Using My Strength In My Teaching

According to Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligence, a teacher or an instructor may find different students in a single class or group who have the ability to learn in a visual-spatial way,some other are able to learn by discovering for themselves in a hands on way, while others have a concrete way of learning in a logical thinking way, where as others prefer or are able to learn through spatial judgment and visualize with their mind eye. 

Basing on the above tenets of Gardner's theory, I have the following strength though some times limited by the conditions at hand at our school:

By considering the verbal-linguistic intelligence,the main medium of communication is English at our school. How ever, there are some students who come from other countries other than Uganda like from Rwanda and Congo D.R.C who had never learned sufficient English Language but are used to the French Language. while some come from Tanzania and Kenya but feel more comfortable to communicate using Swahili-but know some English language. I usually ask individual questions in my Geography lessons of how some Geographical phenomena are called in their language. As students give out the different names in different languages, those who are not pro-English are observed smiling in acknowledgement that they have understood a phenomena in question.

For the ability to visualize with the mind eye, we use the discussion method. In this method I form up small groups of ten students each group and assign them a task to discuss about for the next lesson. Each group produces one presenter who presents on behalf of his/her group. In this way, students begin to challenge each other when they critic their friends' arguments. In that way, they visualize with the mind of the eye.

With spatial judgment, I usually take students for field work and we use the environment as a laboratory since some students are adventurous.

I some times encourage students to form up Geography albums and write simple essays to accompany a given photo or geographical event. this gives chance to the students with the Introspective capacities to explore their prowess in writing.

With music, I am not good at music. But the teenagers I teach love music a lot. So we as a class some times acronym some phrases which need proper grasping. For example when teaching Geography of North America, some names of place or lakes; like the great lakes of the USA (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario, we phrased a song with a verse 'Some Men Have Eaten Oranges' but each word in that verse stands for a lake in the USA.In that way students get to understand what I teach them and enjoy it.

Even though the Multiple intelligences approach to teaching is effective to trigger off the students' understanding of what is taught, I find it difficult to cater for every individual student's strength and weakness. I teach many students which make my classes big. This even makes the Connell's Multiple Intelligence Questionnaire for Children difficult for me to use. Besides, the result oriented nature of my school and Uganda's curriculum some times makes me spoon feed the student in order to complete the syllabus. 

Embracing Authentic Learning Experiences For The 21st Century

Lombardi(2007) gave out 10 fundamental design elements for any effective learning experiences in any subject to take place among learners. From her full article i discovered that my teaching has been tailored to the traditional ways of teaching and learning; By the virtue of my school set up which is result oriented more over in a very short time, as a teacher I am forced by circumstances to 'spoon-feed' the learner and I become a moving encyclopedia. Even though my lessons are made interactive and students are given cites for more academic content, they shun it since they are not used to the self discovery method very well.

However, with this exposure to modern knowledge; in a few lessons I have conducted at my school by the beginning of the year 2015, I have managed to practice the following procedure below:

• Find out about ideas or content to be taught from the Internet and or from text books.

• Improve my content delivery skills by making it learner-centered and sometimes outside the classroom since I teach Geography.

• Make my learners learn collaboratively by grouping them up and assign them different tasks per a group which they later present or express out clearly in order to master the content easily and also discover more on their own.

• I re-teach or re-explain what was not well presented by the students.

• As each group comes out to present, they communicate and challenge each other.

• With the above steps, we as a class(me the teacher and my students) manage to make analysis of a whole given topic in a small period of time of about two lessons.

EXPERIENCES OF TRUE LEARNING

1. Sylvia's experiences when learning English:

In her video she mentioned that it was a difficult experience when learning English yet she was used to speaking French.

She put it that it was her personal initiative to learn by her self.

Even though her Profs. taught her, they could not trigger off the zeal in her to learn, but it was her personal initiative.

When learning, people face different difficulties, for example she was laughed at when she made blander in her speech but she played it cool and laughed back because she knew what she wanted to achieve.
2.My experiences of true leaning

I teach Geography and History. I found hardship in drawing the geographical diagrams and maps. Each time i drew a map, teachers used to comment that i had drawn a jerry-can! yet i had tried my best.

At a higher level, i was introduced to the GIS technology in geography. Here the story was a little bit different but still difficult; Prof. used to teach us how to create a data base and then create shape files for maps: The challenge was that after creating one shape file, i could not recall where exactly it had gone for future reference about it.

Our instructors encouraged us to discover every thing by our own-it was too disturbing but i mobilized my fellow students who were better than me and we tried it out. we succeeded at the end.

3. It feels good when you can do what previously disturbed you. And you can not just laugh at some one who has failed because you already know his hardship.