Promotion of Excellence at Schools with FNMI Students, Part 3

In this third article in the series, the focus is on two effective classroom strategies that teachers may want to implement in their daily practices. If excellence is to occur at schools with FNMI students, the focus needs to be put in assisting teachers to implement best instructional practices on a daily basis.

The first series of instructional strategies is based on the latest educational research compiled by Robert Marzano and associates and the second comprehensive instructional strategy is based on Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. For these two strategies to work effectively, teachers need opportunities for systematic professional development. If teachers and school support staff are given enough professional development in the application of the approaches suggested by both Marzano and Gardner student academic excellence is sure to increase within a year or two of steady application of instructional strategies in the classroom. The two elements that need to be implemented by local administrators are first teacher training in implementation of the strategies and secondly, teacher commitment to student proactive involvement in their learning. The classroom teacher must be the master facilitator and professional designer and the student must become an active researcher and participant explorer in the disciplinary tasks before the learner.   

In 20001 Robert Marzano and associates identified nine major instructional strategies that affect student achievement.  Their findings are summarized succinctly on page 7 of Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement (ASCD, 2001), and are reproduced in the table below:

In the application of these nine instructional strategies, the teacher must constantly engage students through use of open end question strategies and through ensuring that the content studied is relevant to the daily lives of the learners. An ongoing challenge for all learners and teachers is long-term retention of materials and academic approaches in a discipline. In Part 2 of this series I had suggested that a handy retention strategy is having pre-post tests for each unit and a strategy for having some of the previous content reviewed and re-tested periodically during the school year in order to ensure that students are given ample incentives to retains previously learned materials.

In 1983 Howard Gardner shook the foundations of educational practices with his Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. He argued that both teachers and learners had multiple centers of intelligence. Unfortunately, today’s curriculum offerings are limiting the development of the student’s interests and propensities toward an intelligence center that is not valued by our state funded educational systems.  

If the modern school is to be more responsive to learners it needs to cater to more than the traditional Linguistic and Logical-Mathematical centers of intelligence. The school needs to engage Musical, Kinesthetic, Visual, Special, and Intrapersonal, Interpersonal and Naturalist Intelligences as well as the two traditional areas of study. Each intelligence center leads to new research, innovations and job opportunities needed by a modern society. Gardner linked each intelligence center with concrete professions and careers as he argued the need to have greater breadth and depth to the modern state curriculum. He felt that more students and teachers would get excited about each discipline if two of more intelligence were applied to each area of investigation or study. Thus, FNMI students living in rural and northern areas should be encouraged in their Naturalist studies and surroundings and the curriculum should be approached from that angle rather than from the emphasis on English and Mathematics. He felt that each intelligence center contributed to the development of others. The great aim of education that bound all intelligence centers there are the study of The True, The Good and the Beautiful.

Teachers who want to excite their learners about their studies need to know the ideal approaches for each intelligence and need to formulate great issues or questions that challenge students to use an develop new skills as they solve major issues in a discipline or intelligence center. There are many resources and student assessment tests available for teachers in each of the eight major intelligence centers. Currently, the leading Canadian school for the application of Multiple Intelligence Strategies across the curriculum is Westmount Charter School at Calgary Alberta. For other charter schools specializing in an intelligence area such as Music or Language Acquisition see the Association of Alberta Public Charter Schools website at http://www.taapcs.ca/charter-schools/ .  The charter schools have greater success in promoting student excellence since they are clear as to their aims and are focused on approaching student learning based on their specific educational aims. All the schools report that although they focus on a discipline (science, music, performing arts) most of their students perform as well or better than their provincial peers in the annual Alberta Provincial Achievement Tests (PATs) for grade 3, 6, 9.

In closing, teachers interested in promoting excellence in student achievement may wish to buy Rick Wormeli’s, Summarization in Any Subject: 50 Techniques to Improve Student Learning (ASDC, 2005).  

It delves in detail how to implement some of the instructional strategies identified by both Marzano and Gardner.