Case Studies

Multiple Intelligences for Adult Literacy and Adult Education

John
"All I want to do is spell my middle name."

as told by Gail Leightley, Coordinator, Project STAR
Centre County Vo-Tech School, Pleasant Gap, Pennsylvania

One day a new student came in to see me. John was in his mid-30's and graduated from high school. He said his problem was that he couldn't spell. He said. "My middle name is Luther, but I can't even remember how to spell it." After giving him the TABE test to see his skill level, I asked him "What do you do well? What do you like to do on the job?"
He said that he started out as a mechanic, but was now driving heavy equipment. When he was driving the machinery he felt like he was in "synch" with the machine and the things he was moving. He could feel the machine as if it was his body. Gail showed him the Quick Review of Intelligences card and talked about each of the intelligences. Then she asked him to choose which intelligences he felt he used the most in his driving. He chose the body and spatial intelligences.
Next she went to the Spelling Cards in the kit and they looked at the ideas on the cards on Involving the Intelligences in Spelling and Spelling for Mainly Visual Learners . They decided try out the ideas on the visual spelling card. (See the card for the directions.)
Yes, he could imagine a movie screen in his mind. So they started with a word he knew, John. He put John on his screen. Now she helped him spell the name Luther and, yes he could see it on the screen. She asked if it had a color. He replied, "It's orange." She had him spell it forward and backward by looking at his "screen". He could pick out the second letter, the fourth, etc.
Feeling successful, they chose another word he wanted to learn. It was furnace. First they wrote it on paper with colored pens and looked at its shape. He said it was a "black word" and that he could remember the f in it because it reminded him of a smokestack.
Next he chose five words from an article in Newsweek on bad spellers the he had brought along. He wrote the words on paper first, then put them on his mental "screen". He chose different colors for the syllables and then drew a box around the shapes of the letters. He then practiced spelling the words out loud while seeing them on the screen.
When he came in the next week, he had remembered all of the words, and he had 90% retention of the correct spelling. He continued to add words to his list, and by the third week he was matched with a tutor . They "began filling his head with words". They took words from the list of most commonly used words and from work-related magazines. His final comment was, "I wish I had learned how to this a long time ago." At last, he was a successful speller.

Andy and Betty
Going in New Directions after Using the "I Can.." cards
as told by Mollie Hembruch, Flint County Literacy Council, Michigan
After attending a Focus on Learning Strengths training, Mollie especially liked the concept that everyone reads something - people, building plans, pictures, situations. The challenge is discovering what the student "reads" and how they do it. Before the training, "I had always defined reading as print on a piece of paper." So she decided to send the overview cards about Our Many Intelligences and Learning Styles to all of her tutors, and then published an article in her newsletter about how to use the "I Can" cards to identify learning strengths, intelligences, and goals. The results:
Andy's talents take off. One tutor had been working with a 56 year old man who was severely handicapped by a bought with Meningitis at age 5. As Andy and his tutor talked about his hobbies, she learned that he liked to construct model airplanes. He brought several into his next session to show her. She was impressed - they were done very well!
What intelligences was he using to make the models? Spatial, body, logic/math, and self.
After two semesters in class and working with his tutor, Andy is now employed at Goodwill repairing donated items and anything that needs fixing.
Betty shares her green thumb. Betty is in her late thirties. While talking about what Betty could do well and loved to do, her tutor learned that Betty had a real knack raising beautiful house plants. The tutor, on the other hand, did not have a green thumb, so she decided to get several books about plants from the library. The books had beautiful colored pictures and instructions for care and growing plants. Betty and her tutor had lots of fun in their tutoring sessions learning from one another and working on reading and writing at the same time. Mollie reports, "They really bonded."

Applications to ABE & Adult Literacy