Montessori Philosophy – Page 5

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.

Cognitive science and math for pre-schoolers

There is an interesting article in the New York Times on cognitive neuroscience is showing that pre-schoolers are capable of learning mathematical concepts. How novel. The third paragraph:

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

This timescale coincides with Angeline Lillard’s observations in Montessori: The Science behind the Genius (Lillard, 2005) about how constructivist approaches to teaching, like Montessori’s, were devalued and derogated because the more factory-like approaches were seen as more efficient during a time when the marvels of the industrial revolution were continuously impressing. This general theory, of course, may or may not be related to the theory of teaching specific concepts like math. It is disappointing that the references to such a broad statement are not provided in the article.

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.