February 2010 – Page 2 – Montessori Muddle

Tour of Central High

101st_Airborne_at_Little_Rock_Central_High-ps — Memphis 10 and the Little Rock 9

It’s one thing to walk through a place where history was actually made, but having a tour guide who personally experienced part of it is pretty special. The Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site is the only national park with an active, fully functioning high school on site. So when you do the tour, you follow a ranger (wearing the same uniform and hat that they wear on the forest trails) through the halls of a school as scores of students stream past. It’s a little odd to say the least. The Central High students seem to take it in stride, because they’re probably used to it, but our students seemed a bit unsure about how to deal with it.

Jody Morris, born and raised in Little Rock, was our tour guide. She was a child (1st grade I think) when the schools were integrated, and she experienced the ostracism of having parents supportive of integration. Ms. Morris was able to speak with the emotion and authority of someone who lived through troubling times. I’m not sure that we could have had a better tour without having one of the Little Rock Nine there with us.

Much of what we saw is in the history books and the documentaries. On the tour you climb the same front steps in the iconic pictures of the students being escorted up the steps of the school (see above); you sit in the same cafeteria where Minnijean Brown was hazed; you can walk the same long blocks that Elizabeth Eckford did in front of the jeering crowd. The current students walking the halls, immunized to the weight of history by long experience, make it easier to identify with what it might have been.

Montessori secondary and the university

I’ve been thinking recently about the similarities I’ve observed between Montessori Middle and High Schools and liberal arts education at the university level. Especially when compared to a traditional secondary education the two are remarkably similar. Two that stand out are the variety of choice for the students to tailor their own learning, and lots of responsibility given to the student to use their time and resources effectively. The Montessori experience should be really beneficial in college, but that just leaves the little matter of High School.

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, has written quite a bit about the failure of the traditional high school in the “rich world”.

[I]n secondary schools there is a demand for uniformity and regulation of behavior that results in less autonomy and the dumbing down of academic expectations – Botstein (2008).

Botstein argues for universities taking over high schools because they have credibility as educational institutions and because the structure of secondary education in the U.S., with rapid turnover of school boards and superintendents, is a failed model. One fundamental problem that Botstein and others such as Angeline Lillard identify is that the traditional educational is based on a factory style model. Students are fed through the assembly line and those who do not, or can not, conform to the necessary automation get rejected by the system. This model co-evolved with the industrial revolution when the power of the factories and efficiency were novel marvels to behold.

To a degree the education factory worked well in the past, providing the workers for the industries at the time, and certainly, for a while, helped rapidly raise educational levels and productivity. Yet as more and more rote jobs are now being automated, the educational premium is now on creativity. Where technology takes the place of the assembly line worker it also makes it easier and cheaper for the individual inventor or creator.

Personally, when assessing high schools my students go on to, the main thing I look for is the degree of independence they offer their students. Hemmed in by the needs of standardized testing and curriculum standards, it is too rare that students get the opportunities to follow their passions. My own teaching philosophy has also evolved. I’ve come to the conclusion that by the time my students graduate my Middle School they should be the type of independent learners who would succeed in the college environment (and hopefully in the world). That type of independence also means that they also have to tools to deal with anything that comes up in high school, even if they have to work around the system.

Little Rock Immersion

[googleMap name=”Lake Catherine State Park” description=”Lake Catherine State Park” width=”490″ height=”490″ mapzoom=”12″ directions_to=”false”]1200 Catherine Park Rd, AR 71913-8716[/googleMap]

Just got back from an immersion trip to Arkansas. Every sixth week we get out of the classroom for the week and try to integrate what we’ve learned in the previous five. We’re out there, sometimes visiting somewhere history happened, sometimes hiking in the woods, and I wonder why we don’t spend all of our time outside the classroom. The kids get so much out of just exploring, and there is just so much that sparks the imagination.

Anyway, we hit Central High School, the Clinton Library and stayed and hiked at Lake Catherine State Park (see the map above). We also had a lesson on cameras that tied into our discussion of waves last cycle. I expect to post about each of these, they were all quite good.

A reason to draw

MILTON GLASER DRAWS & LECTURES from C. Coy on Vimeo.

Why do we use our hands? Milton Glaser (above) uses his to think, and he cites Frank Wilson who argues that the hand and the brain are so connected as to be a single almost indistinguishable system. In fact, Wilson extrapolates this connection to education where, he makes the arguement, “less rigid more individualized approach to education will yield a student with a unified body and mind” (according to The New Yorker, 1998).

“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand” – Robertson Davies in The Cornish Trilogy

Drawing is thinking for some people at least. Perhaps that’s one of the things that defines kinesthetic learners? It certainly is something to bear in mind when designing and implementing the curriculum. Teachers tend to use teaching methods that fit their learning styles, so it is important to bear in mind we will have a variety of students. It’s certainly something about which I have to keep reminding.

It is also important to remember that all students benefit from experiences with different modes of learning. Students, especially adolescents whose brains are rapidly developing new neural pathways and pruning others, need to experience variety, because once we are set in our ways, it becomes a lot harder to learn new tricks.

This is where preparing the environment becomes so important. We want student to have choices, but we want them to try new things, and sometimes these two objectives conflict. The video above does make a persuasive argument to me about why we should draw and practice drawing. Perhaps it will do the same for our kids.

Element song (by Tom Leher)

Tom Leher has a number of really entertaining science related songs. Here he does the elements and someone (unknown unfortunately) has made a video to go with it, where the elements all pop up on the periodic table as he sings. Since there is no apparent pattern to order in which he sings the elements, this is more a “strike the imagination” type thing rather than anything else.

How much technology in the classroom?

The title of Mark Bauerlein‘s book is somewhat provocative. It’s called, “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” As I am very much an advocate for incorporating technology in the classroom, it’s not too unexpected that I disagree with large parts of his thesis.

Yes there is probably an important link between the brain and the hand that facilitates creative work. But it does not necessarily follow that, “Writing by hand, students will give more thought to the craft of composition. They will pause over a verb, review a transition, check sentence lengths …” (Bauerlein, 2010). As we work on habits of revision there seems to be no real reason why they should spend more time on improving a sentence they’ve hand written than one they’ve typed. True, if students are conditioned to write in short rapid bursts of texting it will translate into their other writing, but it is the role of the teacher to help them delineate these different genres of writing. I also have not seen the evidence that writing by hand is any less abstract than writing by typing on a keyboard. We are already expressing ideas using an abstract medium, words, why is one form of expression better than the other?

Where I do agree with Bauerlein is on the need to take breaks, even substantial ones, from technology and the online world. Where I see the greatest need for this is in aiding student’s comprehension of the natural world. You live too long in the virtual world and you begin to translate that experience into the real world. Yet the virtual world remains a model of the real one. It is simplified and enhanced to make it a more enjoyable experience, so the lessons you learn there do not truly apply to the real world. In addition, physical experience in the virtual world, at least for now, cannot create the kinesthetic, mind-body understanding of the laws of physics and biology that you learn from real-world games and just walking along the nature trail. This is why I am a firm believer in our week-long immersions every six weeks.

So I continue to allow my students to introduce new technology to the classroom, as long as they can show me that it is effective in helping them learn. The latest thing is the proliferation of iPod Touches. I like the iPods because of apps like iSeismo that lets you monitor vibrations in 3D. However, on our recent visit to the Le Bonheur Hospital a number of my students took their notes on their iPods. I personally don’t believe that these are more effective than pencil and paper because you can’t combine text and images very effectively on an iPod, but they did take copious notes (which they were quite proud to show me). I’m planning on giving them a quick quiz to see what they learned from the trip so we’ll see just how effective their note taking was.

We’re all swimming in a sea of new technologies, and we can’t really tell what will benefit and what will hinder without trying them out. So, I at least conclude that the key goal of middle school education should be to create in students a core competence and confidence that will help students navigate steadily in this world of much information and rapidly changing fads. A fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that underlie people’s behavior is key. Know yourself and understand how societies behave. The first is not trivial and the second requires drawing general conclusions from a lot of historical data, which is quite challenging for most adolescents, but that’s why we teach the way we do.

Note: There is an interesting discussion of the use of technology in the traditional classroom going on now on Will Richardson blog post “The Big Questions: Now What?“