Chapter 8 UBD Chapters 8,11,12 MI

The over-arching theme of this grouping of chapters was that MI theory can generally apply everywhere in life. It can apply to assessments, it can apply to careers after school, it can apply to classroom management and discipline, and it can certainly apply to teaching students with special needs. All of these areas can benefit when MI theory is applied to them, as workers and students both work better under conditions that apply to their specific areas of intelligence.
For instance, a few of the chapters dealt with how to assess students differently. Differently seems to be the main key word in all of the chapters and articles we read. It talks about doing away with the standardized testing format that only appeals to linguists and logical learners, and finding more differentiated ways to test our students, tests that can cater to their way of understanding things. How can you accurately test a student if not only were you not teaching them in a way that they understood things, but weren’t testing them in that way either? Or even if you were teaching them in an MI way, it would almost be a waste to not grade them in the same format.
When speaking of discipline and classroom management the chapters gave much advice on how appealing to different intelligences could help to keep students behaving and paying attention to the lesson, in turn limiting class disruptions. First of all, in preventive measure, sometimes a student becomes disruptive because s/he is not engaged by the teaching methods, so engage them! Furthermore, it could be emotional, behavioral, or other outside classroom factors that have set the student on edge. Often, trying to reach them and telling them that what they are doing is disruptive in a way that appeals to their intelligence is more beneficial, and generally more effective in getting them to calm down. These include bodily-kinesthetic methods such as breathing exercises, calming music for music, calming oneself down by speaking for verbal, and a number of other examples.
When speaking of students who have disabilites, MI theory stresses the point to look at the students ONLY as individuals and what they can do, not what they cannot do. If a student with disabilities is taught with lessons that cater to their stronger intelligences it will be a more beneficial lesson to him just as it would be with a student who didn’t share similar disabilities. Every student has the capacity to learn, every student.
In my future classroom I want to apply everything I learned in these chapters. I want to make sure that all of my students are assessed just like how they were taught, in a way that caters to their own strengths. I want to make sure all of my students are viewed as equals, are taught as equals, assessed as equals, and certainly grades as equals. Every student deserves a chance to be taught and get graded in a  way that suits their intelligence, and to not do just that would be doing a “disservice” to them as MI says.