SHOW, TELL, AND DEMONSTRATE: TAPPING INTO STUDENTS’ MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES (MI) IN THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

Introduction The concept of multiple intelligences (MI) theory of Gardner (1993) has been much more discussed in the educational community. It generated great excitement in the area of education because it is compatible with the philosophies and approaches of instruction that can validate the students’ diversity of cognitive strengths and ways of learning. However, it is hardly ever discussed by many researchers and educators what kind of assignment and task that compatible with the students’ learning style, how the task can be implemented in the classroom, and the role of the teacher to give an evaluative feedback. Furthermore, multiple intelligence-base tasks will give students a voice and make the activity come alive since they are designed in the form of teaching across curriculum. Considering that multiple intelligence-base task or MI-base task play an important role in teaching and learning process, discovering students’ multiple intelligence by conducting research problem identification is the part of a very important stage to identify students’ intelligences. In this stage, the teacher will perform in-depthinterview (Richey and Klein, 2007: 73) to discover students’ intelligences by giving at least ten questions in relation with the students’ background, interest, and problem solving. The result of these interviews was crosschecked validated by having discussions with their parents. Then, a report generated based upon the interview and the discussion that covered a description of students’ profile was used as the basis of designing multiple Intelligence-base tasks. Those tasks are, then, presented as follows: establishing the need, introduction, identifying intelligence resources, modeling of a particular intelligence, intelligence rehearsal, practice, independent use, and continuation (Begun, 1996). According to Fleetham (2006), the implementation of multiple intelligence in the classroom involve three concepts to personalizing learning, they are thinking skill, learning style and multiple intelligence. The boundaries of those three concepts will strength to each other even though each of them has different meaning. Therefore, MI base-task that refers to those three concepts involves three types of intellectual ability such as intelligence, wisdom, and creativity. Meanwhile, Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence proposes six types of mental operation such as thinking, memory, and creativity; five types of content such as visual, auditory, and verbal content; and six types of products such as relation and implication (Slavin, 1994: 134-135). For this reason, multiple intelligence-base tasks which will be discussed in this paper are as follows: Teacher and peer modeling, negotiated role playing, Timed discussion, and Real-life storytelling. During the teaching and learning process, the teacher will assess and give an evaluative feed back upon the students’ performance.