After reading the articles provided and taking the education courses at Grand Valley I have learned about many of the myths in education. The overgeneralization of our students and the way people put them into small boxes. Overgeneralizing our students is the worse thing we can do for their learning. Reading Howard Gardner's definition of intelligence attempts to include more aspects than our traditional ideas of intelligence. With his definition Gardner attempts to add incorporates the social world and using everyday products to solve problems. While Gardner does claim there are eight intelligences, he also claims that most students will not simply fall into one of the spots but many.
As a teacher not only are these myths about intelligences harmful to students, but they make teaching very challenging. Most of the time in the education there seems to be a fad to which teachers must teach their lessons around, this makes it hard to plan creative lessons, or lessons that you know will reach to your students. It is also difficult, because often these myths are debunked within a few years. In order to improve the situation for ourselves and our students, we must do the research ourselves to see if the new or old myths are worth using in a classroom. When doing research it is up to us to find the sources and decide if they are credible and worth using in our classroom.
For both learning styles and MI, the point is not to refute them outright; rather, it's to tell teachers not to categorize and classify students and gear instruction in that manner. If you think about UDL, it's GOOD to present and demonstrate knowledge using multiple means. We just get into trouble when we use "I'm a visual learner" as not only a guide, but also a crutch/excuse to explain why a student didn't learn.
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