Category: Montessori Philosophy

The importance of thinking about thinking

Know thyself - Socrates (and others) from Wikimedia Commons.

Personal World is the time for introspection. Every day students get a chance to think about themselves and, hopefully, about how they think. Thinking about your own thinking is called meta-cognition, and there is growing scientific evidence that it is an important life skill that leads to better decision making.

According to Jean Paiget’s theory of cognitive development students only begin to develop the capacity for abstract and meta-cognitive thinking in the middle school years. However, further research has shown that only about 30-35% of high schoolers actually develop the skill (it’s called “formal thinking” or “formal operations“). The brain develops the capacity for formal thinking in early adolescence, but people do not naturally move into that stage; school and the right environment are important.

For formal operations, it appears that maturation establishes the basis, but a special environment is required for most adolescents and adults to attain this stage. – Huitt, W., & Hummel, J. (2003)

The requirement that students spend some time in introspection is one key way that Montessori adolescent programs try to promote formal thinking.

Finally, Jonah Lehrer, a journalist who writes a lot about how people think and makes decisions, points out the importance of metacognition in the qualities that make for a good president.

some studies suggest that when confronted with a complex decision – and the decisions of the president are as complex as it gets – people often do best when they rely on their gut feelings …
However, it has also become clear that listening to your instincts is just a part of making good decisions. The crucial skill, scientists are now saying, is the ability to think about your own thinking, or metacognition, as it is known. Unless people vigilantly reflect on how they are making an important decision, they won’t be able to properly use their instincts, or know when their gut should be ignored. Indeed, according to this emerging new vision of decision-making, the best predictor of good judgment isn’t intuition or experience or intelligence. Rather, it’s the willingness to engage in introspection” – (Lehrer, 2008; emphasis mine)

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    Good teachers …

    How do you know if you’re a good teacher is a question we all ask ourselves as we go through the Montessori teacher training and when we reflect on our time in the classroom. Most of us do not come from traditional educational backgrounds. Angeline Stoll Lillard (2007; p. 379), who literally wrote the book on the cognitive and pedagogic research that supports the Montessori approach, writes that in 1946 Maria Montessori “advised that Montessori teachers not take traditional education courses, because such courses would deepen their adherence to traditional methods and ideas.”

    Lillard’s own belief is that although educational training programs have improved since the 1940’s (they teach more constructivist methods similar to Montessori) new teachers going into traditional schools today get pounded down by the institutional structure of these schools (the traditional classroom layout, the testing etc.) so that they are rarely able to apply those approaches and end up falling back into the traditional methods. Interestingly, according to an article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic, “a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.” (at least within the Teach for America program). The Teach for America research found that the key traits that predicted a teacher would be good are contentedness with their own life and perseverance.

    Of course you have to ask yourself, how do they determine if a teacher is a good teacher? Unfortunately, they do it through standardized test scores. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, because evaluating good teaching is important and difficult to put into numbers. Even crude measures of the quality of teaching can be useful if there is no other available evidence. But increasing the uses of standardized tests has a tendency to shape the entire educational system toward the test itself. In addition, there is a lot of evidence that a focus on testing is not a good way to get students to learn. It devalues the learning to the student, and focuses the attention of the teacher on the test, and, “The very structure of such tests, breaking learning into components that are tested in a disjointed manner, discourages integrated learning” (Lillard, 2005; p 344).

    Yet the focus on testing intensifies. In Washington D.C., teachers are now being scored and potentially fired based on test scores. According to Ripley, teaching quality will now be numerically scored, and for “teachers whose students take standardized tests, half their score will be based on how much their students improved.” At the federal level, there is a new educational initiative where:

    states must first remove any legal barriers to linking student test scores to teachers—something California and Wisconsin are already doing. To win money, states must also begin distinguishing between effective and ineffective teachers—and consider that information when deciding whether to grant tenure, give raises, or fire a teacher or principal

    The two sentences above are separated by a period into two different ideas, but their confluence appears to be inexorable. While testing should be a component of evaluation, test scores are easy to use and come in the form of easy to understand numbers, so the over-reliance on them seems inevitable.

    While there is a clear need to identify good teaching and teachers, I do not believe that standardized tests are the answer.

    Artists sit to the right

    With open classrooms allowing lots of movement, we don’t often have to deal with issues of seating arrangements. But, an interesting study (from back in 1993) found that students (adults in this case) who sit on the right side of the room are more right-brain oriented. They tend to be more the artistic types, less cautious in responding and less analytical. Right side sitters also scored higher on femininity on a Masculine-Feminine scale.

    Since we’re creatures of habit, I wonder if we can see this pattern in the seating arrangements for lessons and community meetings. On balance though, I’d think this would be another argument (if another was necessary) for allowing students and lots of movement so there is more mixing and sharing of talents.

    This seating pattern preference also shows up in where people prefer to sit in movie theaters.

    A sense of justice as a key to moral development

    On an personal level, I’ve always felt that the sense of justice shapes the way people react to the world on a fundamental level. In the language of Montessori, justice is a fundamental need of humanity. As we mature we begin to see justice from different perspectives, and after going over the history of human rights, I wonder if this applies to societies as well.

    Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous theory about the stages of moral development center around the idea of how people see and react to justice and injustice. His first level (pre-conventional) is based on how moral actions affect oneself; if I do this then they will do that right back to me (and I won’t like it). In the second level (conventional) the main concern is how actions affect and are perceived by society; it’s not right to do this because everyone will talk about it (and I don’t like that). The final level (post-conventional), moral judgments are made based on some underlying principles; I should not do this because it will violate someone’s universal human rights (and I would have violated my own principles).

    When we talk about the history of human rights, we are discussing how society has gone through these different stages. The first rule of justice, no matter the culture, is some variant of the Golden Rule, an eye for an eye. Eventually we discover the rights of the citizen, then finally the rights of humans. In humans, this moral evolution is innate in potential but not necessarily realized. Similarly is societies, after all, the Greek democracies eventually failed. But there seems to be a general trajectory of history toward post-conventional morality. Robert Wright, in his book “Nonzero” sees this path as the almost inevitable outcome of the beneficial nature of cooperation to human societies.

    Of course Nonzero was written in the post-Cold War and pre 9/11 period, when the world was breathing a sigh of relief when the potential for global thermonuclear war seemed to disappear (I also remember David Rudder’s 1990 had a similar theme).

    Two faced

    Facial symmetry: left=original picture; middle=left-left composite; right=right-right composite

    A slight tilt of the face to the left or the right changes the emotional message you send. There’s a whole field of study on what’s called laterality that looks at how the asymmetry of your posture says things you might not realize.

    Mike Nicholls has done some interesting work. In one study, he took two pictures of just the left side of peoples’ faces and reflected one half to make a composite image that basically had just two left sides or two right sides. The image above (which was not done by Nichols) shows an original photo, a left-left composite and a right-right composite. He found that:

    … head turns of just 15 degrees can bring about significant changes in the perceived emotionality.

    Nicholls discusses the implications with regards to the fact that portraits tend to feature the left side of the face. However, it is also interesting to think about what this means for non-verbal communication. Another paper, using 3D imaging of facial movements showed that:

    Emotions are expressed more clearly on the left side of the face than the right … There was a trend, however, for left-sided movement to be more pronounced for negative than positive emotions.

    Auto-Tune and the trajectory of fads

    This intelligently done history of Auto-Tune is wonderful for several reasons. First, it has a simple, elegantly executed story arc, where it describes the trajectory of a fad from introduction to over-exposure to parody/remix and finally to a new equilibrium. And it discusses these concepts in a clear and entertaining way.

    Know Your Meme: Auto Tune (featuring “Weird Al” Yankovic) from Rocketboom on Vimeo.

    Second, Auto-Tune is a great example of something that was created for one purpose but finds a new life in a completely different discipline. The technology was created for analyzing seismic signals in petroleum exploration before being applied to music. It is amazing what can come from working with people of diverse backgrounds, and having a broad appreciation of the world. Group work is important.

    Third, in touching on parody, it brings up an issue that adolescents, in particular need to understand; parody is not just a cheap joke, it has something important to say. It uses humor to address significant issues:

    While making fun of something is easy [mockery], parody requires a study of both technique and form, before creating its own recontextualization.

    Third, the overexposure stage of fads and memes is something everyone should be aware of. The meme infiltrates so many aspects of the culture that it becomes irritating. As a Middle School teacher I see it primarily in the language my students use. By introducing this concept to my student, we now have a common language for talking about at least one type issues in the classroom.

    Finally, equilibrium. An important concept in natural and social science, the concept is neatly encapsulated in how the fad starts off small, overshoots and gets smaller but does not disappear as there remains some lower level of use.

    How science works

    Artist's impression of the Big Bang. By cédric sorel: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Big_bang.jpg

    Science progresses from failure. When experiments don’t work, we often learn more from why they did not work than if they had given us the results we expected. Frequently, it is how scientists deal with this adversity that results in advances in science.

    We build models of the world, but by definition these models are incomplete. They are only metaphors for the actual world. When our models fail, we learn, and we expand our models.

    Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the Noble Prize for Physics for discovering the background noise left by the Big Bang. They only did so after spending a year trying to figure out why their radio telescope kept giving them too much static for them to use for their intended purpose (to map the universe’s bright stars).

    Where does morality come from?

    “Do to others as you would have them do to you”. The golden rule (in some form or the other) is almost universal. And because it is found throughout different cultures and belief systems suggests that much of what we view as morality and ethics are innate to the human mind. But what are we born with, and what do we learn from culture? Is the golden rule necessary for successful social groups, so that cultures with the golden rule are more successful that ones that don’t have it? These two questions are fundamental to how we educate, particularly in a method such as Montessori’s that has such a strong moral dimension.

    Maria Montessori herself came from a strong catholic background, but the success of her approach in so many different cultures does argue that, at least for the younger kids, the innate aspects of morality and needs of the child are most important. By the time students get to the Middle School, however, the influence of the local culture has become much more important.

    Morality and culture affect students’ motivations and behavior, yet much of what is considered acceptable in many cultures conflict with the core Montessori principles of respect for oneself and for others. Much of popular American culture for example, is driven by television where moral messages can be decidedly mixed. How often is it appropriate to use violence (or even torture)? Television shows give decidedly different answers from Montessori. But there are many other, more subtle differences. As Montessori educators we will be faced with the question of what to do when Montessori philosophy differs from the beliefs of the student, their family and the larger culture.

    My thoughts are that the “cosmic education” that is a part of the Montessori method should be based on the “universal” aspects of morality that can be shown to make for successful individuals and societies. Some interesting work by Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia looks at how certain systems of morality have contributed to the success of societies. As Nicholas Wade summarizes:

    … natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?

    Haidt suggests there are “five innate and universally available psychological systems” of ethics, and different cultures add stories, virtues and ways of policing these ethics. The Moral Foundations Theory website has a good summary of the five systems, harm/care, fairness, loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity.  In a beautiful example of adding transparency and technology to scientific research, he even has a page for challenges to the theory. Each of the moral foundations these deserves separate consideration of how they evolved, how they benefit society, and how they mesh with Montessori philosophy.

    Nicholas Wade has a good article on the subject and on Haidt’s work in the New York Times.