Every single day, we experience life through stimuli in various forms, including verbal information, visual information, and even tactile information. We aren’t naturally skilled to perform all the tasks that come our way. We pick up certain skills and develop expertise in them, through competence in the type of intelligence we have in abundance. There are several types of intelligence, discovered by Sir Howard Gardner that determines our naturalistic sense of expertise.
One of these kinds of intelligence is Intrapersonal Intelligence, where an individual is fully aware of their emotions, feelings, etc. It allows an individual to be extensively self-aware and independent and curious about the deeper questions of life and how we react to it. This post talks about how Intrapersonal intelligence can be amped up with the help of activities.
Understanding intrapersonal intelligence
While the types of intelligence are majorly dependent upon the concept of smartness with regards to their uniqueness, the two types of intelligence, namely Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Intelligence, are based upon the concept of “understanding” oneself and others respectively.
Individuals with high intrapersonal intelligence, have the aptitude to tap into complexities of their emotional reactions and tend to have higher levels of congruence with their emotions, and their management and thus, are able to strive for self-actualization.
Individuals who have careers related to the disciplines of psychology, theology, writing, etc, have higher intrapersonal intelligence, as they are able to reflect and introspect when it comes to their emotions and emotionally driven decisions.
Such individuals also have a lot more satisfaction towards the purpose of their lives, since the motivation behind their actions are well thought off and in congruence to their personalities, most of the time.
According to Intrapersonal Intelligence, if an individual is able to understand their own desires, motivations, emotions, and intentions, they have a better chance of living a life of success as well as fulfillment.
In research done by Rahadian Sholikhati, Mardiyana, and Dewi Retno Sari Saputro[1], the thinking levels of students based on intrapersonal intelligence were studied. It revealed that students with higher intrapersonal intelligence were able to achieve the analyzing levels of the study more efficiently and effectively.
It was also seen that if the educator focussed on the intrapersonal intelligence of all the students, and devices multiple methodologies to teach the same concepts, the learning increased optimally with implications of intrapersonal intelligence around it.
Improving intrapersonal intelligence: Activities to engage students
1. Talk to your role model
In this activity, the students will be asked to pick a favorite famous personality of their choice, out of the famous writers, freedom fighters, politicians, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, or any educational entity. They will be required to prepare interview questions for these people, whether the role model would have existed before their time, or still has an impact on the lives of people.
Post that, the students will be required to research about these personalities and answer those questions based on the understanding of the role model’s personality, emotions, and observation of their decision-making process and present the report in front of the class with at least 5 questions.
The students will also be required to tell “why” they consider that personality as their role model.
This activity, thus allows the individual to develop the skills required to induce a habit of introspection, reflection, and understanding of how emotions are the driving force behind one’s decisions and the complexity of it all.
2. Treasure hunt
Here, the educator will be required to divide the class into pairs of students. They will be asked topics of their choice from 5 main domains, like history, sports, poems, etc. Then the educator will create questions on those categories in the form of riddles and hide them with clues to find the next.
Whichever pair completes their treasure hunt with the most efficiency and accuracy gets rewarded with something related to their domain. Like, a pair that chose history might be rewarded with a vintage coin or a famous book, similarly, one with sports might receive a poster of their favorite team, and so on.
This activity is therefore helpful in developing the tendency to have a thorough understanding and information about what we like and allows the individual to identify the gap within the same. The reward at the end of the activity acts as an incentive so that the devotion towards their choices remains intact.
3. Journal
In this activity, the students are required to update their journals every day. They will be required to maintain journals, or simply diaries, where they will put down their aspirations and desires for the coming week.
Once that is done, those tasks will be divided into smaller goals on a daily basis. These journals will then be exchanged among students of the class, who will be responsible to make sure that the owner of the journal that they have got, complies to work for their goals and motivates them. To make it a little bit more fun, the journal needs to be color-coded for goals according to week, month, and year. This will promote the inner understanding of an individual themselves and encourages self-motivation, upon achievement of the goals.
4. Story Telling
In this activity, the teacher will be required to create paper chits equal to the number of students in the class with morales on them. Each student will pick a chit and will be provided with 10 minutes to spin their story.
They will be given conditions like the story should be at least 3 mins long, with at least one protagonist and one villain, etc.
This will supposedly boost their understanding of self, and how they perceive things that are abstract in nature. Spinning stories requires an individual to have perspectives over certain scenarios, it allows reflection over the choices, if the scenario was to be encountered in real life. Thus, storytelling as an activity is bound to help an individual dive deeper into themselves and eventually figure out their personality better.
5. Choose our boundary
This activity requires a collaborative effort from the teacher as well as the student. Here, a task like learning a chapter will be given to all the students and they will be provided with options of different modalities to choose from, and present their learnings through it.
This could involve presentations, role-play, debate, experiments, etc. Each of these modalities will have its own constraints, and the students will be required to choose any one of these modalities, adhere to conditions and present their chapter confined to those guidelines.
Post presentation, the students will be required to share their experience of the process and how they felt after the activity. This will help them understand their strengths and weaknesses so far.
6. Autobiography
This is a rather fun activity for students who love to write and talk about themselves. This will require the students to research about the right way to write an autobiography, prepare guidelines for it and share them with the class.
Upon multiple entries, the teacher will choose one of those frameworks which the whole class will have to follow. After that, the students will be given a time of 2 days to write their autobiographies and present them to the class. Students with maximum content and minimal diversion from the guidelines will be rewarded.
7. Meditation
This will be a rather relaxing activity where the students will practice guided meditation with the teacher. Here, the students will be required to bring loose clothes to change for the meditation hour, bring their yoga mats, and surrender themselves to the process.
The teacher will then be required to make sure that the students feel relaxed and comfortable and practice mindfulness through deep breathing, focusing on their breath and body movement, and channelizing their negative energy into rather positive and neutral terms.
This will help the students understand what is going on in their minds, during the lazy and relaxed hours of the day, and pay heed to those thoughts too.
8. Juggle art
This is definitely a fun activity, where the teacher will divide the class into groups of 5 students, and each group will be provided with random art and craft supplies with no connection to each other. If one group could get colors, colorful threads, glue, and origami, the other group might get orange peels, board pins, watercolors, and glitter, etc
These students will then be required to create an art piece out of the provided supplies and share the perspective behind it with everyone else. This will help in understanding the inner functioning of the students, promote their creativity and spontaneity and develop a deeper understanding of themselves.
9. Application & Implication
In this activity, the teacher will be required to choose a topic with the practical and accessible application of the concept every week. Through these topics, the students will be required to share examples and practical applications of the learned material in daily life. This will help them understand the concept better, by identifying and understanding the concept in different ways.
For example, The teacher chooses the concept of conical sections, then makes sure that the students understand the concept clearly, through the use of various activities, like finding conic sections examples in objects around us, or creating conic sections through the use of clay, etc, will help them in understanding themselves regarding the modality of teaching that helps them learn better or how good they are at application, highlight their strengths and weaknesses and in turn help them develop skills to carry out their tasks more efficiently.
Summing up
While each of us has at least a single genre of intelligence (mentioned by Gardner), as our expertise, this article sheds light on the intrapersonal aspect of it.
Intrapersonal intelligence seems to form the core of our existence and has a crucial role in understanding oneself, including how we perceive our role in the world and define the purpose of our lives. This article takes us on the journey to understand various aspects of this type of intelligence better.
It talks about the emergence of intrapersonal intelligence, and its purpose and explains certain activities that can be used with individuals to encourage this aspect of their intelligence and develop their insight and self-awareness so that they can use the power that comes with knowing themselves more effectively.
References
- Sholikhati, R., Mardiyana, & Sari Saputro, D. R. (2017). Students’ thinking level based on intrapersonal intelligence. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 943, 012007. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/943/1/012007
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,