Category: Pedagogy

Leadership and competitive games

“Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be.”
–Jimmy Johnson

As much as I want to offer my students near-autonomy for at least a small part of the day, I am finding it necessary to reinforce the lessons of the classroom during PE. Physical education is an important part of a holistic education not just for the fact that healthy bodies lead to healthy minds, but because it offers another domain for students to develop their leadership skills.

I’ve found that not everyone who is great in the classroom will be great on the playing field, so students who are often learning from their peers when they’re inside, get a chance to teach and lead others. Often however, because they are unused to it, they need a little guidance to recognize the reversal of roles.

It is also interesting to note that some students who are great at peer-teaching the academics can get really riled up on the field and loose all sense of perspective, forgetting those carefully taught collaboration skills. This is particularly true when we play competitive games and they have to balance competition and collaboration. Fortunately, there is a well established term (even if not gender neutral) that sums up appropriate behavior in competition, sportsmanship.

Kindness, and the science for raising happy kids

There has recently been quite a bit of scientific research on the evolutionary benefits of kindness. This article (found via onegoodmove.org) summarizes some of the work quite nicely. Again the theme is reciprocity; when we are kind to others, others tend to do more for us:

“The findings suggest that anyone who acts only in his or her narrow self-interest will be shunned, disrespected, even hated,” Willer said. “But those who behave generously with others are held in high esteem by their peers and thus rise in status.” – Anwar (2010)

Science for raising happy kids blog.

The article links to UC Berkley’s Greater Good Science Center and in particular, their Science for Raising Happy Kids website. Despite the somewhat Orewellian name (thanks Simon Pegg), the website has a lot of good information and a very good blog. I particularly liked a recent post by Christine Carter on Five Ways to Raise Kind Children. What she proposes aligns very much the Montessori philosophy.

PBS’s Inside the Teenage Brain is online (for free)

The full FRONTLINE documentary, Inside the Teenage Brain can be found online at PBS’s website. PBS has an entire website dedicated to the documentary which includes transcripts of interviews with neuro and cognitive scientists.

This is an excellent program (and website) that really delves into a lot that is counter-intuitive about adolescents. It is strongly recommended for both teachers and students, because it goes into the fundamental question of why your teens seem like aliens. Indeed, it describes the type of research upon which the Montessori Middle School program is based.

Naps

Image by Lewis Collard, via Wikimedia Commons

We take half an hour each day, usually just after lunch, for personal reflection. Practicing metacognition. Some students have used the time for quick naps, and I’ve been thinking about how useful this is, or if the time might be used more effectively.

On one hand students wake up a little refreshed, and given the sleep deficit many adolescents have it’s not surprising that they need a little extra. In fact, I found one study (Gradisar et. al., 2008) that found that quite a number of adolescents catch up on sleep by napping during the week (many nap 4 times a week for around 16 hours). And studies with adults have found that naps help you learn. A recent USA Today article on the work of Matthew Walker reports:

sleep clears the brain’s short-term memory storage to make room for new learning. – USA Today (2010)

On the other hand, students need practice with introspection. I believe it’s one of the most important skills they can learn by practice.

Ultimately, I don’t have a problem with students napping during Personal World, as long as they don’t overdo it. And if they do overdo it, it may well be an indication that they need to work more on their sleep cycles at home.

Rising bread

Yesterday, one of our experimental loaves of bread failed to rise, so re-tried it today and had a discussion about all the things we can do encourage it to rise. Since yeast is an organism, and we talked about the role of yeast in baking bread yesterday, this was a chance for the students to take what they’d learned and extrapolate into a new situation.

These types of situations pop up all the time in the student run business, especially when we try something new. It gets to the critical thinking skills adolescents need to practice. It is the reason Maria Montessori advocated for a boarding house middle school that ran a business. It is one of the reasons I insist that we start at least one new business every year in addition to our core pizza business.

Baking bread; the yeast question

Although I’m pretty sure I’d explained this before, I had a student ask me today what makes the bread rise. He’d been combining the ingredients to make bread for the student run business with a rather thoughtful look on his face. So I told him that yeast is a fungus that “eats” the sugar in the honey and “releases” carbon dioxide bubbles, which get trapped in the dough causing the bread to rise.

I could see the look of disgust racing across his face at the mention of fungi, so I asked, “Would you like to look at it?” He did, and he was not the only one. So after lunch I broke out the microscope, which we have not used much this year since we’re doing the physical sciences this year. A slide, a cover slip, a drop of the residue from the glass jar we used to mix the liquids for the bread, a quick (so very quick) demonstration of how to use the microscope and whallah.

Under 10 times magnification you could see hundreds of cells moving across the field of view. The students were impressed by how many there were. Under 40 times magnification you begin to see cell structures.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, but yeast under the 40x microscope objective looks pretty similar.

We’ll look at yeast again next year when we’re focusing on the life sciences, but when I think of the Montessori axioms that the role of the teacher is to prepare the environment and to follow the child, I think of situations like this. At this time, in this place, after kneading dough for half a year, the student asked the question, and everything was ready for him to answer the that question and whet his appetite for more.

Montessori secondary and the university

I’ve been thinking recently about the similarities I’ve observed between Montessori Middle and High Schools and liberal arts education at the university level. Especially when compared to a traditional secondary education the two are remarkably similar. Two that stand out are the variety of choice for the students to tailor their own learning, and lots of responsibility given to the student to use their time and resources effectively. The Montessori experience should be really beneficial in college, but that just leaves the little matter of High School.

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, has written quite a bit about the failure of the traditional high school in the “rich world”.

[I]n secondary schools there is a demand for uniformity and regulation of behavior that results in less autonomy and the dumbing down of academic expectations – Botstein (2008).

Botstein argues for universities taking over high schools because they have credibility as educational institutions and because the structure of secondary education in the U.S., with rapid turnover of school boards and superintendents, is a failed model. One fundamental problem that Botstein and others such as Angeline Lillard identify is that the traditional educational is based on a factory style model. Students are fed through the assembly line and those who do not, or can not, conform to the necessary automation get rejected by the system. This model co-evolved with the industrial revolution when the power of the factories and efficiency were novel marvels to behold.

To a degree the education factory worked well in the past, providing the workers for the industries at the time, and certainly, for a while, helped rapidly raise educational levels and productivity. Yet as more and more rote jobs are now being automated, the educational premium is now on creativity. Where technology takes the place of the assembly line worker it also makes it easier and cheaper for the individual inventor or creator.

Personally, when assessing high schools my students go on to, the main thing I look for is the degree of independence they offer their students. Hemmed in by the needs of standardized testing and curriculum standards, it is too rare that students get the opportunities to follow their passions. My own teaching philosophy has also evolved. I’ve come to the conclusion that by the time my students graduate my Middle School they should be the type of independent learners who would succeed in the college environment (and hopefully in the world). That type of independence also means that they also have to tools to deal with anything that comes up in high school, even if they have to work around the system.

A reason to draw

MILTON GLASER DRAWS & LECTURES from C. Coy on Vimeo.

Why do we use our hands? Milton Glaser (above) uses his to think, and he cites Frank Wilson who argues that the hand and the brain are so connected as to be a single almost indistinguishable system. In fact, Wilson extrapolates this connection to education where, he makes the arguement, “less rigid more individualized approach to education will yield a student with a unified body and mind” (according to The New Yorker, 1998).

“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand” – Robertson Davies in The Cornish Trilogy

Drawing is thinking for some people at least. Perhaps that’s one of the things that defines kinesthetic learners? It certainly is something to bear in mind when designing and implementing the curriculum. Teachers tend to use teaching methods that fit their learning styles, so it is important to bear in mind we will have a variety of students. It’s certainly something about which I have to keep reminding.

It is also important to remember that all students benefit from experiences with different modes of learning. Students, especially adolescents whose brains are rapidly developing new neural pathways and pruning others, need to experience variety, because once we are set in our ways, it becomes a lot harder to learn new tricks.

This is where preparing the environment becomes so important. We want student to have choices, but we want them to try new things, and sometimes these two objectives conflict. The video above does make a persuasive argument to me about why we should draw and practice drawing. Perhaps it will do the same for our kids.