Higher-level learning and multiple intelligences in school improvement

Curriculum

Four School Improvement Goals

Improving higher-level learning

Teachers must incorporate higher-level learning into their syllabuses. Improving higher-level learning must be one of their yearly goals, particularly for at-risk students. "Narrow curricula, rigid instructional strategies, tracking, and pull-out programs hinder the academic achievement of many at-risk students...not challenging at-risk students or encouraging them to use complex thinking skills, schools underestimate students' capabilities, postpone interesting and meaningful work they could be doing, and deprive them of a meaningful context for learning and using the skills that are taught" (Means 1997). To encourage higher-level learning, teachers are encouraged to assign more open-ended projects, like research papers for older students, compositions questions that require younger students to determine facts from opinions, and webquest assignments that allow students to research topics as a class and then post their finding in visual and multisensory formats on the World Wide Web. "Students usually benefit from a teaching approach that emphasizes understanding rather than memorizing the subject matter" (Oliver & Bowler 2008).

Making better use of students' multiple intelligences

According to the Harvard educational theorist Howard Gardener, our schools and culture focus on improving linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence. However, students have many other types of intelligence that they may be stronger than in, than in these traditional curricular areas, including musical, spatial, and kinesthetic intelligences. By incorporating cooperative learning, art activities, role plays, multimedia and multisensory experiences, field trips, and team learning into the classroom, students have a greater ability to gain esteem and exhibit mastery in different intelligences. "Instead of students practicing discrete, isolated skills (such as spelling and punctuation done on worksheets), the curriculum would stress composition, comprehension, and applications of skills. Rather than treating basic skills as an obstacle that must be surmounted before exposing students to more complex and meaningful learning activities, schools would give at-risk students opportunities to learn and practice basic skills in the context of working on authentic tasks" (Means 1997).

Stimulating students' multiple intelligences will empower students who are intelligent in areas not normally recognized in schools, and also add to the education of even the traditionally strong students, as the importance of interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence is being increasingly recognized as critical to success in almost all professions in the 'real world' (Armstrong 2000). Within the classroom, teachers must make greater use of experiential learning techniques, and the school must continue to make a commitment to physical education and the arts, to ensure that students' kinesthetic, musical, and visual or artistic intelligence is not neglected.

Improving students' technological literacy

Although students may seem to be technologically literate because of their fluency using cell phones and IM-ing their friends on the computer, students must be able to use the computer as an effective research tool. Encouraging individual classes to create webquests on subjects of interest, conducting age-appropriate seminars on using the Internet as a research tool through the library, and making use of computer tools in language arts and ESL classes are all ways to increase student comfort using technology in an academic setting. "Using technology for meaningful activities...helps integrate a variety of disciplines, more closely resembling activities that people undertake in the world beyond the classroom" (Means 1997).