Wise Teaching to Students’ Kinesthetic Intelligence: The Teacher as Surrogate, Guru, Foreshadower, Choreographer, or Expeditionist

Abstract

P aside for a moment any thoughts about the word “regurgitation’s” sometimes derogatory usage in the educational setting: actually, the symbiosis of teacher and student is rather beautifully like that of a mother bird first ingesting the food she wants to later feed her chicks. The more experienced one takes part in the same physical act she asks of her offspring. This is not only modeling, it’s a “sharing in.” Teachers discover this sharing-in quality when they practice alongside their students in learning activities that draw on bodily intelligence. Elementary school teachers in the Chicago-area village of Oak Park recently experimented with bringing kinesthetic learning methods to their classrooms. A kindergarten teacher quickly found the positive dynamic in this interdependence. Recognizing that when she was in front of her classroom, “the more I talked, the more they talked,” she decided to change her strategies: “I moved, and they moved.” In so doing, she created a trusting classroom of kinesthetic colleagues and fellow explorers. In 1983, Howard Gardner published Frames of Mind, proposing that, rather than any singly valid measure of intelligence, there are really “multiple intelligences,” each localized in a distinct part of the brain, each offering a particular way of perceiving and encountering the world and a specialized approach to problem-solving. Despite the academic controversies concerning Gardner’s theory, both the K-12 educational community and teachers of adult learners have become increasingly interested in its implications for differentiating instruction, especially to support learners who have not excelled in what Gardner termed the verbal-linguistic or the logical-mathematical intelligences that have been the mainstay of American education, as well as of intelligence and “high-stakes” tests. Differentiated lesson plans and methods of assessing student learning and progress have appeared in many classrooms. And as they vary their modes of instruction, teachers bring to bear their own varied intelligences. Complementing the verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical, Gardner identified five further intelligences: visual-spatial, musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and bodily-kinesthetic. The last of these may cause educators the greatest pause: many teach-