Media Infused Presentations & the Disciplined and Synthesizing Minds

Howard Gardner presents four ways to achieve a disciplined mind. First, one must identify crucial content or processes to be learned within a specific discipline. Second, he suggests allowing a significant portion of time for learning the proposed content or process. Third, one should portray the content or process through several different approaches. Fourth and finally, Gardner tells us to set up “performances of understanding” that force students to apply the content or process they learned into new situations and problems.

Gardner also establishes a variety of methods for educators to help create synthesizing minds within their students. He proposes that the most likely way that students will become synthesizers is through interacting with adult synthesizers. Therefore, educators should aim to acquire this skill and model it to students whenever possible. In addition, mass media presentations, surfing the Web, and reading books are all likely help students’ synthesizing minds evolve.

Media infused projects help foster the development of both the disciplined and synthesizing minds. As mentioned, Gardner proposes teaching materials through a variety of ways. When considering the developing brain of an elementary school aged child, videos, pictures, songs, and other digital medias all accomplish this task. Images and videos help build students’ background knowledge. They also present new terms, ideas, and meanings through visual representations. Therefore, practical tools such as WebQuests, videos, and slideshows are all important in fostering the disciplined and synthesizing minds.

These tools allow students to store this information so that it can be recalled later in their educational careers. When information from prior knowledge is recalled, connections are formed between old knowledge and new knowledge. Thus, students create new schema, demonstrating another way that digital media helps to foster the synthesizing mind.

The use of Smart Boards and other technologies allows digital media to be broadcasted to classrooms in new ways. When teachers can interact with text on websites and model specific strategies for learning, synthesizing also occurs.

In addition, when students are able to interact with similar texts on their own to create projects that demonstrate their learning, both the disciplined and the synthesizing minds are enhanced. Projects like these are non-limiting. Rather than simply reading information and regurgitating it, students must conquer the facts and manipulate them in new ways. This requires students to use inferring and other higher order thinking skills.

Finally, one last practical way that educators can force students to build upon their disciplined and synthesizing minds is through the use of specific software programs. Drawing on Microsoft Paint or creating image, audio, and video stories through Microsoft PhotoStory or PowerPoint are but a “performances of understanding” that allow students to apply their knowledge to new situations.