Montessori Philosophy – Page 8

Why collaboration is important

Montessori middle schools depend a lot on collaborative work and discussions. Individual parts of group work allow students to specialize in areas, hopefully, where they are interested and willing to learn the most. Then when they share their work with the group the whole group gets the information, and the person presenting it gets feedback from different perspectives. Collaborative work is excellent preparation for creative work in the future.

Some recent research by Kevin Dunbar, a neuroscience at the University of Toronto, gives some strong support to the usefulness of collaborative work. He found that group discussions, with people from different backgrounds can be much more effective at solving problems than discussions among specialists. Different backgrounds mean that each person is forced to take a step back from their expertise and think and describe the problem in a way someone else with a different perspective can understand. This allows both the expert and the person they are describing the problem to, to see the problem from different perspectives.

Twittering a Montessori Middle School

I ran into the twitter page for the Montessori Middle School of Louisville today. It is regularly updated (as of May 2010) and the tweets give a fascinating glimpse of what a rural Montessori school near Knoxville, Tennessee, is up to. They have everything from programming computer games with Flash to working the gardens and composting.

The school’s website is at: http://www.discoveret.org/mms/ and they also have a blog at http://montessorimiddle.blogspot.com/

Human? nature

To follow up on the previous post on the evolutionary benefits of kindness, this essay by Marc Hauser describes some of the science that indicates that morality is innate. Not religious affiliation, gender, nationality nor political views affect how people respond to moral dilemmas.

“We tend to see actions as worse than omissions of actions.” People tend to believe that deliberately hurting a healthy person to save one or more others is morally repugnant if the others would only be hurt by your inaction.

The evolutionary benefits of kindness

Evolution is often summed up in the phrase, “survival of the fittest”, well sometimes “fittest” can also refer to kindness. Having empathy is evolutionarily beneficial. As individuals, the more we give to others the more respect we gain for ourselves. As a group or a society, when people are able to cooperate they do better than when they cannot. What scientists have recently been uncovering is that empathy and the urge to cooperate are built into our very genes.

This research ties in elegantly with Montessori philosophy. The benefits of kindness and cooperation seem obvious when you think about it, but the fact that we are genetically predisposed to act in this way helps explain why the emphasis on cooperative work works so well in early childhood classrooms.

If you put this research together with the way society is currently evolving, where problems have to be dealt with with teams from different backgrounds, perspectives and disciplines, it really points out the importance of collaborative work in the middle school.