Montessori Muddle – Page 182 – Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View

Real Play, and the ideal playground

Jungle play area at the Skudeneshavn Primary School in Karmøy on the west coast of Norway.

What I really like about the Skudeneshavn Primary School playground in Karmøy, Norway is the sheer variety of things available for the students to do (hat tip to Mary Cour). I also like the philosophy. Asbjørn Flemmen’s research on the social and motor skills benefits of play, true children’s play, is the key guiding principle behind the design of the playground. His philosophy is that:

Real play is a spontaneous and social activity, dependent upon its environment, where interaction takes place through extensive use of gross-motor movement. – Flemmen (2009)

Because it is spontaneous, real play is also intrinsically driven, coming from children’s innate motivation. Flemmen view of the role of grown-up’s is the same as Montessori’s, to direct the environment. He draws a clear distinction between the real play of children’s culture and the competitive sports that typify adult culture (Flemmen, 2009), where behavior is directed by the adults.

The Skudeneshavn playground embodies these principles by providing a variety of opportunity to challenge all skill levels and interests, and having materials that attract the interest of their students. Indeed, to stimulate interest, a key part of the playground design is to have “activities the children can not yet master and do not dare to do so”.

17b — Jungle area. Students have the opportunity to take risks.

Real play also needs an environment that stimulates social interaction (again very Montessori), and Flemmen’s approach to conflict resolution is the let the kids sort it out. This is somewhat controversial, especially when you consider the possibility of bullying, yet there is some evidence that this approach works. The variety of the activities available make it so that the children are seldom bored.

Flemmen has an interesting chapter in the book, “Several Perspectives on Children’s Play: Scientific Reflections for Practitioners” (Chapter 11). I also find his table comparing children’s play to adult sports to be a very useful template for considering how to organize physical education.

Circadian rhythms and a nature deficit

I remain fascinated by the Brazilian study that found that kids living in homes without electricity did not have the same sleep deprivation issues as those with electricity. I thought of it again recently when I ran across the term “nature-deficit disorder” in Oak Hill Montessori school’s newsletter.

Unstructured nature time is so important because children live through their senses. When they are right there in the forest, they are getting a primary multi-sensory experience of nature as opposed to the secondary, often distorted, dual-sensory view presented by TV. – Daniels, 2009 (p. 4)

The idea of nature-deficit disorder comes from the book “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv. Written in 2005 and updated in 2008 with a bunch of practical things you can do to change things, Louv’s book advocates for more time in nature because, “a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature.” Not only does it affect our individual health, but directly experiencing nature also helps increase environmental awareness (which ties into the Montessori peace curriculum). Louv argues that children have a fundamental right to walk in the woods:

Science sheds light on the measurable consequences of introducing children to nature; studies pointing to health and cognition benefits are immediate and concrete. We also need to articulate the underlying “first principle”—one that emerges not only from what science can prove, but also from what it cannot fully reveal; one that resists codification because it is so elemental: a meaningful connection to the natural world is fundamental to our survival and spirit, as individuals and as a species. Louv (2009)

I can’t say I disagree very much with this diagnosis. My adolescents are too often opting for technology rather than being outside, especially if it’s in nature. This is one reason my students are building the nature trail. The trail has been coming along slowly though, but the seasons are changing and we’ll spend more time outside in the warmer weather. The timing is also nice because we’ve just finished covering simple machines in physics. There are logs and junk to be moved and saplings to be cleared.

Note: Louv has a long list of links to print and broadcast articles on the whole “nature-deficit disorder” concept.

Praise and rewards

Looking through the Greater Good Science Center‘s blog post on how to raise kind children, I was struck, as I usually am, by the somewhat counter-intuitive finding that we should not reward good behavior (helping in this instance).

Very young children who receive material rewards for helping others become less likely to help in the future compared with toddlers who only receive verbal praise or receive no reward at all. This research suggests that even the youngest children are intrinsically motivated to be kind, and that extrinsic rewards can undermine this tendency. – Carter (2010)

While I have not yet looked to see if there is any direct research on this topic with regards to adolescence, this is part of the Montessori philosophy. Lillard (2007; Ch. 5) has an entire chapter on Extrinsic Rewards and Motivation that gets to the same point. She cites the research that gets to the specific point that extrinsic rewards, rewards that come from the outside such as praise, tend to demotivate once the rewards are removed.

Engaging in a well-liked activity with the expectations of a reward led to reduced creativity during that activity and to decreased voluntary participation in that activity later. (Lepper et. al., 1973) in Lillard (2007; Ch. 5)

Rewards have negative effects when they are clearly stated, expected, and tangible; read this book and you’ll get $5; or do this work and you will get better grades. However, rewards can work if you’re dealing with subjects that students find uninteresting and there is a very clearly specified set of steps that they can learn by rote.

“[R]ewards are often effective at the moment of their offering, so if there are no long-term goals, rewards help without causing harm down the road.” Lillard (2007; p. 157)

Rewards can help with basic learning, like memorizing facts, but intrinsic motivation is essential for tasks that require higher-level more creative thinking.

I try to praise or give tangible rewards very rarely, though it is often hard. Students look for praise sometimes (and sometimes for the oddest things), so when I do complement I try to use what Carter calls growth-mindset praise and say something like, “See, practice really pays off.” Praise the effort, not some intrinsic value the students have.

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.

Sleep makes us better people

In researching the benefits of sleep to assist a student interested in sleep deprivation, I came across the work of Matthew Walker from UC Berkley. His papers have some rather intriguing titles. One of them (Walker and van der Helm, 2009), called “Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing” finds that lack of sleep seems to result in us retaining more negative memories and emotions, and reduces our ability to act rationally (Yoo et al., 2007):

[S]tudies indicate that prior sleep loss significantly impairs the ability for effective next-day learning of new experiences across numerous species. Furthermore, sleep loss appears to disrupt the learning of different affective categories to varying extents, potentially creating an imbalance in negative emotional memory dominance. – Walker and van der Helm, (2009)

Walker’s also synthesized the current research on sleep and finds sleep is important in other types of memory as well. During sleep we organize information in our brains, finding context for the data we absorbed while awake, which is why we remember things better after we sleep.

[S]leep serves a … role in memory processing that moves far beyond the consolidation and strengthening of individual memories and, instead, aims to intelligently assimilate and generalize these details offline. – Walker (2009)

Indeed, organizing information into mental schemes is one of the keys to learning.

Walker’s bibliography is a treasure trove of information about research on the affects of sleep on our emotional and intellectual well being. These articles will, however, probably need a lot of translation for the typical middle schooler. For that reason, using the press reports on this work would be a much better alternative for students.

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.