Chapter 8 UbD, Chapters 8, 11 & 12 MI

Chapter 8 from Understanding by Design focused mainly on the best way to grade and assess students. It talked about how using a traditional grading system had many flaws and that many problems can arise from using traditional grading. The chapter offers up many examples of ways this system can be problematic, such as handing out zeros to missing or late work can deter the learning of a student, that grading shouldn’t have the stigma that A means the best and F means the worst, and that using averages can give a incomplete or inaccurate representation of someone’s learning. I agreed with a lot of the statements in this chapter, especially that student’s grades should be a representation of their learning over anything else. I thought it was really nice how this chapter brought back the idea that “effective assessment resembles a photo album – a collection of evidence – rather than a single snapshot.” Grades and a student’s achievements in a class should be looked at in a big picture kind of way, rather as a one opportunity to get a good grade. I definitely think that it’s important to grade students more on their overall learning and growing in a class instead of just one summative assessment at the end of the year or unit. 

In Multiple Intelligence, chapter 8 was all about how to manage your classroom using multiple intelligence. While a lot of these ideas were clever and unique to each intelligence, I feel like it would be hard to incorporate some of them into a secondary classroom. To me, it seemed like most of these suggestions seemed to fit better with a elementary classroom, such as the singing or making animal noises to form groups, or using many hand gestures to get students attention. One thing in this chapter, though, which I really agreed with, was coming up with classroom rules as a class and working together to come up with guidelines to improve the classroom environment. 

Chapter 11 of Multiple Intelligence talked about multiple intelligence and it’s relationship with special education. I thought a lot of the points made in this chapter were really good and I definitely agreed with a lot of this things said in this chapter about how a lot of kids that are in special education, might have a deficiency in one intelligence, but are extremely proficient in another one. I think it’s really important to find out what all students intelligences are, and realize that just because someone might have no proficiency in one, doesn’t mean they aren’t proficient in another one, which is what this chapter was mainly about. Intelligences should be something that are celebrated, even in students who might be low in another intelligence. 

Chapter 12 focused on cognitive skills and their relationship with multiple intelligence. It’s main point was that all students learn and retain information differently, and as a teacher, it’s important to give students resources they need to retain information and succeed.