Multiple Intelligences and Portfolios: A Window Into the Learner's Mind

by Evangeline Harris Stefanakis

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences suggests that culture, language, and environment all influence how an individual's intelligence is expressed. In this guide, Evangeline Stefanakis provides concrete suggestions for translating Gardner's theory into curriculum and assessment practices in the context of urban classrooms. By combining the collection and analysis of student work in comprehensive portfolios, she offers a framework for...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0325003637
• ISBN13: 9780325003634
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.2"
• Grade Range: Kindergarten to Grade 8

Customer Reviews

A respectful, practical guide to assessment for MI educators

This is the book that teachers need to read when thinking about how to assess kids using the theory of multiple intelligences (MI theory). It provides lots of practical tips, teacher anecdotes, forms, guidelines, and examples to steer any teacher from kindergarten through high school toward documenting a child's progress in school in all subject areas in a way that celebrates their multiple intelligences. The book includes excellent contributions from Lynn Stuart, principal of the Cambridgeport School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jill Harrison Berg, a middle-school teacher at the school, regarding how MI and assessment work together effectively in a way that honors children's lives in a public school setting. Of particular value is the CD which comes with the book, which includes examples of different student portfolios showing samples of math, reading, writing, art, and projects in science, social studies, and other areas. What I especially love about the book is its respectful and gentle attitude toward kids. Most assessment approaches in education are disempowering and alienating to children. In such cases the teacher exercises arbitrary power over the student: plucking work from the child's hands, sitting in judgement over it, and then summarily throwing it back on the child's desk. This book is quite different. It suggests that the teacher assess in the true sense of the word (assess actually means "to sit beside"), by sitting alongside of the child, going through her work, and helping her to articulate her own understandings of what she has created. The author of this book, Harvard professor Dr. Evangeline Harris Stefanakis has worked directly with the creator of the theory of multiple intelligences, Dr. Howard Gardner, and with Steve Seidel, Joe Walters and other members of the Harvard Project Zero staff, and has blended their work with her own deep understanding of important issues in special education, multi-cultural education, ESL, and assessment to create a book that should prove to be an enduring one to educators who seek to match their MI instructional approaches with assessment strategies that are true to the spirit of the multiple intelligences movement.