Pedagogy – Page 11 – Montessori Muddle

The future of education?

The innate will to learn is the basic premise of the Montessori philosophy. So we emphasize giving students the freedom to explore the Montessori works, and allow them the time an space to teach each other, rather than intervening all the time. I know I find it hard to shut up sometimes and let them make the obvious mistakes, but they learn so much better that way.

Sugata Mitra wondered what would happen if you gave a computer to bunch of developing-world kids and let them use it as they would. As with Montessori, it turns out that the kids learn a lot, especially because they end up teaching each other.

Mitra’s TED talk is quite interesting in that it’s amazing just how much students will learn from a computer, even if unmediated by a teacher, if you just let them at it. Based on this work, he wants to add more computers and more unmediated spaces, all around the world. I think it’s a good idea.

In middle school we don’t have all the Montessori works students use in pre-Kindergarten through Upper Elementary. Students and their studies are getting more abstract. Instead, there are lots of individual and group projects. I like to view it as a set of apprenticeships: learn to be a scientist, learn to be an author, learn to be a geographer, and so on. One of the key questions I juggle is how “real” should their projects be. Should I give them a basic assignment and have them figure out the questions on their own, or should I point them toward specific resources, like chapters in the textbook. The answer is somewhere in between, but there is a constant tension. I also just try to mix it up a bit.

At any rate, Mitra’s work is interesting and I think its long-term results will probably affect the way we teach Montessori middle schools.

Schools kill creativity

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’re not going to be creative. But when do we give kids the chance to be wrong. Ken Robinson’s argument in this TED talk, is that schools are designed to produce workers good at automatic tasks and bad at creative, heuristic ones. This may have worked well during the industrial revolution, but is painfully deficient in the modern world. It’s the same argument made by Daniel Pink in Drive.

Robinson is a most entertaining speaker, so the presentation is a joy to watch. It’s a great reminder that we need to foster some risk-taking, and students need to know that sometimes the ultimate consequence of failure is learning.

Rewards and motivation

… tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation.
— Desi et al., 1999.

Edward Deci (and others) published a paper (pdf) in 1999 that analyzed a whole bunch of earlier studies on how extrinsic rewards affect motivation. Their conclusion is that rewards are generally bad because rewards prevent people from learning how to motivate themselves.

… the primary negative effect of rewards is that they tend to forestall self-regulation. In other words, [expectation of rewards] undermine people’s taking responsibility for motivating or regulating themselves
— Desi et al., 1999.

So while they may work in the short term, rewards do long-term damage.

When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short term and opt for controlling people’s behavior, they may be having a substantially negative long-term effect.
— Desi et al., 1999.

They also find that rewards can push you into a negative feedback loop, because to properly administer a reward you usually need increased monitoring and you produce more competition. Both of these undermine intrinsic motivation so you’re left with using more extrinsic rewards. (think also of high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind).

So what to do? Desi et al. report that:

intrinsic motivation … requires environmental supports. …the necessary supports are opportunities to satisfy the innate needs for competence and self-determination.

(Note: I found out about this article while reading Daniel Pink’s, Drive).

Drive: How to exploit intrinsic motivation.

So my holiday present from the Head of School was Daniel Pink’s 2009 book, Drive. I’m much happier reading scientific papers and books based directly on them, like Lillards’ Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, than mass-market, self-help publications, but I’m supposed to get through it so we can have a discussion during our inservice. However, since I’d read a favorable review of the book last April I’m willing to give this one a chance, despite the desperate lack of information on the back and the sad pandering to business-minded readers in the blurb on the inside cover.

My antipathy toward self-help books, is based largely, I think, on the possibly erroneous belief that these books tend to be anecdotal, unsupported by science, or even to start with a scientific basis (however poorly understood) and stretch it into wonderful realms of possibility where it was never meant to go.

I also find it hard to credit books that tend to be awfully culture-specific. The worst ones come from certain myopic cultural niches that I find it hard to identify with. Even the stuff that based on rigorous science (as rigorous as far as the social sciences can be at least) tend to be based on the sub-population within the scientists’ easiest reach: WEIRD people from Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies.

Anyway, I’m in the middle of chapter one, and the book is actually quite good. Drive is well written for a general audience, so it lacks the concision that would make me happier; I’m already familiar with quite a bit about what he writes, and I’m a little crunched for time this break. The science so far is still based mostly on WEIRD people (though the first studies were done with other primates), but at least it’s an easy read.

Dinner and a Show

At the end of each year, the Middle School puts on Dinner and a Show. As has become traditional, the students performed a play for the Show, and, for dinner, this year they did a Mediterranean themed meal: lasagna, baklava and some sort of cherry drink. The overwhelming feedback from the not necessarily impartial audience, of family members and faculty, seems to be that food and performance were quite a success. And, I have to say, the same applies from my point of view as well. The students did a great job putting everything together and pulling off the performance.

We usually work on Dinner and a Show for the entire second cycle. The first five weeks revolve around choosing the play, learning lines, and planning the meal. Our director, for the second year running, Ms. Jessica Parker, did a wonderful job with the adaptation, staging and working with the kids.

I was extremely lucky this year that I had two students who were really interested in the project. One, an eight grader, had been planning on taking charge since last year. The other, a seventh grader, really wanted to do the food. What was really nice was that, most of the time, they were the ones pushing me to get stuff done.

I’d ask questions like, “Have you started on the playbill yet?”

“Yes,” they’d reply, with exaggerated patience, “We’re still waiting for you to help with the images.”

The sixth week of the cycle, our immersion week, was dedicated entirely to the event; lots of practicing and food preparation. That’s when the students really shone. We had some help making the baklava (thanks Dr. Jen), but the next day, which was spent assembling two (and eventually three) types of lasagna, I only had a couple queries about what to use to boil water for the pasta (an electrical skillet works fairly well).

Everyone had a part in the play, but were also involved in setting things up. Apart from the cooks, there were separate crews for lighting and the backdrops. Once the crews got going, I spent most of my time staying out of the way. While I’d so like to jump in and help with everything, this is the way I think the middle school should work. I count this week as a really good one.

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?

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:

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.