Description:Graduate students need to be very active scholarly whilst developing their competencies. A presentation of a workshop at a professional level is one of the ways of being scholarly active in academia.
Reflection: As in the other reflections, the activity experience will be organized by using four titles (Description of goals, competencies developed, challenges and lessons learned, and advice to themselves for next time).
Description Of Goals for The Experience: The primary goals of the presentation of a workshop at a professional level are to provide opportunities for graduate students to be scholarly active, have teaching experience and develop a national reputation. As part of this activity, I designed a workshop for teachers titled "A complementary Approach to Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory: The Triarchic Intelligence Theory."
In this workshop, I aimed to help teachers develop a different perspective on the concept of intelligence and how they would evaluate their students with the theories of multiple intelligence (Gardner, 1983) and Triarchic intelligence (Sternberg, 1985). In Turkey, teachers need new approaches to assess intelligence and students' performance in educational settings. As globally including Turkey, IQ perspective during evaluating intelligence is a prevailing opinion among stakeholders in education. However, the approach of multiple intelligences (i.e., multiple intelligence theory by Gardner and Triarchic intelligence theory by Sternberg) offers an ideal and new perspective to assess the concept of intelligence. Considering the primary rule of the psychology field, which is "everyone is unique", the multiple intelligences approach provides us with a great number of ways to evaluate students' potentials by focusing on different intelligence (e.g., naturalistic intelligence in MI theory or practical intelligence in Triarchic theory). That's why the objectives of the workshop are including: (1) the differences between MI theory and Triarchic theory, (2) how the Triarchic theory can be a complementary theory to Multiple intelligence theory, and (3) how it can be applied by teachers in the classrooms and school settings to improve student's achievements and attitudes.
In terms of my academic development, this workshop presentation can be considered as an alternative to publication to become scholarly active and an important component to an academic teaching portfolio.
Competencies Developed: Even though this activity helped me to gain some competencies such as managing a process concerning contacting a school and collecting data after the workshop, I would like to mention the components associated with the effectiveness of the workshop. Because those components contributed to my competencies related to how to manage a workshop presentation process. A presentation of a workshop includes a couple of critical components that can directly affect the effectiveness of the workshop and the whole process: (1) selecting a novel (or popular) topic, (2) choosing the right collaborators (i.e., schools, other presenters, etc.), (3) writing an effective workshop presentation form, and (4) developing and presenting an interactive workshop session. In my workshop presentation, I selected the concept of intelligence as the topic and two theories about intelligence that provide a unique perspective for teachers to evaluate their students. As collaborators, the school that I contacted and my friend, Ph.D. candidate at Yildiz Technical University (Turkey), can be counted. The duty of my friend was to provide technical support during the workshop session. Besides, the workshop that I designed included a didactic session, which is to give background information about the topic, and an interactive session, which is to have learning or skills stations and question/answer sessions. While managing the whole process above, I have developed my competencies about how to select a novel topic, how to choose collaborators, how to write an effective presentation form about the workshop, and how to develop and present an interactive session.
Challenges and Lessons Learned: I would like to explain challenges that I faced throughout the process of the workshop in three titles: Bureaucratic, selection of a topic, and online challenges (because of the Covid-19). The first challenge was related to bureaucratic difficulties such as selecting and contacting a school and presenting your idea to them. Contacting the school, emailing the administrators of the school, and meeting the manager took me more time than I had thought. Thus, I have learned that managing the bureaucratic process is one of the vital parts of academic activity and just as important as presenting an effective workshop. On the one hand, selecting a significant topic to present for teachers was one of the challenges that I needed to handle. I should have selected a highly beneficial topic and prepare every detail about the workshop perfectly because I knew that the school administration will want an immensely professional and interesting workshop that can grab the attention of their teachers. Thus, I was trying to answer this question to find a good topic: “What makes a good topic?” because finding the answer was to find the main topic for the workshop. I realized that I needed to find a good topic (1) that I am passionate about, (2) that is potentially controversial, and (3) that aligns with the meeting’s educational objectives. Those answers led me to choose the topic of intelligence.
The last challenge was the negative impact of Covid-19 on doing face-to-face workshops. It is an undeniable fact that body language (nonverbal communication) constitutes most of the communication. I have been experiencing these difficulties about nonverbal communication since the Covid-19 has occurred. I like face-to-face conversation and meetings; however, I had to hold my workshop presentation online due to the reason of coronavirus. That’s why I had to change my workshop activities in order to be appropriate for online meetings and think of how to manage those activities in an effective way on the zoom meeting. After experienced the challenges associated with the online meeting, I have noticed that I should be thinking of the appropriateness of a workshop for an online meeting before preparing.
Advice to Myself for Next Time: I conducted a post-workshop survey to develop the workshop. The results of the survey can be accepted as advice to me for the next time. According to the survey results, although 93.8% of participant used multiple intelligence approach before, the number of using Triarchic intelligence approach before was 12.5%, which shows most of them was not familiar with the theory of Triarchic intelligence. The answer to the question of “Do you think that you will be using both theories together?” was 100%, which means teachers who participated in the workshop have accepted that Triarchic theory can be considered as a complementary approach to Gardner’s multiple intelligence theories. 93.8% answered yes to the question of “Do you feel sufficient about being able to use the two theories?”. They listed some suggestions for changes to be made in the future workshop on this topic. For example, “More examples may be available, thank you for your interest” and “We would be pleased if you could guide us on different applications (related to the Triarchic intelligence theory) with examples at different grade levels”.
All results demonstrated that almost all participants were satisfied with the workshop and gave positive feedback. Their advice can be grouped as “increase examples” and “how to apply the two theories on different grades.” In terms of increasing examples, I had normally a lot of examples; however, I had to complete my presentation in 60 minutes (The school administrators wanted me that request due to presenting an online seminar). In addition, I had to manage my time effectively as well, by mentioning the literature, differences, etc. On the other hand, how to apply two theories for different grades was a good point. I think it can be considered as a good research question. For more information and graphs, they can be found in the Post-workshop Survey Results.
References
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic.
Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. Cambridge University Press.