You should be fairly immersed in this by now:
As it says in the body of that post, part of this self-assessment and introspective work will be kinesthetic. So let’s color:
Click for the full image.
Click for the full image.
Those are printable copies of, in order, a blank spider graph for our GAP skills and traits and a blank spider graph for Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. You are meant to figure out how to use those from your close reading of that instructional post. In addition, you might want a printed copy of this handout, which helps with self, holistic, and performance-based assessments1.
When properly filled in, a single spider graph looks like this:
Click for the source, which is about rating coffee.
And an iterative spider graph — one filled in now and then again later, or filled in to compare two sets of data — might look like this:
Calvin really needs to get it together.
You should end up with a visual approximation of these skills, traits, and intelligences, at least according to your self-assessments.
Two things:
- This is about valuing yourself differently — looking not at GPA, class rank, social status, etc, but at the stuff that really matters. You are smart in different ways. You are skilled in different ways. You want to fight the Dunning-Kruger effect, sure, but you must also learn how and why your skills matter. Imposter syndrome is just as limiting as an inflated sense of self.
- This is also a test of your efforts lately, because you’ll either have done the necessary research to learn about multiple-intelligence theories or not, just like you’ll have invested in learning the skills and traits of the class or not. You’ll have looked up the Dunning-Kruger effect, because it was assigned to you, or you won’t have.
These aren’t mutually exclusive. It matters if you didn’t do the reading assigned in that post. It matters if you aren’t carefully reading directions, looking up concepts, etc, because that was the assignment. And if you’ve gotten to October 17 without figuring out how your English course assesses you, that definitely matters.
But if you use the opportunity to plot these graphs and color them to learn about Gardner’s multiple intelligences, that’s great. If you only now start to teach yourself about the language in our set of universal skills and traits, that’s great, too. If it’s only now that you ask me for help, that’s not anything but fantastic. It’s never too late to commit to growth and improvement.
In other words, let’s focus here on what you see in yourself, on what makes you unique, but let’s make that self-assessment an informed opinion. Don’t make an assumption about these labels and what they mean. Do the research — into multiple intelligences, our GAP skills and traits, what a spider or radar graph looks like — and then do the work.
Ask questions below.