Explorations: Curriculum & Instruction

The Explorations Pathway speaks to two goals for MI-informed practices: For curriculum and instruction, it supports students' exploration of a range of different types of experiences, domains, and intelligences. For assessment, it focuses on students' abilities and preferences. The first goal, an MI-enhanced learning environment (by environment I mean the activities, resources, as well as class set up) suggests analyzing one's environment for "signs of MI life." Remember that whatever students are doing in a classroom or other learning setting taps some part of some intelligences. So does play and many mundane aspects of life.

Students are always providing us with evidence of their areas of strength and preference. Explorations means creating those opportunities in the learning setting. So one part of the mission, and it comes early in Explorations, is using MI as one lens through which to assess the range of ways students already have to engage in the classroom material.

Once you identify what you already do well, then you can identify areas that could use shoring up (again, in light of wanting students to be able to come into contact with a range of intelligences and domains).

By identifying 'gaps' in areas ("I really don't do music," I could do different types of language, like storytelling) Explorations helps locate where one can start with MI in the classroom, in those areas you identify as needing shoring up.

And because Explorations is about analyzing and working on the "sum total" of curriculum, instruction, and assessment that happens in your classroom and/or school. Explorations doesn't mean having activities happening separate from the regular curriculum. Explorations does not describe (or prescribe) any specific activities. Rather it describes the lens with which you are analyzing, implementing and using those activities.

So filling the gaps to expand the range of intelligences tapped in your setting may mean adding a new activit(ies) to an ongoing project, or creating a new whole-group activit(ies). But it could also mean creating an Interest Center in the classroom. In other words, new, separate activities are not necessary for Explorations, but they certainly can have a place in an Explorations-led MI initiative. Your reading for this Session is a chapter about Explorations.