Montessori Philosophy – Page 3

The future of education?

The innate will to learn is the basic premise of the Montessori philosophy. So we emphasize giving students the freedom to explore the Montessori works, and allow them the time an space to teach each other, rather than intervening all the time. I know I find it hard to shut up sometimes and let them make the obvious mistakes, but they learn so much better that way.

Sugata Mitra wondered what would happen if you gave a computer to bunch of developing-world kids and let them use it as they would. As with Montessori, it turns out that the kids learn a lot, especially because they end up teaching each other.

Mitra’s TED talk is quite interesting in that it’s amazing just how much students will learn from a computer, even if unmediated by a teacher, if you just let them at it. Based on this work, he wants to add more computers and more unmediated spaces, all around the world. I think it’s a good idea.

In middle school we don’t have all the Montessori works students use in pre-Kindergarten through Upper Elementary. Students and their studies are getting more abstract. Instead, there are lots of individual and group projects. I like to view it as a set of apprenticeships: learn to be a scientist, learn to be an author, learn to be a geographer, and so on. One of the key questions I juggle is how “real” should their projects be. Should I give them a basic assignment and have them figure out the questions on their own, or should I point them toward specific resources, like chapters in the textbook. The answer is somewhere in between, but there is a constant tension. I also just try to mix it up a bit.

At any rate, Mitra’s work is interesting and I think its long-term results will probably affect the way we teach Montessori middle schools.

The Edible Schoolyard

Alice Waters has been in the news a lot recently with the recent evaluation of the Berkley School Lunch Initiative (full report).

Waters instituted a program that:

… offered cooking and garden classes integrated with selected classroom lessons along with improvements in school food and the dining environment. – Rauzon et al. (2010)

The report, which followed 5th and 6th graders into middles school, found that they knew more about nutrition and had greater preferences for fresh fruit and vegetables than students in comparable schools.

The researchers did not go into all of the ancillary benefits of gardening and cooking in the school, because the lessons tie into science and social studies curricula. Of course these benefits should be familiar to the Montessori community since Montessori advocated the erdkinder farm school for adolescents.

The Hershey Montessori School seems to be a good example of what Montessori was aiming for (as is the glimpses we get of child rearing in Mirable). We do a lot ourselves in our little program. I’ve noted before how our greenhouse and bread baking tie into math, science, social studies and art.

I sometimes think that the progression of education traces the evolution of culture and technology over the course of human history much in the way that embryonic development was supposed to recapitulate the evolutionary history of the species.

Ontology does not recapitulates phylogeny, and my observations are probably just about as accurate, but the psychosocial development of early adolescents, who are just discovering who they are and realizing their place in society and history, parallels the fundamental reorganization of human societies brought about by the emergence of agriculture.

Learning to work in a group

Woolley says she was surprised to find that neither the average intelligence of the group members nor the intelligence of the smartest member played much of a role in the overall group intelligence. Social sensitivity – measured using a test in which participants had to identify another person’s feelings by looking at photographs of their eyes – was by far the most important factor. – from Frankel (2010), Social sensitivity trumps IQ in group intelligence.

I’ve been thinking that it would make sense to have specific lessons on how to work in a group. Montessori students do a lot of group work and should be quite practiced at it by the time they get to middle school. In an increasing complex and interrelated world the ability to work in diverse, interdisciplinary groups is increasingly important, which makes it pertinent to consider and adapt to research on group intelligence.

The key research finding from this recent paper is that the “intelligence” of a group depends most on the sensitivity of members to the feelings of others, which is called social sensitivity. Individual intelligence of group members have little if any impact on the effectiveness of the group. Good social sensitivity of group members allowed everyone to contribute to the benefit of the group.

Apparently, women tend to be more socially sensitive. If this research holds up then we’ll have to consider how to teach social sensitivity to everyone. We already try to teach students how to behave and interact in a group; letting everyone have a chance to speak, for example, is another sign of good group intelligence. But to become more socially sensitive, students need to become more aware of others’ feelings. It’s something we already try to convey, and most of our students are aware if it, yet I can’t help but think that they might benefit from a full, Montessori, three-part-lesson on how to work in a group.

The lesson would probably fit best into the orientation cycle when we talk about community building, or maybe I can tie it into the Personal World curriculum next cycle. There are differences between small group dynamics and large community interactions that may make separation of these two topics important.

NPR also had a good story on the research paper mentioned above:

What if everything we know about how students learn is wrong?

“The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” — Pasher et al., 2008.

What if there was no such thing as learning styles? What if tests were a great way to help students learn? Benedict Carey has a fascinating article in the New York Times that reviews some of the cognitive and educational research on how students learn.

Among the more interesting findings are that there is practically no evidence that different learning styles make a difference in learning (though this is largely because there aren’t any good studies the met the stringent criteria of the authors’ of this review). The pattern of work in our Montessori Middle School program is designed around the idea that different students have predilections for certain types of learning. And my own anecdotal observations, of myself and of my students, indicate that this is the case. However, even if learning styles were not important at all, Carey’s article points out another observation that highlight the power of our approach.

modes-of-learning — The cycle of work. Within each subject area there are different types of assignments designed to provoke learning in many different styles.

First off, though we believe different students have different learning styles, the cycle of work is designed to expose all students to multiple learning styles. So the belief in learning styles is not stifling. If students do learn better from reading, they get the chance, but for any given topic and on any given week, they’ll see the same information in diagrams and get to talk it over with their small group. This ties into Carney’s observation that varying the study environment, and the information studied, aids learning. For example, in the case of identifying different painters by looking at their work:

“What seems to be happening … is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments …; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” — Nate Kornell (in Carney, 2010)

Overspecification is something I wonder about when I hear about the School of One program in New York City, which I discovered via the Freakonomics podcast. (I’ll post more on this intriguing program later).

Carney also points out the research that shows that testing helps students learn. But here the important point to highlight is that it testing is most effective when it’s used as a formative assessment, when it helps guide learning, and when it is used to reinforce ideas students are learning. This is how I use our cycle tests. Summative tests, like standardized tests, which try in one big lump to assess a student’s learning, are susceptible to so many small variabilities and are so prone to overinterpretation and overemphasis that it’s hard to say that their benefits overweight their problems.

It is important that, as teachers, we remain cognizant of the educational research. But it’s just as important the we not just jump on the latest fads or get overexcited about the latest research results. The Montessori Middle School program is constantly evolving, but it has a long and successful history, so it behooves us to approach the research with caution and to dig beneath the surface to see if the results are really fundamental at odds with what we know (at least in our experience) works.

Classroom culture

One of the most powerful aspects of a multi-aged classroom is the institutional memory that develops and makes learning a whole lot easier than starting off, every year, from scratch. All the aches and toil of last year did not just disappear when the new crop of students started. The new kids look to the older students for cues about how to behave and it has been saving me a whole lot of time and energy.

That’s not to say that bad habits don’t persist too. But having a slew of new students mixes things up enough so that even the returning students are receptive to some change.

So now I have a bit more time and energy that I can now put into new projects and tailoring the curriculum to make life a little more interesting for one and all.

Well we’re on our first immersion now and I’m getting a little reflective. Probably because it’s close to 2 am and they’re still not asleep.

Layered meanings

Daily life, for all its basic routine, is always popping up surprises. The human brain is attracted to mystery; it is after all just a fancy problem solving machine. David Mitchell gets up on his soap box to give a wonderful screed about how having sophisticated references tucked into childrens’ programming is a good thing and there should be more of it. Kids are naturally curious. If they’re interested enough they’ll look it up, and, in the age of the internet search engine and smartphones, the barriers to looking anything up are negligible. So include more Greek references in your discussions because although inciting curiosity in the internet age is a bit like opening Pandora’s box, you’re much more likely to get better results.

It also ties a bit into Montessori Philosophy. Students start “playing” with artifacts like the binomial cube in kindergarden, where the goal is to convey mathematical concepts is a solid, sensorial way. They don’t get into binomial formula until years later in algebra, but their familiarity with the cube allows them to take the step into the abstraction of algebra on familiar, safer ground.

This discussion also highlights one of the major advantages of using websites and hypertext for educational materials. References can be embedded in the text with links to credible sources even further reducing the transaction costs of the student having to search around the web trying to look something up. There is an argument to be had, however, on if hyperlinking is too distracting and reduces our ability to focus, but perhaps we need to work on study habits and using invisible hyperlinks rather than not using technology altogether.

(I discovered David Michell’s Soap Box via Somewhat in the Air, who notes that, “Few of David Mitchell’s posts are child friendly but the “Passionate about Sofas” is terribly funny, too.”)

Resurrecting the greenhouse

Two years ago, the middle school’s flagship project was to put up a fully functional greenhouse (using this design). It took all year but we did it. On the way, we got to practice geometry, mapping and construction, while learning and growing plants and studying soil profiles. It was so successful that, with our spring plant sale we broke even on the entire project.

Last year, however, the greenhouse was somewhat neglected. My plans to add an automatic window opener, which would have been a wonderful tie-in to our electronics and Newtonian physics studies, did not work out; we just did not have the time. We’d taken the plastic covering off, so only the bare, forlorn PVC frame was left standing around a plot of waist-high weeds.

Though I could not have predicted it, this year we have a strong core group of students who are highly enthusiastic about resurrecting the greenhouse and making it work. My suggestion was that we try to grow produce this fall that we could cook in December when we do our Dinner and a Show. Well, two weeks in, they’ve already put together a menu plan, weeding is well on its way and I’m being harassed to hurry up and arrange a trip to Home Depot. The excitement is so infectious that another student has volunteered to bring in his electric weed-whacker during the immersion. It’s amazing!

I’m having the hardest time not butting in. There is a beauty in seeing a well oiled machine executing a project or solving a difficult problem. But there is another even more wonderful aesthetic visible in a the birthing struggles of a nascent team. The forward motion of infectious enthusiasm is pulling puzzle pieces into its wake, and the pieces just seem to click into place when the time is right. I have to keep reminding myself that my job is to prepare the environment and let the kids do the rest.

Multiple Intelligences

The lessons, the individual works, the different group works, the reading; they’re all set up in this elaborate combination so that different students with different learning styles can get the information they need in the way that’s most meaningful to them. But the students also get to experience a wide range of learning styles so that they can become acclimatized to the different styles while actually figuring out which ones work best for them.

The logic behind this approach comes from Howard Gardner’s ideas on multiple intelligences. He argues that we have aptitudes for different ways of learning, and learning is easier and faster if students take advantage of their preferred learning styles. Whether we acquire these preferences through nature or nurture is an intriguing question, but by middle school I’ve found that it does not take long to recognize that some students have rather strong preferences.

[T]here exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early ‘naive’ theories of that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. – Gardner (1993) p. xix.

The learning intelligences have been defined in a number of different ways (see Smith, 2008 and BGfL for examples). We parse them like this:

Linguistic intelligence – learning from the written word or hearing words (auditory).
Logical/Math – using numbers and logical reasoning.
Bodily-kinesthetic – learning from doing.
Visual/Spatial – emphasizes images and relationships in space.
Interpersonal – learning from/with others.
Intrapersonal – introspective learning.
Musical – rhythm is important
Naturalistic – comprehending of the environment.

I prefer students to discover their preferred intelligences via the variations convolved into the curriculum, however, the BGfL has an online, multiple intelligences test that I’ve used in the past. However, as with standardized tests, you don’t want to stereotype students or have them stereotype themselves. All the intelligences interact. Different challenges force us to take different approaches, using different combinations of our intelligences to best effect. As always, a growth mindset is best. With their mental plasticity, adolescence is the best time to explore different learning approaches.