Reflections on Gifted Education by Joseph Renzulli

Author:Joseph Renzulli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Applying Theory to the Construction of the Multiple Menu Model

The Multiple Menu Model was developed as a way for educators to design curricular units that place a premium on both the organization and pursuit of knowledge and the application of investigative methodologies as they pertain to a particular discipline or field of study. It requires teachers to identify a discipline’s principles and concepts and to carefully reflect on how they can share the meaning of these ideas with the young people with whom they work. It encourages the curriculum writer to offer students opportunities to apply the research methodologies that practicing professionals use in their fields of study. The curriculum writer needs to consider all of these elements because it helps students develop deep understandings of the subject matter, grounds students’ learning in meaningful and authentic contexts, and equips students with the skills used by practicing professionals so they can apply them in learning new information. This type of curricular planning helps students pursue the depth and complexity of a discipline and its content, rather than learning surface-level content knowledge.

Because of the accelerated rate at which knowledge is expanding today, we have organized The Multiple Menu Model to address the selection of content and the selection of procedures in a way that maximizes the transfer of learning to new situations. The model concentrates on the various structural elements of a discipline and focuses instruction on the basic principles, functional concepts (Ward, 1960), and methodologies within that discipline. Teachers should view principles and concepts as tools that help the learner understand any and all of the selected topics of a content field. Information of this type is referred to as “enduring knowledge,” as opposed to time-sensitive topics or transitory information. For example, understanding the concept of reliability is central to the study of psychological testing; reliability, therefore, may be considered an enduring element of that field. The specific reliability of any given test, however, is more timely or transitory in nature because it changes over time (and from test to test). It is the type of information that learners can always “look up” and understand if they have a basic comprehension of the more enduring concept of reliability.

In a similar fashion, the Multiple Menu Model deals with content selection by focusing on what Phenix (1964) called representative topics. These topics consist of any and all of the content in a field that the curriculum developer might choose as the focus of a unit, lesson, or lesson segment. For example, a teacher might choose The Merchant of Venice as a representative literary selection to illustrate the key concept of a tragic hero. He or she may also integrate other selections that employ this key concept into the unit of study, and a second or third selection might be necessary if an instructional objective is to compare and contrast tragic heroes. It is not necessary to cover an extensive list of selections if one or a few representative literary selections can convey the concept.

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