The Montessori Method

Sometimes ideas seem to follow me.  It's like I'm walking down a sidewalk and I look over my shoulder and I see the idea dart behind a tree.  Then I walk a little further, still feeling like I'm being watched, and I zip around to try and catch the stalker off guard.  When lo and behold, I face forward and I see the idea standing right in front of me, staring right at me.  

In this case, the idea that has been shadowing me for years now is the Montessori method.  I didn't realize it was following me until a recent visit to see my nieces in Danville, KY.

My brother asked if I wanted to drop my niece off at school, Danville Montessori school.  I agreed because a friend of mine from Harvard was a headmaster of a Japanese Montessori school.  He piqued my interest in the Montessori method, and I wanted to learn more.

I briefly observed my niece, as she skedaddled out of the car and began her morning routine at the Danville Montessori school.  Back at my brother's house, my sister in law showed me a video from the school's facebook page.

In the video, a boy - who could not have been more than six years old - rattled off answers to very complex mathematical questions.  The teacher asked the boy, "What is the square root of four?" 

"Two."

"What is the square root of 16?"

"Four."

On and on this went, until the teacher asked the boy, "How do you know this?"  The boy replied, "I've done it," as if he were a Mayan inventing mathematical concepts for the first time in human history.

When I returned home to Chicago, I picked up a book that had been collecting dust on my shelf for quite some time: Montessori.  A Modern Approach.  There are two important ideas from the book that I have spent a great deal of time thinking about.

First, Montessori believed that children have a natural curiosity to solve puzzles and require no incentive for doing so.  In fact, a child can be so insulted by the mere presentation of an incentive that the child averts tasks with incentives.  The author of the book cites research from H.F. Harlow, who found, "...In three separate studies...monkeys can and do learn to work puzzles when no motivation has been offered other the presentation of the puzzle itself."  The point here being that if monkey's natural drive is to solve puzzles, then surely it is a homo sapient tendency even more so.

Secondly, I have spent a lot of time thinking about Montessori's idea of 'control for error materials'.  This is a fancy term for educational materials that are error proof by design.  In other words, there is only one way to use the materials correctly.  For instance, think of the popular child's toy with a wooden platform with holes punched in the shape of a star, a circle, and a rectangle.  The toy comes with wooden cut outs of the shapes, and there is only one correct way to place the shapes in the cut out holes.  According to Montessori, most educational materials should be designed in this manner, so a child can work on the puzzle without having to stop and ask the teacher, "Did I do this correctly?"

These two ideas have already impacted my philosophy of educational best practices, and I'm finding myself wondering how I use these ideas in a more tangible way.  I can't rightly say to teachers I supervise, "Your lesson should include more control for error tasks."  I would get a blank stare.

I'm not looking to become a Montessori teacher or principal, but I am looking to use what I know about best practices to train my staff.  Montessori gurus, please respond with ideas.

Lillard, P. P. (1972). Montessori, a modern approach. New York: Schocken Books.

How to Minimize Suspensions and Increase Student Achievement

Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85%

I applaud the alternative discipline policy principal Jim Sporleder uses at Lincoln High.  According to the article, this is how he handles school discipline issues:

"A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension. Instead, Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly:

 'Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?' He gets even more specific: 'You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?'"

All too often, principals and teachers make the mistake of giving students a firm lecture when they are sent to the principal's office for misbehavior.  Those conversations, which are often counterproductive, often go something like this:

Principal:  What did you do?
Student:  I told my teacher to F*** off.
Principal:  That is not how you speak to an adult.  What makes you think you can act like that in school?  I'm going to give you a suspension for that inappropriate behavior.  This is unbelievable.  I will not tolerate this nonsense in my school.  Your teachers are here to help you, and in return you treat them like this?  It's shameful.  Get up there an apologize to that teacher right now, do you hear me?

So on and so forth.  Usually, the adult does most of the talking; the student - meanwhile - pretends to listen; the adult administers the punishment; and the student gets sent home having learned nothing, bitter and resentful towards school officials.  I have reacted this way many times myself, and in most cases it does more harm than good.

In contrast, Lincoln High uses techniques documented in Teaching with Love and Logic and Restorative Justice online.  These techniques, in essence, focus on rebuilding broken relationships - whether that be between two students who got in a fight or a student who swore at a teacher - instead of focusing on what punishment to administer.  Although more research needs to be done to determine how effective these practices are, in my own work as a school administrator I have seen a lot of success.

The following video documents these strategies in action:

The Death and Life of the Great American School System - A Chilling Tale

“When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do, sir?”¹

-John Maynard

If someone asked me, “What one book should I read if I want to change the direction of public education in this country?”  The answer is simple:  Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System:  How Testing and Choice Are UnderminingEducation.  It is – dare I say – as frightening as a Stephen King novel, and as thrilling as a Jason Bourne Movie. 

Diane Ravitch worked as a counselor to Lamar Alexander, George H.W. Bush’s secretary of Education.  She was an instrumental advocate for high-stakes testing and school choice, originally in favor of market-based principles as accountability measures for schools (ie. giving money to schools that achieve and dissolving schools that fail on high-stakes test). 

That is how we run our economy; why not apply the same principles to schooling? 

In theory the idea may make sense; however, in reality, “…test-based accountability led to score inflation, to gaming the system, and to behaviors that undermined the value of the scores”  (Ravitch, 2010).  For instance, she writes how New York City inflated test scores for political reasons by lowering the passing threshold on the high-stakes test from year to year so it appeared as if NYC students were improving.  Moreover, she writes about Atlanta and Washington D.C. where cheating on high-stakes testing was rampant arguably due to perverse pressure on teachers and administration to raise test scores. 

In essence, this book challenges the myth the high-stakes testing and school choice lead to student achievement, citing study after study that rejects that claim and demystifying studies that support that claim.  For example, she cites Stanford University’s study - the most comprehensive study of charter schools to date - that says that states 17% of charter schools provide superior education, about 50% are no different than neighborhood public schools, and 37% provide inferior education (2009).  In contrast, Finland, one of the most successful international school systems, abolished high-stakes testing and school choice years ago, and they are outperforming the United States in every category on the only international comparative test (Sahlberg, 2011).   

The facts, Ravitch argues, reveals the current state of the American Public Schools is troublesome at best and in disrepair at worst.  Only time will tell.  In light of the evidence she presented in her book, I am skeptical of the current trajectory of school reform in this country, and I am hopeful that we change course.

Works Cited:

1.  Alfred L.  Malabre Jr., Lost Prophets:  An Insider’s History of the Modern Economists (Boston:  Harvard Business School Press, 1994), 220.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes (2009). Multiple Choice: Charter school performance in 16 states. Palo Alto, CA Stanford University. http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf

Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great american school system : How testing and choice are undermining education. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Sahlberg, P., & Hargreaves, A. (2011). Finnish lessons : What can the world learn from educational change in finland?. New York: Teachers College Press.

Reform & Order - School Reform Short Film

Kay Merseth is something of an icon at Harvard Graduate School of Education.  My friends and I were determined to make the best damn final project for her course.  Did we achieve our goal?  That jury is still out.  But the movie is online!

I Design the School of the Future

It is a crisp fall morning at The New School High.  One third of the student population is gone.  Not missing – just gone.  Like a baker flicking flakes of sugar over a delectable dessert, one third of New School High high-schoolers are sprinkled around the globe, in home-stays and in schools in countries like India, China, Vietnam, and Peru.  Those students are involved in an ongoing cultural project in their three-month hiatus from New School High – writing blogs about their cultural experiences and creating the cultural projects they will showcase in May at the spring project exhibition.  The rest of the student body is on The New School High campus, walking amicably through the glass entrance doors, ready to work on their projects .  

 

As they enter, they see the open space that is unique to New School High.  About the size of a football field, the space looks more like a modern library or a roman atrium.  On the western facing wall, there are three long rows of Apple desktops where students sit.  On the eastern facing wall there are rows of bright wooden tables, where students work with their materials spread out in front of them.  In the back corner of the building, there is a large reading/meeting area, filled with beanbags and plush burgundy leather chairs.  And on the far back wall of the open-space there is a large u-shaped table where some students eat; cooks busily move about the inside of the U, serving oatmeal and fresh fruit to the students.  Some students work while they eat, others sit beside classmates at the oversize family style table and converse.  Beside the large u-shaped kitchen table, there are teacher offices.  They are open space cubicles, designed so that three to four teachers work in one space, and students can see them working.  

           

Along the base of the glass roof of the building, there is a long narrow scrolling screen with red and green letters, like the one at the New York Stock exchange.  It runs the length of the school and can be seen from anywhere in the atrium.  At 10 AM, Javier Mendez and Jonathan Black’s names scroll across the screen.  They know what this means; it is time for their weekly assessment meeting.  

           

They take out their laptops and open the movie editing application.  Javier and Jonathan have always been movie buffs.  So they chose to spend their combined craftsman allowance – a chuck of money each student gets from the school to hire a master craftsman – to hire a local documentary producer to be their teacher.  Susan - the documentary filmmaker they hired – Arthur – one of the many full time core content teachers – and Javier and Jonathan sit together at a large wooden table to analyze the work.  They watch a portion of the movie Jonathan and Javier have finished, and they critique the boy’s individual accompanying essays on ‘The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking’.  Afterwards, Susan and Arthur discuss the movie and the essays with them; they ask questions; pose suggestions; field questions; and finally grade them according to the rubrics.  Every project at New School High has three rubrics: one to grade the project; the second to grade the accompanying Math and English core content work; and the third to grade to grade the group dynamics.  The core content teacher and the master craftsman grade the rubrics together on a weekly basis.  The final rubrics are graded on the day of the spring exhibition.

           

Susan and Arthur finish grading, and they leave to file the grades in a computer system.  Other names of students scroll across the screen, and the process continues, over and over again so that students meet with their craftsman and core content teachers once a week.  

           

At the center of the atrium, there is a large white cube, each side 4 feet tall and wide.  As students encounter problems or questions that they cannot find answers to on the internet, they stick post it notes on the white cube.  Every 20 minutes, a teacher walks by the cube and pulls off the post it notes.  The principal then makes an announcement inviting the student/s who asked the question to meet with a teacher in a designated area.  The principal also invites anyone who is interested in the question meet as well.  

           

As students need, they stop working and take a lunch break.  They head to the back kitchen table, and are served a healthy lunch, often prepared by other students.  And so the hours pass, and the official ‘school-day’ comes to a close.  It’s 2:30, which means it is clean up time.  The words ‘clean-up time’ scroll across the screen at the top of the atrium.  For 20 minutes, all students and teachers stop working on their projects; they grab their assigned tools from the closets and begin sweeping, vacuuming scrubbing, raking, mowing, gardening, and weeding.  Once the cleaning is complete, the day is done.  Some students and teachers head home, and others stay at school to work, to participate in a club, or to play an organized school sport.  This is a day in the life of a New School High student.

           

The days and weeks go by, each student working on his or her project and breaking when he or she wants to eat.  It runs like clockwork and leads up to the days of the spring exhibition.  On these days the work areas are pushed to the back of the atrium, and a stage is constructed - fully equipped with visual, audio, and lighting features to make the presentations an interactive experience.  Then the presentations begin.  Presenters are grouped together based on project categorization: engineering, math, and science projects in the morning, humanities and world travel projects in the afternoons, and arts and crafts projects in the evenings.  The presentations take several days, but it feels like the hours pass by quickly like a brisk fall wind; and student’s anticipation fuels the burning excitement around the spring exhibition.

             

After each presentation, judges, content teachers, and craftsman teachers meet to calculate a grade.  Grades are calculated not according to the average grade of all assignments, but rather they are calculated based on the how much evidence of learning and evolution occurred from the projects inception to the projects finish.  Then the grade is calculated and given to the students.

           

After the exhibition days end, students start a new project.  With the help of their content teachers and peers, they begin brainstorming the next project, begin to plan their next overseas trip, and begin the process of starting anew.

The Nobel Prize for Education Goes to...High Tech High

In the education world, the equivalent of the 'Nobel Prize' is something called the McGraw Prize.  It is awarded annually to a few living recepients who are deemed to have made the biggest contribution to the field of education.

My friend sent me a link to a youtube video to one of 2011's McGraw winners...Larry Rosenstock.

Picture of High Tech High Hallway

He created a charter school in San Diego called 'High Tech High', and it has exploded in the ten years since it's founding.  Larry Rosenstock describes his model as a liberal arts school in disguise, focusing on personalization, adult world connections, a common intellectual mission, and teacher's as designers. 

Seems interesting.  Very different from KIPP and many TFA models, which in my opinion, don't focus on teacher's as designers, but focus on standardized tests as designers.