Alex Moore is a teacher at International House in Bielsko-Biała, Poland. Before becoming an English teacher, he worked as a journalist for a local newspaper group in his native South Wales, and since qualifying he has taught in schools in China and the UK. He enjoys working with young learners and small groups, and is particularly interested in the psychology behind memory, forgetting and L1 interference. E-mail: alexmoore1984@live.com

Introduction

Look up the adjective “clever” in a thesaurus. You’ll find plenty of synonyms: “adept”, “cunning”, “inventive”, “knowledgeable”, “rational”, “shrewd” and “talented” were among the 54 I found. These are synonyms of “clever”, but are they all synonyms of each other? No. I know plenty of people who are, for example, knowledgeable but not inventive, or talented but not rational. Clearly, there are different ways of being “clever”, different ways of engaging with the world, and different ways of engaging with a language class.

Psychologists call this concept “multiple intelligences” theory, also known as “learning styles”. You may well have heard of it before. When I studied for my original TEFL certificate and, later, CELTA, MI was taught more or less as fact. However, it is now undergoing a crisis of credibility.

In spring 2017, thirty psychologists and neuroscientists wrote to the Guardian, voicing their concern about its use. They criticised teachers who place blind faith in it, describing it as “one of a number of common neuromyths that do nothing to enhance education” (www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/13/). Trinity College no longer mentions “multiple intelligence” nor “learning style” in their CertTESOL syllabus, and other organisations in the English teaching industry are, similarly, distancing themselves from it.

In this article, I will argue that, accurate or not, MI is a tool that can be used to make your teaching style more varied. I will give a practical example from my own career, and recommend that other teachers follow the same method.

Background

Intelligence is a controversial idea in psychology. Is there a global, measurable, absolute quantity by which humans can be ranked and classified? Charles Spearman was the first to theorise, in 1904, that there was one variable, which he called the “General intelligence factor”, underlying all other mental abilities. Those with a high G-factor will be good at things and respond better to being taught new skills than those with a low one.

However, Howard Gardner disagreed with the idea of a single intelligence factor, and in his 1983 study, Frames of Mind, he argued humans have distinct, compartmentalised forms of intelligence. Gardner himself changed the precise number and definition of these intelligences as his findings developed, but he later arrived at this eight-category model:

• Logical / mathematical - the ability to use numbers and recognise patterns.
• Visual / spatial - sensitivity to shape, size and colour, and the ability to navigate.
• Body / kinesthetic - the ability to use your body to express yourself and solve problems.
• Musical / rhythmic - sensitivity to rhythm, pitch and melody.
• Interpersonal - the ability to understand another person’s moods, feelings and motivation.
• Intrapersonal - the ability to understand your own moods, feelings and motivation, and exercise self-discipline.
• Verbal / linguistic - the ability to use language effectively and creatively.
• Naturalist - the ability to relate to nature and classify what is observed.

According to this model, everyone possesses at least some measure of all eight, but with their own relative strengths and weaknesses. For educators, this is preferable to the “G-factor”, which defines students as unchangeably intelligent or unchangeably not. Classifying a student as unintelligent feels like an abdication of responsibility, with horrific memories of the dunce cap. Gardner’s model instead lets us acknowledge that students might have skills and interests that might not be engaged in one particular subject, lesson, or activity. A student’s failure in one of these need not mean failure generally. It’s a more optimistic, more inclusive theory.

If we consider a typical student possessed of a range of intelligences, they will enjoy and learn from classroom activities that are designed around one of their strengths; conversely, if the activity points towards an intelligence they do not have much of, they might well try, but it’ll be an uphill struggle. And if your own teaching style consistently misses their stronger intelligences and nags at their weaker intelligences, eventually they’re going to coast, switch off, or stop coming to lessons altogether.

Marti Anderson and Diane Larsen-Freeman, in Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching, give some examples of activities that fit each type of intelligence.

• Logical / mathematical - puzzles and games, logical, sequential presentations.
• Visual / spatial - charts and grids, videos, drawing.
• Body / kinesthetic - hands-on activities, field trips, pantomime.
• Musical / rhythmic - singing, playing music, jazz chants.
• Interpersonal – pair work, projects work, group problem-solving.
• Intrapersonal - self-evaluation, journal keeping, options for homework.
• Verbal / linguistic - note-taking, storytelling, debates.
• Naturalist - collecting and labelling objects from the natural world and then learning all about them.

An activity I regularly use is to sit two students back to back, give A a picture and B a pencil and a blank piece of paper. A describes and B draws, then we swap roles and repeat the process. This activity is certainly visual/spatial and interpersonal, and you could probably tweak it to include other categories. For example, by having student B make notes instead of drawing, would make it more verbal/linguistic. Making a model using blocks or clay would tick the body/kinesthetic box too.

The key message so far is to balance activities so that every intelligence type is catered for, but can we rely on ourselves to do this unless we know our own intelligence profile?

In 2013 I was working in China. I had encountered MI on my TEFL course, and would encounter it again when I upgraded to CELTA the following year. On both courses, MI was presented as a way of accommodating students’ talents and preferences. But, I thought, what about my own MI profile? Am I inflicting my own biases on my students?

Case study

I chose a sequence of four one-hour lesson plans produced for a class of ten 12- and 13-year-olds. These classes contained 29 separate activities, which I scored in terms of the MI category they engaged:

• Logical/mathematical: 7
• Interpersonal: 6
• Verbal/linguistic: 5
• Naturalist: 4
• Body/kinesthetic: 3
• Visual/spatial: 2
• Intrapersonal: 1
• Musical/rhythmic: 1

Though small and unscientific, the sample was representative of my teaching style at the time, and strongly suggested to me that my lesson planning and activity selection was mirroring my own preferences and biases. In my youth, I liked word searches, puzzles, and similar logical/mathematical challenges, and, before becoming a teacher, I worked as a journalist, a job reliant on well-developed interpersonal skills.

At the other end of the scale, I appeared to avoid intrapersonal and musical/rhythmic activities. This makes sense. In job interviews, I hate the “Tell me a bit about yourself” opening. Similarly, I’m not musical at all. I’ve never learned an instrument and am completely tone deaf, and it would be very rare for me to play music in my house when I’m on my own.

Maybe I had musical/rhythmic and intrapersonal learners in that class who weren’t served well by the choice of activities? Maybe I still do? Maybe the behaviour and attention problems I have in my classes now are, at least partly, caused by students feeling unengaged because of my own preference for certain types of activity and avoidance of others? Looking at my own lesson plans in this manner was an eye-opening experience, one that I would urge others to repeat, alone or as part of a teacher training session.

There is help for those of us who struggle to incorporate as much variety as we should in our lessons. Rosie Tanner has produced an excellent chart (reproduced in Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching) with 56 activity ideas, arranged in eight rows, representing MI categories, and seven columns, representing the four skills, grammar, vocabulary, and literature. As an experiment, require your teachers to incorporate a certain number of these activities, from different rows and columns, into their forthcoming classes, and follow up on how students react to this sudden injection of variety.

Conclusion

Psychology, like all science, is a set of conclusions based on evidence, but the underlying process – the electro-chemical activity of the brain – is essentially unknowable. There may be seven or eight true vectors of intelligence, as Gardner theorised, or their might be one, like Spearman said, or three (analytical, creative, practical), as Robert Sternberg proposed in Beyond IQ.

Or you could go the other way, and argue that there are dozens or hundreds of different varieties: all Gardner did was group them into clusters and name them. Or dismiss the whole project. Lynn Waterhouse argued, in 2006, that MI theory “lack[ed] adequate empirical support and should not be the basis for educational practice”, despite its high currency.

I indicated earlier that MI was an “optimistic, inclusive theory”, and our confidence in it is essentially a white lie we tell ourselves. Scott Thornbury, in his A-Z of ELT, acknowledges the shortcomings of MI theory, but adds: “The best that can be said is that, if the learner’s preferred learning style is out of synch with the type of instruction, then success is much less likely than if the two are well-matched”. Even Geoff Barton, the incoming general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, who described MI as a “fad” in the Guardian article, acknowledged that “the notion of making teaching and learning more varied in classrooms is helpful and likely to motivate a wider range of students.”

True or not, MI is a tool that can help teachers aim away from their own biases and develop a more varied style that “homes in” on students’ preferences and talents over time. That sounds like a pretty good “white lie” to me.

References

Anderson, M and Larsen-Freeman, D, (2011) Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching, Oxford University Press.

Gardner, H, (1983 and 2011) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Basic Books.

Jenkins, N, dir., (2014) Controversy of Intelligence: Crash Course Psychology #23, Crash Course, Youtube.com/watch?v=9xTz3QjcloI [accessed February 27, 2017]

Spearman, C, (1904) ‘General Intelligence,’ Objectively Determined and Measured”, The American Journal of Psychology.

Sternberg, R, (1985) Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press.

Tanner, R, (2011) “Teaching Intelligently”, English Teaching Professional 20.

Thornbury, S, (2006) An A-Z of ELT: A Dictionary of Terms and Concepts, Macmillan Education.

Trinity Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CertTESOL) Syllabus http://www.trinitycollege.com/resource/?id=5407, Trinity College London, April 2016 [accessed March 22, 2017].

Waterhouse, L, (2010) “Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligences: A Critical Review”, Educational Psychologist, vol 41, issue 4.

Weale, S., “Teachers must ditch ‘neuromyth’ of learning styles, say scientists”, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/13/teachers-neuromyth-learning-styles-scientists-neuroscience-education , Monday, March 13, 2017.

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