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Introduction:
In teaching your specific discipline, have you made connections
with other subjects? Is your teaching style primarily lecture
and class discussion? Have you considered incorporating multiple
types of teaching/assessment practices in which students demonstrate
what they are learning through various modes of assessment?
For example, students could role-play what they are learning,
or illustrate what they know through graphic organizers. This
style of instruction is referred to as multi-modal teaching/assessment
practices, which can transform the learning environment and
accommodate students with diverse learning styles.
This workshop introduces “best practices” for cross-disciplinary
instruction, as presented at the International Conference in
Arts and Humanities, 2004. It includes strategies for integrating
content from multiple disciplines, collaboration, and innovative
teaching practices.
To enhance content knowledge as well as reinforce interdisciplinary
connections, multi-modal options for teaching and assessing
(“best practices”) can be adopted to stimulate higher
levels of thinking and conceptualization of information. Howard
Gardner, a psychologist, professes in his Frames of Mind:
A Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983) (Different Ways
of Knowing), that all humans possess many modes of cognition
or ways to know. He defines the major modes as: verbal-linguistic,
logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, musical-rhythmic, bodily-kinesthetic,
interpersonal and intrapersonal. Recently, Gardner has added
the naturalistic and existentialistic intelligences to the original
seven.
The purpose of the workshop is to delineate specific steps
for integrating content from other disciplines to the subject
area you teach. It is believed that when educators design instruction
with “best practices” linked to the various intelligences
(ways to know) both hemispheres of the brain are engaged and
the diverse learning styles are addressed.
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