Multiple Intelligences is Back

Education
New teaching strategies get students out of their chairs

By Lynn Thompson
Times Snohomish County Bureau

Once a year, Tami Caraballo's anatomy classroom at Snohomish High School is transformed into a working model of the heart.

Students stand outside the classroom door, blue balloons representing oxygen-depleted blood bobbling in their hands.

One at a time, and to the accompaniment of ballet music, they dance their way through the rearranged room, advancing into the first chamber, the right atrium, only after they've named the veins through which they must travel — the inferior vena cava and the superior vena cava.

By the time they leave through another door, they've exchanged their blue balloons for oxygenated red ones, departed the left ventrical through the aorta and are ready to start circulating, figuratively speaking, to the rest of the body again.

Students receive extra credit for leading a friend or parent correctly through the pumping heart — all 19 steps along the way.

The activity isn't just a fun way to learn. It's effective. When Caraballo recently quizzed the students on the heart's anatomy, 29 out of 31 received perfect scores.

Lessons that work

The best teachers have often been the ones who enliven lessons with memorable activities. But until recently, teachers generally had to devise these lessons on their own. Now, school districts are adopting curricula that incorporate hands-on activities, even for sometimes-dry subjects such as math.

The new teaching strategies draw on research into how the brain works and theories about "multiple intelligences." These theories say that because students have different talents and abilities, they learn in different ways.

"The model of sitting at a desk and reading or being lectured doesn't work," said Caraballo, who also teaches physiology and forensic science. "We're competing with video games, TV. Kids learn more and remember more if it's something that gets them involved."

Pam Hopkins, the assistant superintendent for teaching and learning in the Edmonds School District, said all teachers have access to active learning strategies that weren't widely available a generation ago.

"We know now that we need specific strategies to engage students," she said. "Learning doesn't happen automatically."

Talking about reading

New approaches to literacy in several school districts, including Edmonds, Mukilteo and Marysville, involve teachers and students talking collaboratively about their reading. Teachers ask students to make inferences and predictions out loud. Teachers also elicit students' own responses to a text — what they saw and felt as they were reading.

Even math is being enlivened by classroom activities.

At Meadowdale Elementary School in Lynnwood, third-grade teacher Francesca Moen has her students playing math games, from bingo to dice, that involve counting, number and coin recognition, and learning how to say big numbers, such as 9,568.

Now in her fourth year of teaching, Moen said her work has been influenced by Harvard professor Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner suggested that people understand information not only in verbal and mathematical ways, but also through movement, music and relationships with others.

"Not all kids learn in the same way, so I can't teach in only one way," Moen said. "If I just stand in front of the class and deliver a lesson, I'm going to be missing so many kids."

Moen has several reasons for adopting active teaching strategies. For one, her class is 75 percent boys — "squirrelly boys," she said, laughing.

They groan when she tells them they're going to write poetry but perk up when she says an art project is involved.

"Their learning style isn't to sit down and learn. Their style is to get up, experience, create, move. They have to live and breathe their learning."

By the end of the year, Moen said, they do need to be able to sit at their desks and solve multiplication problems. But at first, she has to find creative ways to "hook them."

In addition to engaging the students and minimizing behavioral problems, the active approach also produces measurable gains in achievement.

In last year's Washington Assessment of Student Learning, 72 percent of Meadowdale fourth-graders met state standards for math, compared with 60 percent of fourth-graders statewide.

The active learning doesn't stop with math. Moen's third-graders learn about maps by pacing off compass points in the room. They create a scale-model of their classroom with scissors and paper and use a computer to map the whole school. For science, they cut up fruit, plant the seeds and write down their observations.

Activities are planned with the state's learning goals in mind. Moen said she had scrapped an idea of having students build a model rain forest in the classroom because it didn't contribute to concepts the state says third-graders need to know.

At Snohomish High School, Caraballo said one motivation for her classroom activities is to put the fun back in school.

"When they get to high school, we forget about the crayons, scissors and play. If they get to play again, it makes it fun and they remember more."

Caraballo's students in advanced anatomy agree. Senior Marlo Leer said that in other semesters, she's had to drag herself through first period, with its early start time of 7:30 a.m. But Caraballo's class is different.

"We're actually learning by doing. It's by far my favorite class," Leer said.

Lynn Thompson: 425-745-7807 or lthompson@seattletimes.com