Student-centered lessons are all about intellengence types

The activities presented in this blog are mostly open. By this I mean that they can be modified according to what types of intelligence students use the most and also according to their learning styles. This means that students, in certain way, are going to be creating their own material. This is the main principle of having student-centered lessons.


One of the most important aspects of student-centered lessons is allowing students to make choices. They mostly (if not always) are going to choose to work on projects that use their most developed intelligences. As teachers, we should encourage learners to also work on projects that promote growth in those less developed intelligence types (Gardner, 2006).


My experience trying to encourage students to work with those less developed intelligence types has been successful. I am never going to forget one student who was evidently high in visual/spatial intelligence. He would design these amazing graphics and visual aids for his assignments. But my class, as a hybrid between economics and marketing, demanded some mastering of numbers and formulas. So I challenged him to present a paper based more on the economics part of the course rather than the marketing part. If you haven't already done so, you are going to read in this blog that we do not work or develop only one type of intelligence. So I didn't ask him to forget about his inclination for graphic and visuals. Rather, I asked him to use them to represent formulas, equations and mathematical charts. The result was some learning tools that most of the students wanted to copy and use.


The example above shows how letting students work on their own material can make them realize the potential they have to transfer their skills developed by one intelligence to another. Student-centered lessons demand that the teacher to get to know the students and their intelligence profiles. But this doesn't mean that you can't use them from the start. An excellent way of doing this is by gathering  learner feedback pages after each class or activity (Sasson, 2012).