Author: Lensyl Urbano

Montessori Middle School Training/Research Projects

Maria Montessori developed her method teaching through careful observation of children and how they learn, which is why her method had held up so well over time and aligns so well with modern pedagogy (see Lillard, 2005). Montessori’s worked early childhood through elementary kids, and while she did some serious thinking and writing about secondary education, she did not put those thoughts into action herself.

Over the last 20 years or so Betsy Coe has developed, at School of the Woods, an exceptional middle school (and now high school) program based on Montessori’s ideas and tied to close observation of early adolescents and our growing understanding of their cognitive and neurological development. Unlike Montessori’s boarding school model (e.g. Hershey Montessori), Dr. Coe’s is primarily a day school but with “land-labs” one week out of every six, where student get to go out and live on the land.

There’s a lot to say about Dr. Coe’s program (which will be well explained in her upcoming book) but you can glean some of her influence from this blog, because I trained with her over the last two summers at the Houston Montessori Center.

One of the key tenets that Coe shares with Montessori is that the primary job of the teacher is to observe the students, their interactions and their environment. You apply the scientific process to the classroom. Observe, hypothesize, test and make the necessary changes. As such, a key part of the training program is the research project.

For the research project teachers in training have to apply the process to some aspect of their class and write it up. My own project was on the utility of my classroom wiki, which I’ve said a bit about previously. My peers did quite a wide variety of excellent projects, and I’ve asked them to share their experiences with me for the blog. I’m one of those people who’d collect bits of string because they might be useful in the future (hence the blog), so I’m loathe to let their experiences and efforts just disappear since it is unlikely that much of this work will be published.

I plan to post summaries of the research projects so there is a record of who did what, and I apologize for any mistakes I make in condensing the work. My goal is to create at least one node for discussion so that we might add these small anecdotes to the collective gestalt as we attempt to not replicate the interesting errors of others but make brand-new errors of our own.

Since most of this work is not formal research I’ll use the tag anecdotal research to help keep track of things.

Country population maps

Population distribution in the U.S. © Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

WORLDMAPPER has a nice interactive map that shows you how the population is distributed within different countries. The map above, of the United States, really shows how most of the population is located in the big cities. This map is a bit abstract, so I’m curious to see my students interpret it.

The BBC has a nice article explaining these maps, which includes animations showing how the maps were deformed.

Enjoying the silence

That was one of the most poignant moments for me—conversations I had with a class of kids in a school in a tough neighborhood who simply had no positive associations at all with the idea of silence.
– George Prochnik (Gorney, 2010)

In constructing the Montessori classroom we aim for an open, uncluttered environment. George Prochnik has an interesting little interview in the Atlantic about the value of silence in our noisy world. He points out that there has been a movement away from the sound deadening carpets, tablecloths and wall hanging in the interior design of restaurants, in an effort to generate more energy. Of course that makes things louder. Thinking about the interior design of the classroom, I can see how there might be a trade-off between creating an uncluttered environment and designing for a quiet classroom.

Of course, in a classroom of adolescents, some prefer to work in quiet, while others favor the energy and noise in the background. I try to create nooks and crannies where students can get out of the noise but are still visible to the rest of the room. I also allow students to use headsets during individual work time.

Thinking about it now, the nooks were designed to fit small groups of three, but the students only really migrated toward them as individuals. So it may be that their primary value has been to provide small cones of silence and I should make more of them but smaller ones.

On the popularity of soccer

A Tired Ball Speaks from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.

I remember playing the game with a rolled up spheroid of aluminum foil. For kids living in poverty in the developing world something as simple as a soccer ball is an expensive luxury. Jessica Hilltout has a coffee table book out called “Amen: Grassroots Football“, with photographs of the “balls” she’s seen used in Africa. The video above has just a small selection.

The pictures speak to, and help explain, the popularity of soccer around the world. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure how to order the book, but the website does allow you to look inside.

Poverty on the Brain

This book I should read, “Teaching with Poverty in Mind“, sounds like it’s based on Ruby K. Payne’s framework for understanding poverty. I’ve already written a little about the controversy surrounding her work. Payne’s practical activities seemed useful at the very least, so it should be interesting to find out how Eric Jensen extends the theories to the classroom.

Maps of wealth and population

World population in 2000. (© Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).)
Wealth in 2002. Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

In the coming year we’ll be looking at inequalities in wealth around the world. One way of looking at this is via the two maps above from the WORLDMAPPER website. Countries are scaled by the population, in the first image, and wealth in the second.

Worldmapper also has quite the number of very interesting maps, including maps related to health, violence, pollution, food and ecology. The species at risk map ties in well with the study of the Earth’s resources.

They also distribute some animated maps as well as free software, called ScapeToad, that you can use to make your own maps. I like the fact that their maps and software are clearly licensed and allow free educational use.