Pluralizing the Teaching

Let's begin with a story. I will introduce you to some important characters in my story - Ram, Balram, Krishna, Narayan, and Shiv.

All of them are attending a three-day induction program facilitated by a senior trainer called Ms. Sarasvati.

It's Day 1 of the training, and Sarasvati has already started to make some observations about her trainees.

• Ram asks the maximum questions in the class. He is quick to form connections between new pieces of information coming his way during the program. He struggles to accept unstructured and disconnected pieces of content. For example, in the beginning of the class Sarasvati provided an overview of different functional practices within the organization. However, she never helped Ram identify the functional practice that he has joined in. Ram looked confused.

• Balram takes the maximum number of breaks. His phone seems to be ringing quite often. Sarasvati already knows that Balram will find it difficult to sit through the three-day induction program. She was not surprised to see Balram enjoying the "facility walkthrough" session the most. He was quite attentive and kept on asking questions throughout that session.

• Krishna seems to have enjoyed the Compliance piece the most because it had some fun jingles interspersed for the participants to retain the key cybersecurity guidelines and practices. Sarasvati could see Krishna grooving to the music while also learning about cybersecurity.

• Narayan was most active during group discussions and group activities as if he was looking forward to networking with his peers and form long-term connections. He was the most vocal and interactive in the group happily taking the lead in conversations with his fellow participants.

• Shiv was the quite one. He was quietly absorbing the new ways of working and making notes. While he was the most attentive throughout the class, he was particularly not comfortable asking a lot a questions or making a lot of noise during the activities. Sarasvati was surprised to see Shiv scoring a high passing percentage at the end of the three-day program.   

Do you know that all these learners are leveraging their strongest intelligence while learning? Intelligence is not always general. As per the popular phycologist, Howard Gardner, there are multiple forms of intelligence and designing instruction catering to a single intelligence leads to poor learning transfer. Gardner recommends pluralizing the teaching, that is, teaching the most important materials in multiple ways.

Further reading: Theory of Multiple Intelligences