Pedagogy – Page 14 – Montessori Muddle

Time

“… he was purchasing time, than which nothing is more precious to a man bent on great achievements” – from Plutarch‘s Life of Sertorious

Without grades and extrinsic rewards, students build much more durable commodities: strength of character and self-motivation. But as I try to manage a classroom there are so many things that could so easily be considered rewards. The most important of these is time.

I feel the significance of time most of all when we have to reschedule P.E. for the end of the day instead of just after lunch. We only do it then when there’s a lot of work that I want to make sure the students get done. It sits there, dangling at the end of the day, if only they’re focused enough, if only they work smoothly and efficiently enough.

It’s clear from the literature, and from my own observations when I do this, that extrinsic rewards reduce creativity and devalue both the work and the reward itself. So I suppose I may just have to say, on those days with too much to be done, that we’ll have to skip P.E. and eliminate the expectation altogether. It’s something I’d prefer not to do, but it’s unrealistic to expect students to give their full though and concentration to a subject while glancing at the clock every five minutes.

Sundial_PSF — Image by Pearson Scott Foresman from Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening versus frozen food? A little controvercy

Adam Ozimek stirred some controversy last month when he suggested that, whatever the educational merits, if the objective is to get inner-city kids to eat better, then we should be teaching them how to cook delicious meals using, cheaper and almost as nutritious, frozen vegetables, and not get into the slow-food, organic, locavore ethic of the Berkley School Lunch Initiative

Ozimek may have a point from a very strict utilitarian position, but he misses the big picture so badly that even if his fundamental argument was not wrong, which I think it probably is, it would be moot anyway.

First off, leaving aside the other educational merits of the program seems to miss the point. Humans, adolescents, education, these are all complex systems that interact in surprising ways. Students’ motivation to cook something they grew, for themselves, in the garden, is orders of magnitude different from the interest in cooking something out of the freezer section. And they miss everything they learn from gardening itself.

Using organic gardening methods and purchasing food, to the best of their ability, from local sources brings everyone’s attention to important environmental issues that situates students in the global ecosystem, which is something I know I spend a lot of time trying to accomplish. We’re not trying to make students aware of environmental issues because of some insidious “progressive” political agenda. The issues are there irregardless of the differing political approaches to dealing with them.

I also have a problem with the argument that frozen vegetables are the best way to deal with nutritional issues. From an immediate perspective Ozimek is probably right, and I’d support making sure frozen veges are an important part of the program. But the slightly bigger, slightly longer term, picture is that the program successfully increases awareness of healthy nutritional options. As long as student are also aware that frozen vegetables can also be a healthy substitute then students will use what’s within their means.

As an aside, although gardens are difficult or sometimes impossible in urban environments, their benefits are numerous, and there are wonderful innovations, like Global Buckets that reduce their intractability. A couple of Montessori kids designed Global Buckets as a means of impoverished communities to get fresh vegetables. Now that the a new set of kids are inspired by gardens in the school and this healthier food program, what will they come up with?

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:

Idea Sketch: Graphic organizer for the iPod

I’m quite happy for students to use their handheld devices if they’re being productive. They’ve used them to take text-based notes (I’m still not sure how they are able to type so fast), make flashcards (I need to find or make an app for notecards and bibliography cards for the IRP), and now they’ve discovered one for making graphic organizers called Idea Sketch (thanks go to J. for showing me, and M. for finding it).

I’ve been using graphic organizers (GOs) a lot at the beginning of the year and students are getting the idea that we will inevitably put one together to summarize the weekly themes. So today, during our Needs of People discussion/lesson, when I did a quick spot check to see what the the iPod users were doing with their devices, they showed me that they were already putting together GOs. Because I really want them to develop the skill themselves, I’ve not been giving them GOs ahead of time, and we’ve been practicing putting them together. I was quite happy to see them being proactive. Maybe the lesson helped after all.

Idea Sketch is simple, seems to work pretty well, and is a free download at least at them moment.

Standards, scope and sequence

Full-overview.vue — Curriculum alignment graphic. Still very much a work in progress.

The Montessori middle school curriculum we use is designed to meet the Texas state standards, so there are some interesting lessons about Texas history that I’ve had to drop or adapt, and some other topics that needed to be supplemented or replaced. Trying to represent this all in the same place has been quite the challenge. I’ve been working on the graphic above for some time.

The graphic is set up with the Tennessee Department of Education’s standards in mind, but I’m using the free, mind-mapping software, VUE, to make it easily adaptable. This way I can update any small annual changes fairly fluidly, and plug in the national standards when I get around to it. Aligning all the standards can be a bit of a pain, because the graphic really should be broken down to show the individual assignments that meet specific standards, but the figure is busy enough as it is.

In case it might be useful to anyone else, and so I can keep track of it myself, in addition to the image above I’m also posting a pdf version as well as Full-overview.vue here, with the strong caveat that it is very much a work in progress.

Mitosis resources

Our assignments for natural world usually combine some reading and some type of activity, but all the short video clips available online are a great resource, so I’ve been adding them to the studyguides as I find them.

The above two-minute, cell division video is a great example. Mitosis is a process, so it makes a lot of sense showing it as an animation, rather than discrete pictures in a figure. The video makes deciphering what’s going on in the diagram in the textbook a whole lot easier to understand, while the textbook diagram fills in the detail so the whole thing makes more sense.

There are also a number of useful interactive animations online. John Kyrk’s is quite nice. I like how the CellsAlive animal cell mitosis page lets you step through each frame in the animation.

Anaphase_IF — Anaphase: Lengthening microtubules push the two sets of chromosomes further apart. (from Wikipedia)

Wikipedia, as is so often the case, also has some nice images.

Spore: Lamarkian in the subtexts

During our last immersion, one of my students brought in the computer game, Spore. Although the game subtly indicates that it’s your progeny that gains evolutionary advances, the fact that you get to choose what you want (extra horns, poison sacks), and the fact that you can see yourself (or do I mean your creature) evolve on the screen, really smacks of Lamarckism. While it’s appealing to think, like Lamark, that you can pass on traits gained during your lifetime to your kids, despite some fascinating new research, that’s just not how evolution works.

Evolution is not directed by the organism but by their environment. In a population of organisms of any particular species there is going to be some variability due to simple, random genetic mutation. Some lucky members of the species might have a mutation that makes their muscles better at burning oxygen during sprints, making them able to run faster to get away from the lions. So they survive and pass their genes on, with their genetic mutation. Of course, if lions become extinct (disease maybe) then this trait may no longer be beneficial and something else, like maybe intelligence, would be selected for.

The game can capture your interest, however, so I’ve asked the student who brought in the game to come up with a presentation explaining why it would be useful to have the game in the classroom. I am, after all, not instinctively opposed to using computer games in class. I’m really curious to see what this game looks like from the student’s point of view.