MI Chapter 5

This chapter makes the argument that standing in front of the classroom lecturing students isn’t the best way to teach for all students.  Because each student has different strengths in different intelligence areas, lectures are not the most effective teaching method for all students.  They can still be used and be purposeful for some students, but other students need other strategies to meet their intelligences.  This chapter lists various other teaching approaches that will meet their intelligences, such as kinesthetic or logical methods.  It also suggested a good way for brainstorming activities that meet each of the intelligences for a unit.  This brainstorming idea seems really simple but really powerful, and I definitely think that I will use it in my classroom to vary the intelligences that my lessons meet. The chapter provides a sort of database for different activities and it will be helpful to refer back to it when I am planning my lessons in the future.

UbD/DI Chapter 7

The WHERETO model organizes teachers’ lessons by posing various questions that ask the teacher to think more about the learner. Some of it deals with engaging and hooking students at the beginning of the lesson, and some of it deals with helping the learner with the material.  I have seen this model only briefly before, but I have a feeling that I will see it more very soon.  It will be a good model to help guide my planning and my instruction because the questions it poses ask me to focus on the students more than the material.

UbD/DI Chapter 6

This chapter focused on being a responsive teacher and responding to the various elements of the classroom that affect learning and how that is considered part of differentiated instruction. Responding to students in ways other than just answering questions can lead to lesson plans changing on the spot or in the future or it can result in clarifying something for a confused student.  It could also mean changing the lesson from class to class depending on the situation and the students in each group.  I liked the analogy between the classroom teacher and the jazz musician because both incorporate practiced/ rehearsed material into their “performance,” while large pieces of it are left for improvisation, depending on the situation.  I think this will mostly help me to begin thinking about various ways to respond to students.

MI Chapter 10

This chapter focused on how the MI theory relates to assessment in the classroom.  Armstrong posed the idea that there should be a variety of assessments given, one option for each intelligence, so that students can complete the assessment in the intelligence they are strongest in.  This idea of having multiple assessments creates options for students, which can connect to tiering the instruction.  I particularly like that Armstrong believes “assessment experiences and instructional experiences should begin to appear virtually indistinguishable,” (148), which I think a lot of teachers would have a problem with.  They want to teach their lessons and then they want to administer the test, but then they are only catering to one or two intelligences. When they are indistinguishable, it means that both are learning experiences for the students.  I will definitely try to create assessment options that fit each of the multiple intelligences so that each student can do their personal best.

FIAE Chapter 6

The scenario at the beginning of this chapter stuck out to me because I have faced similar questions many times in my schooling career.  It is nothing less than frustrating when a teacher uses a question like that and then expects you to be able to read his or her mind.  The part of the chapter that I found myself connecting my content area to is the section about root words and how it isn’t just a quiz asking students to spit out the definitions of the root words, but to use their knowledge of each root to define various words.  As someone who waited until five minutes before the roots quiz to quickly memorize each definition, I think I would have preferred something more along the line of what the book suggests because it would have required me to put more effort into it.  There were also some good points about making sure that the test questions and prompts are valid and that you aren’t inundating students with too many questions of one type.  These seem like obvious points for teachers to consider, but in my experience at least, they are often overlooked, which makes it difficult for students to take the test to the best of their ability when there are other factors at play. 

FIAE Chapter 5

This chapter was about tiering different assignments, which helps learners who might not be hitting the standard and are instead below or above it.  Tiering is a method of differentiation that either assists students by guiding them a little more or challenges their thinking by asking more thought-provoking questions.   Although I had been exposed to tiering before, I hadn’t really seen how easy it is to tier assignments or the benefit of it for more than just students below the standard.  After realizing how advantageous tiering can be, it will definitely be something that I incorporate into my classroom, and there are fun ways like the RAFT, which will make it easier for me to do so.

FIAE Chapter 4

Chapter 4 had a lot of examples of the three different types of assessments, portfolios, rubrics, and student self-assessments.  Portfolios are good because they show progress and improvement over a period of time, but they can be difficult to maintain sometimes.  Rubrics, if structured well, can serve as good tools not only to guide student work, but to assess it as well.  With rubrics, it is important to remember that parallelism is necessary for students to understand what the rubric is asking for.  If the rubric isn’t clear than it is hard for the students to know what it is they were supposed to be doing, especially if the rubric was passed out at the beginning of the assignment.  Student self-assessments are a tricky method of assessing students, but if they are crafted appropriately then they can be really beneficial to both teachers and students.  You just have to keep an eye out for the students who will say that they did everything just the way it was supposed to be done instead of accurately assessing their work.  I would really like to use portfolios in my classroom, and will probably attempt a variation on them at the very least, and I know I will be using rubrics and self-assessments, so the examples for both from this chapter will be helpful.