Nationally recognized for her solo choreography and performances by age 18, Mary Lynn Lewark's passion for dance, creativity and education fueled her desire to build a dance school. Since founding Between the Bones in 1996, she has produced and directed 11 original productions. Today, Mary Lynn continues to generate new and innovative dance experiences for her students and faculty. Her life experiences as a dance artist and educator – as well as mother to Sydney, Ellery and Lucy - bring a joyous “break the mold” dance curriculum to Between the Bones.
How did you get into dance instruction?
I have been a dancer most of my life. By the age of 18 I had my share of dance injuries. I had been teaching dance and got my degree in education. My first teaching job was at an Expeditionary Learning School, where I taught Kindergarten through 2nd grade for three years. I was struck at how the way the school is set up so that everyone wins and everyone learns. It is very collaborative rather than competitive. Yet, typically in dance it is very competitive and is designed to ensure that only the best participate. When I opened up my dance school I wanted to build on the idea formed in Expeditionary Learning that dancing, too, could be collaborative and inclusive and yet still competitive with other programs. I like the idea of working thematically and then building backwards; thinking about what you want a dancer to be in the end– expressive, graceful, talented and skilled, athletic, healthy and working backwards to put elements in place to allow them to achieve just that.
I understand you take an unconventional approach to dance instruction in that you teach in a holistic way? Can you describe that?
What is unique about our school is the somatic nature of it using the Feldenkrais philosophy. Somatic education has many forms but they lend themselves to teaching people how to use their bodies well. The Feldenkrais Method teaches possibilities of movement, through experience rather than imitation. Over the last ten years I have worked with Feldenkrais Practitioner Bethany Cobb applying the Method to our dance education. Typically you get to Feldenkrais only after an injury or as you get older. That is how I found it! But I thought, why wait for that? Including Feldenkrais in our dance curriculum builds a foundation along the way for knowing and understanding our bodies, when to push, when to listen and how to reduce the risk of injury.
What is Feldenkrais and how does it benefit people?
Moshe Feldenkrais is the man who originated it as a form of rehabilitating his self. I look at it as a constructivist model for learning. Its philosophy is to set up a situation for learning without telling the students what they will learn. Dancing is usually about imitation and this is the opposite. It is designed to encourage an internal knowing. It helps to make people to become more aware of their bodies and helps to reduce the risk of injury by breaking down movement so that learning can occur. These days we see a lot of people who are much less coordinated and less flexible. It is likely a result of our way of living, where we don’t climb trees or run, our play is restricted. No one comes in perfect. We all have missed developmental milestones, like crossing over the mid-line, right and left coordination, etc. Dance and Feldenkrais help to achieve these.
What is the mission of Between the Bones?
It is to provide a balanced dance education. What I mean by that is we want to balance strength with softness; technique with expression; skills with self-awareness. By balancing each aspect of dance with its opposite the kids become whole people, whole dancers.
How does Between the Bones help students grow, learn and succeed outside of the studio or off the stage?
Dance in general gives body awareness and confidence. You are the ultimate multi-tasker as a dancer – you have to be present yet think ahead. You have to do a difficult move with great concentration yet express a sense of ease or something else. It takes tremendous self-control and elegance. You have to be able to learn quickly. Dance students make great problem solvers. When you make a mistake on stage you have to be able to deal with that and move on. You don’t know exactly what is going to happen next, so you have to be open to it. Dancing in a performance will help build skills in any field. It helps with both process and product and encourages intellectual curiosity and interest.
The way you integrate dance with other related topics, like nutrition, classic literature, and history brings these lessons alive for your students. Describe how dance can make other subjects meaningful.
I am biased but I believe you could learn everything through dance! When you are researching before a dance performance, you look into the time periods and observe why they are wearing what they are wearing. You get a look at the politics and religious values of that time while preparing for the dance. When we did Alice in Wonderland we explored that period of time and talked a lot about the author, the historical time frame, and did a lot of critical thinking and questioning in preparation for the performance to really understand what we were going to be doing and telling.
I appreciate that you encourage students of all body types to dance. Please tell me about your philosophy in that regard.
Modern dance and jazz are particularly more accepting of bodies of all types. The goal is to be healthy and in shape and it is a challenge to balance healthy with rigorous. The dancing we do requires skill and discipline. We’ve had body types of all kinds and many on the too thin side. It is helpful if they get caught up in dance and find it in themselves to improve for their own benefit rather than through the external pressure imposed on them. Feldenkrais is good with providing a balanced approach and a sense of self.
How can dance help us tap into the Age of Creativity?
At Between the Bones we use the story to drive our work and our performances. When the dancers are a part of the creative process like they are at Between the Bones, they become part of a collaborative team involving teachers, costume makers, and students to take a leap and solve problems that haven’t been solved before. It is not just imitative or just a recital. The story gives boundaries and rules and allows us to think creatively. It is constructivist: you throw all of the pieces together that you can work with, knowing that those are the only things you can use to create. Let’s see what happens.
For more information on Between the Bones, visit: www.betweenthebones.com
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Opening a Public Waldorf School - an Interview with Alliance for Public Waldorf Education
How does the Alliance for Public Waldorf Education assist people and communities?
The Alliance for Public Waldorf Education is a member organization, supporting established schools, developing schools and initiatives in the planning and start up phase. The Alliance provides resources and free consultation from experienced administrators to its member schools. In addition, the Alliance provides an annual conference, professional development opportunities, and is developing partnerships in support of the public/charter schools movement.
How close does the public version of Waldorf come to the traditional Waldorf schools?
The curriculum and pedagogical approach looks very similar in both public and independent Waldorf schools. The public sector lens comes with additional transparency and accountability requirements, particularly around documenting grade-by-grade curriculum and academic standards. Most people wouldn’t notice much difference in the classroom if they visited a private Waldorf school or a public school inspired by Waldorf education.
With public schools' inflexibility on standardized testing, how do you keep the integrity of the pace of Waldorf with literacy?
At most public Waldorf schools, the curriculum doesn’t vary much from the traditional independent Waldorf program. Meeting literacy and all academic standards while nurturing the development of the whole child is integral to a Waldorf education. A Waldorf curriculum takes a different approach to reading in grades one and two; however, students are not tested in most states until grade three, by which time students’ literacy is basically on par with the testing standards. California schools test a year earlier than the federal government recommends or requires, and students tend to do poorly on the second grade exams. In later years, however, student test results are comparable and above, as would be expected with the full Waldorf curriculum.
In public Waldorf schools, do the students stick with the same teacher for 8 years or at least several years?
Yes. When a teacher has a class for several years, the teacher and the children come to know and understand each other in a deeper way. Children who feel secure in that familiar relationship, may be better able to learn. The interaction of teacher and parents also can become meaningful over time, which can be supportive to the child’s development.
How do you strive to keep the hands, heart and head balance in the public school setting?
Waldorf curriculum and pedagogy seeks to nurture all aspects of the child’s development leading to excellence in intellectual and academic capabilities. Artistic and practical subjects such as gardening, hand work, and woodworking play a significant role in preparing students for life in the ‘real’ world.
In addition to reading, writing, math, history, geography, and the sciences, children learn to sing, play a musical instrument, draw, paint, carve and work with wood, speak clearly and act in a play, think independently, and work harmoniously and respectfully with others. Lessons are primarily delivered orally by the teacher in a thoughtful, interactive and artistic manner, thereby engaging hands, heart and head into all lessons and activities of a student’s day.
How many public Waldorf schools are there in the United States?
There are 46 schools and initiatives in the United States.
How successful have they been?
Lower grade students moving to a comprehensive high school (public or private) are often recognized for their keen ability to think, for being well-rounded young adults, and as having experience as learners rather than merely digesters. High school graduates are likely to have well developed sense of themselves, sound thinking and reasoning skills, a genuine curiosity of their world, and love of learning. While public schools inspired by Waldorf education are relatively new in the United States, even the most prestigious colleges embrace Waldorf educated students as likely to be a contributing, engaged student and have a successful college experience. The Yuba River Charter School in Nevada City, CA, whose oldest graduates are now 25 years old, has had a group graduate from UCLA and Berkeley this year and has their first high school graduate attending Harvard. Other students are now finishing graduate school and one is a Waldorf teacher!
For more information on the Alliance for Public Waldorf Education, go to http://allianceforpublicwaldorfeducation.org/
The Alliance for Public Waldorf Education is a member organization, supporting established schools, developing schools and initiatives in the planning and start up phase. The Alliance provides resources and free consultation from experienced administrators to its member schools. In addition, the Alliance provides an annual conference, professional development opportunities, and is developing partnerships in support of the public/charter schools movement.
How close does the public version of Waldorf come to the traditional Waldorf schools?
The curriculum and pedagogical approach looks very similar in both public and independent Waldorf schools. The public sector lens comes with additional transparency and accountability requirements, particularly around documenting grade-by-grade curriculum and academic standards. Most people wouldn’t notice much difference in the classroom if they visited a private Waldorf school or a public school inspired by Waldorf education.
With public schools' inflexibility on standardized testing, how do you keep the integrity of the pace of Waldorf with literacy?
At most public Waldorf schools, the curriculum doesn’t vary much from the traditional independent Waldorf program. Meeting literacy and all academic standards while nurturing the development of the whole child is integral to a Waldorf education. A Waldorf curriculum takes a different approach to reading in grades one and two; however, students are not tested in most states until grade three, by which time students’ literacy is basically on par with the testing standards. California schools test a year earlier than the federal government recommends or requires, and students tend to do poorly on the second grade exams. In later years, however, student test results are comparable and above, as would be expected with the full Waldorf curriculum.
In public Waldorf schools, do the students stick with the same teacher for 8 years or at least several years?
Yes. When a teacher has a class for several years, the teacher and the children come to know and understand each other in a deeper way. Children who feel secure in that familiar relationship, may be better able to learn. The interaction of teacher and parents also can become meaningful over time, which can be supportive to the child’s development.
How do you strive to keep the hands, heart and head balance in the public school setting?
Waldorf curriculum and pedagogy seeks to nurture all aspects of the child’s development leading to excellence in intellectual and academic capabilities. Artistic and practical subjects such as gardening, hand work, and woodworking play a significant role in preparing students for life in the ‘real’ world.
In addition to reading, writing, math, history, geography, and the sciences, children learn to sing, play a musical instrument, draw, paint, carve and work with wood, speak clearly and act in a play, think independently, and work harmoniously and respectfully with others. Lessons are primarily delivered orally by the teacher in a thoughtful, interactive and artistic manner, thereby engaging hands, heart and head into all lessons and activities of a student’s day.
How many public Waldorf schools are there in the United States?
There are 46 schools and initiatives in the United States.
How successful have they been?
Lower grade students moving to a comprehensive high school (public or private) are often recognized for their keen ability to think, for being well-rounded young adults, and as having experience as learners rather than merely digesters. High school graduates are likely to have well developed sense of themselves, sound thinking and reasoning skills, a genuine curiosity of their world, and love of learning. While public schools inspired by Waldorf education are relatively new in the United States, even the most prestigious colleges embrace Waldorf educated students as likely to be a contributing, engaged student and have a successful college experience. The Yuba River Charter School in Nevada City, CA, whose oldest graduates are now 25 years old, has had a group graduate from UCLA and Berkeley this year and has their first high school graduate attending Harvard. Other students are now finishing graduate school and one is a Waldorf teacher!
For more information on the Alliance for Public Waldorf Education, go to http://allianceforpublicwaldorfeducation.org/
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Reggio Emilia - Another Fine Italian Import Interpreted by Daniel Bigler
Daniel Bigler, previously a guest blogger here has graciously returned to explain Reggio Emilia. Daniel is a former Reggio Emilia-inspired teacher and eloquently explains more on this education modality or philosophy.
What is the Reggio Emilia philosophy?
It might be best to understand the philosophy within the context of its birthplace: Reggio Emilia, Italy. Reggio Emilia is a small region in northern Italy and after the devastation of World War II, many of its local communities and parents began to realize that the way to move beyond this violence laid within education. So among the war-torn rubble, mothers literally began to piece their communities back together by coming around their young children and building preschools for them. Loris Malaguzzi was a young journalist and educator at the time and impressed by the parents' efforts. He helped them build a system of schools that would ultimately support their different concept of how to exist within the world.
In many respects, it's hard to separate what's become known as the Reggio Emilia philosophy of education with their larger philosophy of life. If I had to try, though, it'd be characterized by these things:
* A respect for children and their capacities and curiosities
* An emergent curriculum that comes from the children and their inquiries about the world, which often manifests in in-depth project work
* A belief that children can learn through different "languages" and art mediums, and that representing and exploring learning through these is central to true understanding. Thus, at the center of every classroom is the Art Studio
* A sense of harmony and connection between the classroom and the broader community, the natural world, and others
* A letting go of time, of hurriedness and unnecessary expectations as part of an attempt to get back to the joy of learning. "Nothing without joy," as Loris Malaguzzi once said.
There's probably many other defining characteristics of the Reggio Emilia philosophy and each person I've found working in it is drawn to the philosophy for different reasons. I can only explore and share what Reggio Emilia is to me – though many others, like Lella Gandini, Louise Boyd-Cadwell, and George Forman have done a truly fantastic job at introducing Reggio Emilia's philosophy and practices to American audiences. There's a wealth of wisdom about education and "the Reggio Emilia way" in their books, if you're interested.
I understand it is more of a guiding philosophy than a methodology or set curriculum. Can you explain that?
Reggio Emilia's philosophy about education can really be summed up, I think, with this question: What is your Image of the child? Do you view children as capable, competent, strong, and wise? Do children have something to contribute to broader society? Are they able to be in charge of their own learning?
I wonder if you really have to be in the right place mentally, to work in a truly Reggio-inspired way: a conceptual place where you no longer place any "value" on education in the sense that you expect it to do certain things, and produce pre-established sets of knowledge and skills. This approach requires you to take a step back and do away with all the adult expectations of what children "should be learning" and instead just allow and encourage the children in front of you to learn what comes naturally to them. The emphasis is really shifted from the system to the child.
It's often mistakenly assumed that the Reggio Emilia philosophy requires less work of the teacher, because you don't have a curriculum; but really, it is the opposite. As a teacher, you're asked to be constantly and deeply engaged with the children you're among, and constantly reflective of where they are at mentally, emotionally, physically – fully aware of the possibilities of where their learning might go from here.
It's sort of as if you're committed philosophically to making everything up as you go along, without the past theorists and wealth of knowledge about "child development" to fall back on and get in the way of recognizing the children as they truly are. You're certainly engaged with these ideas from the broader culture, but you take nothing for granted. Instead of some checklist handed off from above or an abstract theory a guy wrote in a book once of how and what children learn, the children themselves become the benchmark for whether you're doing it right.
Reggio Emilia touches on our connection to each other, the community, the food on our plate, etc. Why is relationship and connection so important?
I'm certain some of this is simply reflective of the Reggio Emilia philosophy's Italian roots: the Italians emphasize family, simplicity, enjoyment. Their worldview is one of living life slowly and appreciating it fully, with others close to them. In that way, the way Reggio Emilia does "education" is a natural extension of how they do "life" altogether.
I don't know how much of this transfers easily (especially to America), since so much of it is worldview, but I do think there some important truths here. For instance, if we want kids to really explore an interest deeply and passionately, mindful that it's largely the process and not the content that matters most in children's cognitive development, then we have to give them ample time to do so. We have to value unstructured, unhurried days and not be bound to the clock. We have to let kids continue to play and build, even though our adult heads might say it's time to put away the blocks and sit down for lunch. Children need to be able to depend on and expect a certain continuity to their work – they have to be able to trust that they can revisit, for instance, their pretend dinosaur play or pirate ship block building the next day and the next, and not be hurried along to another thing on some curriculum list somewhere.
Likewise, if we want our children to truly know the value of human life and learn how to work and collaborate together then we have to emphasize and build *real* communities, and we have to set the structure and culture of our classroom so that everybody in it (adults and kids alike) truly rely and depend on each other, with an equal investment in the community as well as self.
In the same way, the children *have to* be connected to the broader community, woven into the fabric of the broader social life happening around them. They shouldn't be shoved aside in a child care classroom, guarded by a gatekeeper, while the adults of a community go off to work and live. Children need to be present and an active part of the life of a community – they need to be known and accepted at the local farmer's market, the park, area businesses.
This idea of fostering true community among children and integrating them into the broader community might be the biggest obstacle for American schools hoping to transplant the Reggio Emilia philosophy. Our strong individualistic tendencies and emphasis often get in the way of children truly learning to be a part of a broader classroom, community, or world. We often want our children to "develop" enough and become "educated" enough, become autonomous enough before we weave them into our society. But if we stop and think, this is a rather silly way of doing it. If we what we're after is empowered, capable, strong learners and thinkers who can go out into our society and make the world better, then we absolutely need to have them be an integral, welcomed and supported part of that world first.
I think most Italians would be appalled at our "child care" centers – aghast especially at the idea that we treat children's care as an economic good. Children have become little more than add-ons to our lives, not connected in any meaningful way to the broader cultural life and community. Until they are quality, purposeful early childhood education in America can never be fully realized.
How is the role of the teacher different in this setting?
Most education occurs within a deficit-oriented, authority-based paradigm. Teachers work to put knowledge and skills out into the classroom, making them accessible to children "at their level", so that children can become filled up with those (very culturally-bound) things. It's a future-oriented setting, always with the teachers looking onward at what children need to know next, looking for ways to impart this knowledge to them. Simply put, most education has children as passive bystanders in their own education.
In the Reggio Emilia philosophy, the opposite is the case: teachers believe that children are natural learners and inherently empowered individuals capable of incredible thinking and inquiry. The world, as Reggio-inspired teachers see it, is rich enough for children to learn from – and unless they've been taught out of it, children have a natural and insatiable curiosity for knowledge and understanding. Children are encouraged to experiment and make mistakes, to explore their own interests, The teacher's role is simply to support this, taking their cue from the child himself.
It's easy to mistake this as doing nothing, but in actuality there's a lot more work involved with this kind of teaching paradigm. One of the main new roles of the teacher is as observer and documenter: teachers listen to children's dialogue and questions, observe their play and activities, and root out their deeper passions and interests. Then in documenting their observations, teachers give themselves something to reflect on, an insight about further "provocations" and subtle changes they can offer, that might add a richer, deeper dimension to the children's exploration and activity. You slowly see the classroom's curriculum "emerge" this way, with teachers using their observation and documentation to reflexively introduce just "one more thing" to the classroom at a time – careful not to get too ahead of the children, but at the same time artfully scaffolding their experiences.
There is, of course, many other role implications to such a drastically different teaching paradigm. The teachers are collaborators with children, and don't necessarily provide them the answers, rather they encourage open-ended inquiry. At its core is this different concept of relating to children.
What is meant by the expression, The Hundred Languages of Children?
Understandably, it's not a literal expression and it's also not meant to be limiting, as "the hundred" might suggest. Instead, the expression "The Hundred Languages of Children" encapsulates the idea that children discover, learn, do, and exist in endless ways. Think of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences: it's the notion that children learn and achieve literacy about a topic through multiple ways, many different languages. The Hundred Languages is meant to communicate this open expanse of opportunity about how learning can happen.
It's also meant to engender a certain respect and acknowledge for each child as a gifted, thoughtful, and unique individual. A child may be naturally gifted at dance. Or a child might choose to sketch a drawing to express his understanding of how leaves form and maybe resemble the "skeleton bones" in our hands. The visual arts, physical movement, speech, music, hand work, dance, dramatic play... all of these can be languages of learning for children. Reggio-inspired teachers recognize this, and work with children to open these languages up to them for their use. This is why the L'Atelier – the "Art Studio" – is at the heart of any Reggio Emilia-inspired classroom. Through developing a proficiency in and meaningfully using these languages, children can – on their own, in the very truest sense of empowerment – deeply engage and explore topics, ideas, and inquiries in very real and concrete ways.
From a scientific perspective, allowing and encouraging children to explore one topic or object through a diverse variety of physical media increases and enhances the neurological connections centralized around that topic or object, deepening a child's schema of understanding about that thing. Representing and exploring things in different ways allows our brains to fully, comprehensively understand and appreciate those things in a way that simple bookwork would never allow.
How does this approach address matters of balance (academic, emotional, social, physical, etc.)?
You know, I think there's just a natural holism to the Reggio Emilia approach. Teachers approach children as a whole, and I don't think that many people who work in this approach tend to think much about these matters of balancing the social, emotional, physical, cognitive domains. It simply comes rather naturally.
I sometimes think we, as adults break children's lives and experiences down too much. We narrow a child's life to such precisely defined parameters, that I wonder if we lose a part of it in the process. I don't think that the Reggio Emilia approach neglects any of these aspects of life. In fact, I think the balance is a lot richer and deeper than most educational approaches – but it's not something we spend any particular effort in doing. When you discard any adult expectations of how children should be, and view them simply as they are, it's much easier to meet children's needs.
How does the approach take sides in the debate of play-based education or early learning education in the younger years?
I don't know if the approach particularly does take sides. For its part, the Reggio Emilia philosophy is largely about culture. At its core it's a way of thinking about children, acknowledging their abilities and listening to them. There's a decent amount of mutual respect involved, but how this approach might actually "look" depends drastically on the individual community it's in and a part of.
Naturally, some classrooms may be more play and exploratory-based, while others might seem more "serious"; it simply depends on the children, the culture and experiences they bring with them, and how their interests manifest in the every-day activity of the classroom. Often this is through play, but sometimes it's through arts-based representation and exploration, project work, or other ways. As adults, we just try to let it happen, whatever it is and support it however we can. Of course as teachers we're kept incredibly busy but our roles change, from say, instructors and traffic monitors to observers, documentarians, provocateurs, and co-learners.
At the preschool I worked at – with many of our parents being working professionals – we had the children for a good portion of the day. We spent much of the morning engaged in more "focused" work, spending a lot of time in our art studio, either exploring and practicing different art media, or continuing long-term projects if we have any going on. The larger part our day has a natural, relaxed ebb and flow to it. We try to minimize transitions and group or adult-directed times during the day and children mainly work and play in small groups with their friends. The "curriculum" and activity of the classroom emerges from their own thoughts and ideas. In this way, "education" becomes a living, breathing thing, when put in the hands of the children themselves.
Is it only for younger kids?
Not at all! One of the very best (elementary) schools I've seen was a charter school in Portland, Oregon, that worked out of a Reggio-inspired philosophy. They had a preschool program, yes, but they also had grades above that – up to 5th grade, the last time I was there. It's very much a philosophy that largely transcends both age and, for that matter, culture.
The philosophy manifests itself in different ways at different ages, of course. When I was at this particular school, for instance, the 3rd and 4th graders were wrapping up these immensely impressive and elaborate projects on issues like civil rights, explored and represented through different media and experiences. They also didn't neglect the more "traditional" subjects like mathematics, although they explore them through holistic, interdisciplinary means, like integrating math with their other projects, for instance, or through kinesthetic and spatial means, like advanced architectural building with blocks.
The preschoolers, on the other end, had spent the year exploring issues of power and identity. The class had some unusually active young boys, and instead of having their unusually strong inclination toward rough-and-tumble play and pretend fighting suppressed, the teachers recognized its connection with another strong interest the children had that year – their interest in the animals that they saw at their semi-regular trips to a nearby zoo. The teachers magnificently wove both of these threads together, and, over time, these kids knew and, as unusual as it sounds, could innately sympathize with these animals on such an intimate level. Toward the end of the year, they spent several long weeks in the art studio, the children laboring intently over what would become these elaborately detailed, intricately painted paper måché masks that represented the different zoo animals. They finished them just in time for one last trip to the zoo, where the children donned their masks and truly, physically, emotionally *became* the animals on the other side of the fences. It's these transcendent moments that you only rarely get to witness that let you know there can truly be more – a lot more – to a child's education.
So the philosophy may appear differently at different ages, but it's very much for any age. If there's a central commitment to supporting children's inquiry, learning through arts- and materials-based representation and expression, and reflective, community-based teaching practices, then the Reggio philosophy can, in my mind really be taken anywhere.
How does the Reggio Emilia classroom look and feel compared to a conventional classroom?
In terms of the materials, I don't know if this is as defined as some would like to think. The philosophy can inspire any teacher or school – even those with few resources or funding – and it's really mostly the immaterial culture that stands in sharpest contrast to conventional classrooms.
I do think, though, that when teachers and adults are mindful about the environment that the children are in– "The Third Teacher," as the Reggio Emilia approach calls it, they find ways around resource limitations to imbue their environment with a certain spirit. Children learn just as much from the physical spaces and places around them, from the materials around them, so this is important. Even if a school is dirt-broke though, teachers can carefully consider what physically is allowed in their classroom, only permitting what they find to be meaningful or provocative to children's learning, in harmony with the children themselves and the spirit of the classroom as a whole. Teachers can foster attunement with the natural world by bringing in stumps, leaves, dirt, and so forth and they encourage resourcefulness and creativity by bringing in materials that are largely "blank" of their own accord in the beginning, but which allow children to project their own worlds and play onto them. In this sense, minimalism can often be a good thing – one of the best things, in fact. Children aren't distracted by the horrendously bright colors and flashy "educational" posters found in most conventional classrooms, and instead their classroom space really begins to take on, over time the simple lives and character of the children themselves.
It's this sense of harmony and attunement with the children themselves – not just some far off, distant concept of who the children are or should be – that I really can't adequately describe. It's very much a dynamic thing, changing over the years with different groups of children, and because it comes from individual children, it can never be replicated.
This harmony can in many ways be encouraged by setting a soothing, calm stage without distractions, by allowing the natural world in, placing live plants in and around the classroom, and by doing what is possible to let natural light in. This also means discouraging adult-designed or overly-specific toys or displays, and replacing the cute alphabet and weather posters with children's own artwork, carefully articulated documentation of children's learning, and photographs. Certainly, great attention is also given to the Art Studio, to make it a place of rich and diverse opportunity for exploring material languages and representing learning. There are a great many ideas and strategies that may physically set aside a Reggio Emilia-inspired classroom from others. But in the end, it's the classroom's teacher who has the responsibility to mindfully this place.
This place will be different for each context, taking into account the culture, material resources at hand, and the children's lives – but we usually find that if teachers take the proper time out to think through the environment, not simply settling for the status quo out of a catalog but carefully considering the physical space in the perspective of this different philosophy of children and learning, then they end up with a classroom offering children much more meaning and spirit than a conventional classroom.
Daniel's blog can be found at http://www.danielsaurus.com
What is the Reggio Emilia philosophy?
It might be best to understand the philosophy within the context of its birthplace: Reggio Emilia, Italy. Reggio Emilia is a small region in northern Italy and after the devastation of World War II, many of its local communities and parents began to realize that the way to move beyond this violence laid within education. So among the war-torn rubble, mothers literally began to piece their communities back together by coming around their young children and building preschools for them. Loris Malaguzzi was a young journalist and educator at the time and impressed by the parents' efforts. He helped them build a system of schools that would ultimately support their different concept of how to exist within the world.
In many respects, it's hard to separate what's become known as the Reggio Emilia philosophy of education with their larger philosophy of life. If I had to try, though, it'd be characterized by these things:
* A respect for children and their capacities and curiosities
* An emergent curriculum that comes from the children and their inquiries about the world, which often manifests in in-depth project work
* A belief that children can learn through different "languages" and art mediums, and that representing and exploring learning through these is central to true understanding. Thus, at the center of every classroom is the Art Studio
* A sense of harmony and connection between the classroom and the broader community, the natural world, and others
* A letting go of time, of hurriedness and unnecessary expectations as part of an attempt to get back to the joy of learning. "Nothing without joy," as Loris Malaguzzi once said.
There's probably many other defining characteristics of the Reggio Emilia philosophy and each person I've found working in it is drawn to the philosophy for different reasons. I can only explore and share what Reggio Emilia is to me – though many others, like Lella Gandini, Louise Boyd-Cadwell, and George Forman have done a truly fantastic job at introducing Reggio Emilia's philosophy and practices to American audiences. There's a wealth of wisdom about education and "the Reggio Emilia way" in their books, if you're interested.
I understand it is more of a guiding philosophy than a methodology or set curriculum. Can you explain that?
Reggio Emilia's philosophy about education can really be summed up, I think, with this question: What is your Image of the child? Do you view children as capable, competent, strong, and wise? Do children have something to contribute to broader society? Are they able to be in charge of their own learning?
I wonder if you really have to be in the right place mentally, to work in a truly Reggio-inspired way: a conceptual place where you no longer place any "value" on education in the sense that you expect it to do certain things, and produce pre-established sets of knowledge and skills. This approach requires you to take a step back and do away with all the adult expectations of what children "should be learning" and instead just allow and encourage the children in front of you to learn what comes naturally to them. The emphasis is really shifted from the system to the child.
It's often mistakenly assumed that the Reggio Emilia philosophy requires less work of the teacher, because you don't have a curriculum; but really, it is the opposite. As a teacher, you're asked to be constantly and deeply engaged with the children you're among, and constantly reflective of where they are at mentally, emotionally, physically – fully aware of the possibilities of where their learning might go from here.
It's sort of as if you're committed philosophically to making everything up as you go along, without the past theorists and wealth of knowledge about "child development" to fall back on and get in the way of recognizing the children as they truly are. You're certainly engaged with these ideas from the broader culture, but you take nothing for granted. Instead of some checklist handed off from above or an abstract theory a guy wrote in a book once of how and what children learn, the children themselves become the benchmark for whether you're doing it right.
Reggio Emilia touches on our connection to each other, the community, the food on our plate, etc. Why is relationship and connection so important?
I'm certain some of this is simply reflective of the Reggio Emilia philosophy's Italian roots: the Italians emphasize family, simplicity, enjoyment. Their worldview is one of living life slowly and appreciating it fully, with others close to them. In that way, the way Reggio Emilia does "education" is a natural extension of how they do "life" altogether.
I don't know how much of this transfers easily (especially to America), since so much of it is worldview, but I do think there some important truths here. For instance, if we want kids to really explore an interest deeply and passionately, mindful that it's largely the process and not the content that matters most in children's cognitive development, then we have to give them ample time to do so. We have to value unstructured, unhurried days and not be bound to the clock. We have to let kids continue to play and build, even though our adult heads might say it's time to put away the blocks and sit down for lunch. Children need to be able to depend on and expect a certain continuity to their work – they have to be able to trust that they can revisit, for instance, their pretend dinosaur play or pirate ship block building the next day and the next, and not be hurried along to another thing on some curriculum list somewhere.
Likewise, if we want our children to truly know the value of human life and learn how to work and collaborate together then we have to emphasize and build *real* communities, and we have to set the structure and culture of our classroom so that everybody in it (adults and kids alike) truly rely and depend on each other, with an equal investment in the community as well as self.
In the same way, the children *have to* be connected to the broader community, woven into the fabric of the broader social life happening around them. They shouldn't be shoved aside in a child care classroom, guarded by a gatekeeper, while the adults of a community go off to work and live. Children need to be present and an active part of the life of a community – they need to be known and accepted at the local farmer's market, the park, area businesses.
This idea of fostering true community among children and integrating them into the broader community might be the biggest obstacle for American schools hoping to transplant the Reggio Emilia philosophy. Our strong individualistic tendencies and emphasis often get in the way of children truly learning to be a part of a broader classroom, community, or world. We often want our children to "develop" enough and become "educated" enough, become autonomous enough before we weave them into our society. But if we stop and think, this is a rather silly way of doing it. If we what we're after is empowered, capable, strong learners and thinkers who can go out into our society and make the world better, then we absolutely need to have them be an integral, welcomed and supported part of that world first.
I think most Italians would be appalled at our "child care" centers – aghast especially at the idea that we treat children's care as an economic good. Children have become little more than add-ons to our lives, not connected in any meaningful way to the broader cultural life and community. Until they are quality, purposeful early childhood education in America can never be fully realized.
How is the role of the teacher different in this setting?
Most education occurs within a deficit-oriented, authority-based paradigm. Teachers work to put knowledge and skills out into the classroom, making them accessible to children "at their level", so that children can become filled up with those (very culturally-bound) things. It's a future-oriented setting, always with the teachers looking onward at what children need to know next, looking for ways to impart this knowledge to them. Simply put, most education has children as passive bystanders in their own education.
In the Reggio Emilia philosophy, the opposite is the case: teachers believe that children are natural learners and inherently empowered individuals capable of incredible thinking and inquiry. The world, as Reggio-inspired teachers see it, is rich enough for children to learn from – and unless they've been taught out of it, children have a natural and insatiable curiosity for knowledge and understanding. Children are encouraged to experiment and make mistakes, to explore their own interests, The teacher's role is simply to support this, taking their cue from the child himself.
It's easy to mistake this as doing nothing, but in actuality there's a lot more work involved with this kind of teaching paradigm. One of the main new roles of the teacher is as observer and documenter: teachers listen to children's dialogue and questions, observe their play and activities, and root out their deeper passions and interests. Then in documenting their observations, teachers give themselves something to reflect on, an insight about further "provocations" and subtle changes they can offer, that might add a richer, deeper dimension to the children's exploration and activity. You slowly see the classroom's curriculum "emerge" this way, with teachers using their observation and documentation to reflexively introduce just "one more thing" to the classroom at a time – careful not to get too ahead of the children, but at the same time artfully scaffolding their experiences.
There is, of course, many other role implications to such a drastically different teaching paradigm. The teachers are collaborators with children, and don't necessarily provide them the answers, rather they encourage open-ended inquiry. At its core is this different concept of relating to children.
What is meant by the expression, The Hundred Languages of Children?
Understandably, it's not a literal expression and it's also not meant to be limiting, as "the hundred" might suggest. Instead, the expression "The Hundred Languages of Children" encapsulates the idea that children discover, learn, do, and exist in endless ways. Think of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences: it's the notion that children learn and achieve literacy about a topic through multiple ways, many different languages. The Hundred Languages is meant to communicate this open expanse of opportunity about how learning can happen.
It's also meant to engender a certain respect and acknowledge for each child as a gifted, thoughtful, and unique individual. A child may be naturally gifted at dance. Or a child might choose to sketch a drawing to express his understanding of how leaves form and maybe resemble the "skeleton bones" in our hands. The visual arts, physical movement, speech, music, hand work, dance, dramatic play... all of these can be languages of learning for children. Reggio-inspired teachers recognize this, and work with children to open these languages up to them for their use. This is why the L'Atelier – the "Art Studio" – is at the heart of any Reggio Emilia-inspired classroom. Through developing a proficiency in and meaningfully using these languages, children can – on their own, in the very truest sense of empowerment – deeply engage and explore topics, ideas, and inquiries in very real and concrete ways.
From a scientific perspective, allowing and encouraging children to explore one topic or object through a diverse variety of physical media increases and enhances the neurological connections centralized around that topic or object, deepening a child's schema of understanding about that thing. Representing and exploring things in different ways allows our brains to fully, comprehensively understand and appreciate those things in a way that simple bookwork would never allow.
How does this approach address matters of balance (academic, emotional, social, physical, etc.)?
You know, I think there's just a natural holism to the Reggio Emilia approach. Teachers approach children as a whole, and I don't think that many people who work in this approach tend to think much about these matters of balancing the social, emotional, physical, cognitive domains. It simply comes rather naturally.
I sometimes think we, as adults break children's lives and experiences down too much. We narrow a child's life to such precisely defined parameters, that I wonder if we lose a part of it in the process. I don't think that the Reggio Emilia approach neglects any of these aspects of life. In fact, I think the balance is a lot richer and deeper than most educational approaches – but it's not something we spend any particular effort in doing. When you discard any adult expectations of how children should be, and view them simply as they are, it's much easier to meet children's needs.
How does the approach take sides in the debate of play-based education or early learning education in the younger years?
I don't know if the approach particularly does take sides. For its part, the Reggio Emilia philosophy is largely about culture. At its core it's a way of thinking about children, acknowledging their abilities and listening to them. There's a decent amount of mutual respect involved, but how this approach might actually "look" depends drastically on the individual community it's in and a part of.
Naturally, some classrooms may be more play and exploratory-based, while others might seem more "serious"; it simply depends on the children, the culture and experiences they bring with them, and how their interests manifest in the every-day activity of the classroom. Often this is through play, but sometimes it's through arts-based representation and exploration, project work, or other ways. As adults, we just try to let it happen, whatever it is and support it however we can. Of course as teachers we're kept incredibly busy but our roles change, from say, instructors and traffic monitors to observers, documentarians, provocateurs, and co-learners.
At the preschool I worked at – with many of our parents being working professionals – we had the children for a good portion of the day. We spent much of the morning engaged in more "focused" work, spending a lot of time in our art studio, either exploring and practicing different art media, or continuing long-term projects if we have any going on. The larger part our day has a natural, relaxed ebb and flow to it. We try to minimize transitions and group or adult-directed times during the day and children mainly work and play in small groups with their friends. The "curriculum" and activity of the classroom emerges from their own thoughts and ideas. In this way, "education" becomes a living, breathing thing, when put in the hands of the children themselves.
Is it only for younger kids?
Not at all! One of the very best (elementary) schools I've seen was a charter school in Portland, Oregon, that worked out of a Reggio-inspired philosophy. They had a preschool program, yes, but they also had grades above that – up to 5th grade, the last time I was there. It's very much a philosophy that largely transcends both age and, for that matter, culture.
The philosophy manifests itself in different ways at different ages, of course. When I was at this particular school, for instance, the 3rd and 4th graders were wrapping up these immensely impressive and elaborate projects on issues like civil rights, explored and represented through different media and experiences. They also didn't neglect the more "traditional" subjects like mathematics, although they explore them through holistic, interdisciplinary means, like integrating math with their other projects, for instance, or through kinesthetic and spatial means, like advanced architectural building with blocks.
The preschoolers, on the other end, had spent the year exploring issues of power and identity. The class had some unusually active young boys, and instead of having their unusually strong inclination toward rough-and-tumble play and pretend fighting suppressed, the teachers recognized its connection with another strong interest the children had that year – their interest in the animals that they saw at their semi-regular trips to a nearby zoo. The teachers magnificently wove both of these threads together, and, over time, these kids knew and, as unusual as it sounds, could innately sympathize with these animals on such an intimate level. Toward the end of the year, they spent several long weeks in the art studio, the children laboring intently over what would become these elaborately detailed, intricately painted paper måché masks that represented the different zoo animals. They finished them just in time for one last trip to the zoo, where the children donned their masks and truly, physically, emotionally *became* the animals on the other side of the fences. It's these transcendent moments that you only rarely get to witness that let you know there can truly be more – a lot more – to a child's education.
So the philosophy may appear differently at different ages, but it's very much for any age. If there's a central commitment to supporting children's inquiry, learning through arts- and materials-based representation and expression, and reflective, community-based teaching practices, then the Reggio philosophy can, in my mind really be taken anywhere.
How does the Reggio Emilia classroom look and feel compared to a conventional classroom?
In terms of the materials, I don't know if this is as defined as some would like to think. The philosophy can inspire any teacher or school – even those with few resources or funding – and it's really mostly the immaterial culture that stands in sharpest contrast to conventional classrooms.
I do think, though, that when teachers and adults are mindful about the environment that the children are in– "The Third Teacher," as the Reggio Emilia approach calls it, they find ways around resource limitations to imbue their environment with a certain spirit. Children learn just as much from the physical spaces and places around them, from the materials around them, so this is important. Even if a school is dirt-broke though, teachers can carefully consider what physically is allowed in their classroom, only permitting what they find to be meaningful or provocative to children's learning, in harmony with the children themselves and the spirit of the classroom as a whole. Teachers can foster attunement with the natural world by bringing in stumps, leaves, dirt, and so forth and they encourage resourcefulness and creativity by bringing in materials that are largely "blank" of their own accord in the beginning, but which allow children to project their own worlds and play onto them. In this sense, minimalism can often be a good thing – one of the best things, in fact. Children aren't distracted by the horrendously bright colors and flashy "educational" posters found in most conventional classrooms, and instead their classroom space really begins to take on, over time the simple lives and character of the children themselves.
It's this sense of harmony and attunement with the children themselves – not just some far off, distant concept of who the children are or should be – that I really can't adequately describe. It's very much a dynamic thing, changing over the years with different groups of children, and because it comes from individual children, it can never be replicated.
This harmony can in many ways be encouraged by setting a soothing, calm stage without distractions, by allowing the natural world in, placing live plants in and around the classroom, and by doing what is possible to let natural light in. This also means discouraging adult-designed or overly-specific toys or displays, and replacing the cute alphabet and weather posters with children's own artwork, carefully articulated documentation of children's learning, and photographs. Certainly, great attention is also given to the Art Studio, to make it a place of rich and diverse opportunity for exploring material languages and representing learning. There are a great many ideas and strategies that may physically set aside a Reggio Emilia-inspired classroom from others. But in the end, it's the classroom's teacher who has the responsibility to mindfully this place.
This place will be different for each context, taking into account the culture, material resources at hand, and the children's lives – but we usually find that if teachers take the proper time out to think through the environment, not simply settling for the status quo out of a catalog but carefully considering the physical space in the perspective of this different philosophy of children and learning, then they end up with a classroom offering children much more meaning and spirit than a conventional classroom.
Daniel's blog can be found at http://www.danielsaurus.com
Monday, August 10, 2009
Ecoliteracy - An Interview with Lisa Bennett
Lisa Bennett is the communications director for the Center for Ecoliteracy. She is also a former fellow at Harvard University's Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and is currently writing a book about parents and global warming.
What is the mission of the Center for Ecoliteracy?
Our mission is education for sustainable living. We provide expertise, inspiration, and support to the immensely hopeful and vital schooling for sustainability movement that is rising among a growing number of public and independent schools in the U.S.
We’re committed to this for two reasons: First, because schooling for sustainability is grounded in ecological knowledge and hands-on experiences in the natural world—and this kind of schooling inherently stimulating, relevant, and alive. It makes education exciting again.
Second, schooling for sustainability is a promising answer to our many environmental challenges. Addressing climate change, the end of cheap energy, and other issues, after all, will require citizens who can think ecologically. And where else can young people be prepared for this but at school?
What services do you provide for schools?
We offer a wide range of services, depending on what a particular school needs. In fact, our work typically begins with identifying the appropriate starting point for each school. Usually, this tends to be the theme or pathway most people in that school community care about. It might, for example, be around food, gardens, the campus, community, or larger curriculum.
We offer seminars that attract people from around the United States and many other countries, and books, such as Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World and Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability, which will be available in September 2009.
We also offer curriculum audits, coaching for teaching and learning, in-depth curriculum development, school sustainability report cards, and technical assistance. You can find more information at www.ecoliteracy.org/about/services.html
What kinds of schools do you typically work with?
We have worked with hundreds of schools, both public and independent, and seen extraordinary successes in almost every setting imaginable. The article, “Greening a K-12 Curriculum,” describes how we worked with one school that sought to integrate sustainability education throughout its entire curriculum. (See http://www.ecoliteracy.org/publications/head_royce.html)
Why is sustainability an important concept for an elementary school student? Shouldn’t they spend their time on reading and math instead?
The good news is that this is not an either-or choice. That is, schooling for sustainability is not another “add on” that teachers must somehow squeeze into their day. Rather, it is a richly creative approach to education that allows teachers to integrate an ecological shift in perspective into subjects ranging from art and English to science and mathematics.
To support this shift, the Center for Ecoliteracy offers a framework called Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability (also the title of our new book!) This is grounded in four guiding principles, which can be applied in a single classroom or entire K-12 school:
1. Nature Is Our Teacher
2. Sustainability Is a Community Practice
3. The Real World Is the Optimal Learning Environment
4. Sustainable Living Is Rooted in a Deep Knowledge of Place
I love the statement that food is an organizing principle for encouraging ecological understanding. It certainly brings ecology from the conceptual level to the practical, meaningful level. Can you explain this more fully?
Food is so central to human survival and experience that it can be a pathway for integrating nearly any subject—science, health, history, social studies, geography, art, economics. Nutrition education makes more sense when studied in the context of how nature provides.
How we grow, process, transport, market, prepare, and dispose of food is critical to the central issues of sustainable living: resource use, energy, pollution, water and soil conservation. Food serves as an ideal entry point for understanding the interrelations of such world issues as hunger, trade policy, energy use, and climate change.
Students can track the sources of the food in their lunches and calculate the resources and energy used to bring it to them. They can research what types of foods would be available to them if they were to adopt a regional “hundred-mile diet”—eating only food grown within a hundred-mile radius in order to emphasize fresh and seasonal ingredients, support local agriculture, and reduce the energy and expense needed to preserve and ship food over long distances.
You advocate education of the head, hands and heart. Why not just the head, as most schools focus on and test?
As our cofounder and executive director, Zenobia Barlow says, "We know from considerable experience that human beings struggle with cognitive dissonance, which means that we can uphold an idea or a value, while simultaneously acting in ways that are inconsistent with that idea or value, causing us to resolve those dissonances or rationalize them. Our current lifestyles are an example in terms of consumption and its implications. Left to the head alone, we are in trouble as a species."
Sustainability is also a practice that involves skills. Addressing environmental problems like climate change requires complex thinking and changes in behavior. For example, look at how the Southern Hemisphere—or the people on the other side of the tracks, so to speak—is forced to live with the consequences of our decisions to place toxic dumpsites or ship toxic waste to their backyards. To fully grasp this issue, one needs to genuinely care about who is downstream, and then act on it. The Head alone won't get us there.
Furthermore, living sustainably implies living in community. It's not for the faint-hearted or the single person dwelling in isolation. Living sustainably involves relationship, communication, and cooperation skills. We can’t achieve mastery by reading or philosophizing about them.
If you read the brain research on how people learn, it's multi-modal. Talking at people about ideas isn't a very effective education strategy. People learn by actively constructing their knowledge base—and that is best accomplished by engagement, grappling with real problems.
The people who dreamed up nuclear energy or bombs without having figured out what to do with the toxic waste exemplify what happens when education primarily engages the head.
Humans have a range of competencies. Education poses the challenge of responding to the vast spectrum of human capabilities. Remember the notion of "I think therefore I am." That was the Cartesian logic of a few centuries ago. We need an updated education model, don't you think?
It seems Ecoliteracy takes on not only the classroom, but the school at large, involving the staff and community as well. It demonstrates that schools are not just institutions for students learning, but, as you put it, they should be a healthy network of relationships that include everyone. What is the school sustainability report card and what is done to help schools achieve good marks on it?
Absolutely! Because, as we say in our Smart by Nature principles, sustainability is a community practice. That is, sustainability depends on a healthy network of relationships that includes all members of the community.
When educators, parents, trustees, and other members of the school community make decisions and act collaboratively, they demonstrate sustainability as a community practice. School communities also have the opportunity to model sustainable practice through the ways in which they provision themselves with food, energy, and other basic needs, and how they relate to the larger communities of which they are a part.
The Center for Ecoliteracy sustainability report card is a broad assessment of schools' sustainability policies and practices. It is conducted through the lens of campus, curriculum, community, and school food systems.
Tell me about Smart by Nature.
Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability a new book from the Center for Ecoliteracy and our senior editor Michael K. Stone. Available in September 2009 from U.C. Press and Amazon.com, it portrays the hopeful new sustainability movement that is growing among public and independent schools in the U.S.
Endorsed by Daniel Goleman, Alice Waters, the National Wildlife Federation and others, Smart by Nature offers a compelling framework for schooling for sustainability that is based on nearly 20 years of experience in schools. With its roots in systems thinking and whole-school change, this framework is organized around the four central principles I mentioned earlier: Nature is our teacher; Sustainability is a community practice; The real world is the optimal learning environment; and Sustainable living is rooted in a deep knowledge of place.
This book also offers concrete strategies for greening the campus and curriculum, conducting environmental audits, rethinking school food, and transforming schools into models of sustainable community.
Smart by Nature is also the name of our larger initiative that is dedicated to supporting the schooling for sustainability movement nationwide. You can learn more by signing up for our newsletter at www.ecoliteracy.org
What is the mission of the Center for Ecoliteracy?
Our mission is education for sustainable living. We provide expertise, inspiration, and support to the immensely hopeful and vital schooling for sustainability movement that is rising among a growing number of public and independent schools in the U.S.
We’re committed to this for two reasons: First, because schooling for sustainability is grounded in ecological knowledge and hands-on experiences in the natural world—and this kind of schooling inherently stimulating, relevant, and alive. It makes education exciting again.
Second, schooling for sustainability is a promising answer to our many environmental challenges. Addressing climate change, the end of cheap energy, and other issues, after all, will require citizens who can think ecologically. And where else can young people be prepared for this but at school?
What services do you provide for schools?
We offer a wide range of services, depending on what a particular school needs. In fact, our work typically begins with identifying the appropriate starting point for each school. Usually, this tends to be the theme or pathway most people in that school community care about. It might, for example, be around food, gardens, the campus, community, or larger curriculum.
We offer seminars that attract people from around the United States and many other countries, and books, such as Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World and Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability, which will be available in September 2009.
We also offer curriculum audits, coaching for teaching and learning, in-depth curriculum development, school sustainability report cards, and technical assistance. You can find more information at www.ecoliteracy.org/about/services.html
What kinds of schools do you typically work with?
We have worked with hundreds of schools, both public and independent, and seen extraordinary successes in almost every setting imaginable. The article, “Greening a K-12 Curriculum,” describes how we worked with one school that sought to integrate sustainability education throughout its entire curriculum. (See http://www.ecoliteracy.org/publications/head_royce.html)
Why is sustainability an important concept for an elementary school student? Shouldn’t they spend their time on reading and math instead?
The good news is that this is not an either-or choice. That is, schooling for sustainability is not another “add on” that teachers must somehow squeeze into their day. Rather, it is a richly creative approach to education that allows teachers to integrate an ecological shift in perspective into subjects ranging from art and English to science and mathematics.
To support this shift, the Center for Ecoliteracy offers a framework called Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability (also the title of our new book!) This is grounded in four guiding principles, which can be applied in a single classroom or entire K-12 school:
1. Nature Is Our Teacher
2. Sustainability Is a Community Practice
3. The Real World Is the Optimal Learning Environment
4. Sustainable Living Is Rooted in a Deep Knowledge of Place
I love the statement that food is an organizing principle for encouraging ecological understanding. It certainly brings ecology from the conceptual level to the practical, meaningful level. Can you explain this more fully?
Food is so central to human survival and experience that it can be a pathway for integrating nearly any subject—science, health, history, social studies, geography, art, economics. Nutrition education makes more sense when studied in the context of how nature provides.
How we grow, process, transport, market, prepare, and dispose of food is critical to the central issues of sustainable living: resource use, energy, pollution, water and soil conservation. Food serves as an ideal entry point for understanding the interrelations of such world issues as hunger, trade policy, energy use, and climate change.
Students can track the sources of the food in their lunches and calculate the resources and energy used to bring it to them. They can research what types of foods would be available to them if they were to adopt a regional “hundred-mile diet”—eating only food grown within a hundred-mile radius in order to emphasize fresh and seasonal ingredients, support local agriculture, and reduce the energy and expense needed to preserve and ship food over long distances.
You advocate education of the head, hands and heart. Why not just the head, as most schools focus on and test?
As our cofounder and executive director, Zenobia Barlow says, "We know from considerable experience that human beings struggle with cognitive dissonance, which means that we can uphold an idea or a value, while simultaneously acting in ways that are inconsistent with that idea or value, causing us to resolve those dissonances or rationalize them. Our current lifestyles are an example in terms of consumption and its implications. Left to the head alone, we are in trouble as a species."
Sustainability is also a practice that involves skills. Addressing environmental problems like climate change requires complex thinking and changes in behavior. For example, look at how the Southern Hemisphere—or the people on the other side of the tracks, so to speak—is forced to live with the consequences of our decisions to place toxic dumpsites or ship toxic waste to their backyards. To fully grasp this issue, one needs to genuinely care about who is downstream, and then act on it. The Head alone won't get us there.
Furthermore, living sustainably implies living in community. It's not for the faint-hearted or the single person dwelling in isolation. Living sustainably involves relationship, communication, and cooperation skills. We can’t achieve mastery by reading or philosophizing about them.
If you read the brain research on how people learn, it's multi-modal. Talking at people about ideas isn't a very effective education strategy. People learn by actively constructing their knowledge base—and that is best accomplished by engagement, grappling with real problems.
The people who dreamed up nuclear energy or bombs without having figured out what to do with the toxic waste exemplify what happens when education primarily engages the head.
Humans have a range of competencies. Education poses the challenge of responding to the vast spectrum of human capabilities. Remember the notion of "I think therefore I am." That was the Cartesian logic of a few centuries ago. We need an updated education model, don't you think?
It seems Ecoliteracy takes on not only the classroom, but the school at large, involving the staff and community as well. It demonstrates that schools are not just institutions for students learning, but, as you put it, they should be a healthy network of relationships that include everyone. What is the school sustainability report card and what is done to help schools achieve good marks on it?
Absolutely! Because, as we say in our Smart by Nature principles, sustainability is a community practice. That is, sustainability depends on a healthy network of relationships that includes all members of the community.
When educators, parents, trustees, and other members of the school community make decisions and act collaboratively, they demonstrate sustainability as a community practice. School communities also have the opportunity to model sustainable practice through the ways in which they provision themselves with food, energy, and other basic needs, and how they relate to the larger communities of which they are a part.
The Center for Ecoliteracy sustainability report card is a broad assessment of schools' sustainability policies and practices. It is conducted through the lens of campus, curriculum, community, and school food systems.
Tell me about Smart by Nature.
Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability a new book from the Center for Ecoliteracy and our senior editor Michael K. Stone. Available in September 2009 from U.C. Press and Amazon.com, it portrays the hopeful new sustainability movement that is growing among public and independent schools in the U.S.
Endorsed by Daniel Goleman, Alice Waters, the National Wildlife Federation and others, Smart by Nature offers a compelling framework for schooling for sustainability that is based on nearly 20 years of experience in schools. With its roots in systems thinking and whole-school change, this framework is organized around the four central principles I mentioned earlier: Nature is our teacher; Sustainability is a community practice; The real world is the optimal learning environment; and Sustainable living is rooted in a deep knowledge of place.
This book also offers concrete strategies for greening the campus and curriculum, conducting environmental audits, rethinking school food, and transforming schools into models of sustainable community.
Smart by Nature is also the name of our larger initiative that is dedicated to supporting the schooling for sustainability movement nationwide. You can learn more by signing up for our newsletter at www.ecoliteracy.org
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Balance in Democratic Education - An Interview with Sam Chaltain
Sam Chaltain is the National Director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, a DC-based education “action tank” devoted to restoring the public purpose of public education. He is also the founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, a national program that helps K-12 principals create more equitable, high-functioning learning environments. Previously, Sam spent five years at the First Amendment Center as the co-director of the First Amendment Schools program. I approached Sam with some concerns and much admiration for the Democratic model of education. By the end of the interview I was convinced that this is one the best education modalities going.
Meghan McCain recently got slammed for not having an encyclopedic knowledge of history, when she admitted to not knowing much about a certain historic event. While she did inadvisably blame her lack of knowledge on her youth, it begs the question: what *should* a child should know when he graduates from high school?
I am less interested in mandating what a child should know than I am in exploring what s/he should understand and be able to do. As I wrote in a recent Huffington Post op-ed <http://cli.gs/hJUVPp> , if our goal is to prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace, the standards we pursue should be whatever young people need most to be successful in college and the workplace. And in today's world, although young graduates certainly need a foundation of content knowledge, the greater measure of their long-term success will be the extent to which they learn to use their minds well.
Using one's mind well means more than just acquiring large numbers of discrete facts; it means learning how to find, analyze, and use information in adaptive ways. It doesn't mean content doesn't matter either - just that our decisions about which content to teach (and why) should be made at the school level, by the people who know students best - their teachers. Neither does it mean we should throw up our hands and say there are certain things we just can't measure. http://mc2paedia.wikispaces.com/habits
I believe we have a responsibility to ensure that, say, a school in California and a school in Mississippi are reaching for the same golden ring. Common standards would be useful, therefore, but they must be aspirational, not basic. They must be guideposts, not hitching posts. And they must be indicators of wisdom that students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction.
Is there a set of core skills, like literacy or basic math skills that you feel is important to someone fresh out of school and looking for a job?
I spoke to this a bit in the previous question, but I'll get more specific by using the example of a school in NH where the curriculum is organized around seventeen skills (the school calls them 'habits') of mind and being. Content is one of several ways - professional internships, wilderness treks, and shared governance are others - through which the school helps young people cultivate these core skills, including habits as elusive as "collaboration" and "quality work." http://mc2paedia.wikispaces.com/habits
I'm not suggesting this school's set should become the requirement for all schools - just that it is vital to decide as a school community what core skills you want your graduates to acquire, and to then work backwards from those skills to ensure that your school's curricula and activities are all aligned to help young people develop accordingly. Short of this, as it has been said before, any road will get you there.
I am respectful of everyone learning at his own pace, yet I know of someone in a Democratic school that is 15 years old and cannot yet read. I am very uncomfortable with that. I feel like that child has missed out on years of beauty, learning, independence - the very thing that Democratic/Open schools are supposed to nurture. Can you comment on that?
This is the central riddle I try to answer in my forthcoming book, American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community. The crux of the problem is that many schools are unaware of a fundamental tension that exists in all of us - on one hand, there is the irresistible, universal human impulse for freedom - and for feeling in control of our own destiny and determining the shape of the world around us. And on the other hand, there is an equally pressing human desire for structure, safety and a sense of order to the world.
These two universal needs – for freedom on one hand, and structure on the other – are particularly relevant to our nation’s school leaders, who must strike the right balance between the two in order to create healthy, high-functioning learning environments. And yet in my years as an educator, I have witnessed scores of schools that choose, consciously or unconsciously, to value one of these needs at the expense of the other. In some schools, like the one you described, students are given too much freedom, and adults end up abdicating their responsibility to serve as authoritative guides for the learning process. In others, schools provide too much structure, and adults end up becoming authoritarian presences who stifle student engagement and self-discovery.
We do not need to choose. It is possible – indeed, essential – to find the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure. In fact, research confirms that when school leaders do so, they create optimal conditions for student learning, motivation and engagement.
Now, more than ever, our country needs these sorts of schools. We need schools that provide young people with well-structured spaces in which to discover who they are and what they care deeply about. We need schools where adults prepare students for active citizenship and the 21st century workplace. And we need schools to reinforce democratic practices that extend beyond the school’s walls, helping adults unite behind the shared belief that all children deserve to be seen and heard. But before that vision can become a reality, we must ensure that the central elements of our social covenant are also in place in our schools: a clear sense of structure and shared identity on one hand, and an unwavering commitment to individual freedom on the other. And that's a very specific leadership skill, and one that isn't necessarily a part of most training programs today.
In the work world, if we are lucky, we get to choose which tasks to do, not whether or not to do a task. For example, Terri Gross, the host of Fresh Air on NPR gets to interview all sorts of interesting people. She can choose who to interview, but she doesn¹t get to to choose whether or not to interview someone she doesn¹t get to keep her job if she doesn¹t do something. Some schools give their students a lot of liberty. How does his much liberty prepare a person for much less of it in the work world?
In schools that don't have the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure, kids are sometimes not prepared well for the world beyond those walls. This is why it's so important for those of us committed to democratic practice to become experts in organizational change theory, systems thinking, etc. It isn't enough to just tell kids they have rights. Jim Collins has a good way to put this, even though he was talking about successful businesses. “Disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and take disciplined action – operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities – this is the cornerstone of a culture that creates greatness.” The same holds true for schools.
Without experience or much knowledge of the world about us, we don't know what we don't know. How do you expose children to new ideas, other cultures, the history of the world, the wonders of the universe and still preserve their freedom to choose what they want to learn?
The learning process is the process of personal transformation. It's the chrysalis, the experience of developing the knowledge and skills to use one's unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.
So the way you expose children to new ideas, cultures, and wonders is by aligning every aspect of your school to the shared goal of providing a healthy, high-functioning, supportive, relationship-driven culture of learning - one in which adults provide professional guidance and simple structures that help young people discover their passions and their inner voices. Once that is in place, the rest will take care of itself.
How does a Democratic school capitalize on the collective knowledge of our culture, for example our elders, our experts in a given field, our authors?
In short by creating a legitimate democratic learning community.
Myles Horton, the founder of the Highlander adult education schools that helped train activists like Rosa Parks, put it this way: “I think it’s important to understand that the quality of the process you use to get to a place determines the ends, so when you want to build a democratic society, you have to act democratically in every way. . . . When you believe in a democratic society, you must provide a setting for education that is democratic.”
Once such a culture is established, it's inevitable that the spirit of appreciative inquiry that is at the heart of democracy will ensure a steady stream of new ideas, opinions, experts, etc. This is because when we allow all voices to be heard, and when we engender a respectful exchange of ideas, we invite the creative power of “civil” friction. “One of the most reliable indicators of a team that is continually learning is the visible conflict of ideas,” Peter Senge explains. “In great teams conflict becomes productive. There may, and often will, be conflict around the vision. In fact, the essence of the ‘visioning’ process lies in the gradual emergence of a shared vision from different personal visions. . . . Conflict becomes, in effect, part of the ongoing dialogue.”
Identifying your own strengths, weaknesses, and interests comes from continually coming into contact with people, ideas and subjects, especially those previously unfamiliar to us. How does a Democratic School provide this environment for self-knowledge?
C. Otto Scharmer, a senior lecturer at MIT and an expert in organizational learning, offers a useful metaphor for the deeper level of understanding and awareness you describe. Scharmer, who grew up on a farm in Germany remembers his father teaching him to see the fields they tilled with a wider lens. “Each field, he explained to me, has two aspects: the visible, what we see above the surface, and the invisible, or what is below the surface. The quality of the yield – the visible result – is a function of the quality of the soil, of those elements of the field that are mostly invisible to the eye.”
Scharmer believes we should see “social fields” the same way. “Social fields are the grounding condition, the living soil from which grows that which only later becomes visible to the eye. And just as every good farmer focuses attention on sustaining and enhancing the quality of the soil, every good organizational leader focuses attention on sustaining and enhancing the quality of the social field – the ‘farm’ in which every responsible leader works day in and day out.”
Understood this way, the most “visible” aspects of a school culture are the things parents, educators and students do, say, and see. Trophy cases. School bathrooms. Test scores. Cafeteria food. Uniforms. Policies. All are important indicators of a school’s quality and commitment to young people. And because these cultural indicators are visible, they end up receiving the bulk of our attention.
By contrast, the “invisible” parts of a school culture are far more elusive – and essential – to the cultivation of a healthy learning environment. Scharmer describes these features as the inner conditions from which parents, educators and students operate with each other. Our hopes and fears. Our emotions. The quality of our relationships with each other. The issues we have informally agreed never to discuss.
These factors are the deepest determinants of a school’s success (or failure) at creating a high-functioning school. And yet precisely because they are invisible (and so much harder to work on), they tend not to factor into most school improvement plans.
The central challenge in any organizational culture, therefore, is to help people become more adept at different ways of seeing – and of being seen. “We need to learn to attend to both dimensions simultaneously,” says Scharmer. “What we say, see, and do (our visible realm), and the inner place from which we operate (the invisible realm, in which our sources of attention reside and from which they operate).”
Attending to both dimensions – and balancing individual and group needs – is an essential goal for any organization. When a school finds the right balance in its organizational culture, it encourages all people to discover the power and uniqueness of their own voices. It helps young people chart a navigable path on their ongoing journeys of personal development. It helps members of the school community foster more meaningful, trusting relationships with each other. And it turns the old maxim about young people on its head, by creating a learning environment based on the belief that all children deserve to be seen and heard.
Sometimes growth comes from doing things we don't like to do, or through continual practice or effort. How does a Democratic School nurture important qualities like resilience, mastery, persistence and the like?
The short answer is it doesn't - unless the school is intentionally set up as a place that welcomes "civil friction," and an environment that prepares people to feel comfortable with the discomfort of competing ideas.
This idea is not new - it's the core idea behind the First Amendment. And at the heart of that spirit is a framework for civil friction that my former colleagues at the First Amendment Center call the “Three R’s”:
• Rights: The First Amendment’s guarantee to protect freedom of conscience is a precious, fundamental and inalienable right for all. Every effort should be made in public schools to protect the consciences of all people.
• Responsibilities: Central to the notion of the common good is the recognition that the First Amendment’s five freedoms (religion, speech, press, assembly, petition) are universal rights joined to a universal duty to respect the rights of others. Rights are best guarded and responsibilities best exercised when each person and group guards for all others those rights they wish guarded for themselves.
• Respect: Conflict and debate are vital to democracy. Yet if controversies about freedom in schools are to reflect the highest wisdom of the First Amendment and advance the best interest of the nation, how we debate, and not only what we debate, is critical.
These are the ground rules of our democracy. Properly understood and applied, they are equally useful for our public schools.
Meghan McCain recently got slammed for not having an encyclopedic knowledge of history, when she admitted to not knowing much about a certain historic event. While she did inadvisably blame her lack of knowledge on her youth, it begs the question: what *should* a child should know when he graduates from high school?
I am less interested in mandating what a child should know than I am in exploring what s/he should understand and be able to do. As I wrote in a recent Huffington Post op-ed <http://cli.gs/hJUVPp> , if our goal is to prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace, the standards we pursue should be whatever young people need most to be successful in college and the workplace. And in today's world, although young graduates certainly need a foundation of content knowledge, the greater measure of their long-term success will be the extent to which they learn to use their minds well.
Using one's mind well means more than just acquiring large numbers of discrete facts; it means learning how to find, analyze, and use information in adaptive ways. It doesn't mean content doesn't matter either - just that our decisions about which content to teach (and why) should be made at the school level, by the people who know students best - their teachers. Neither does it mean we should throw up our hands and say there are certain things we just can't measure. http://mc2paedia.wikispaces.com/habits
I believe we have a responsibility to ensure that, say, a school in California and a school in Mississippi are reaching for the same golden ring. Common standards would be useful, therefore, but they must be aspirational, not basic. They must be guideposts, not hitching posts. And they must be indicators of wisdom that students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction.
Is there a set of core skills, like literacy or basic math skills that you feel is important to someone fresh out of school and looking for a job?
I spoke to this a bit in the previous question, but I'll get more specific by using the example of a school in NH where the curriculum is organized around seventeen skills (the school calls them 'habits') of mind and being. Content is one of several ways - professional internships, wilderness treks, and shared governance are others - through which the school helps young people cultivate these core skills, including habits as elusive as "collaboration" and "quality work." http://mc2paedia.wikispaces.com/habits
I'm not suggesting this school's set should become the requirement for all schools - just that it is vital to decide as a school community what core skills you want your graduates to acquire, and to then work backwards from those skills to ensure that your school's curricula and activities are all aligned to help young people develop accordingly. Short of this, as it has been said before, any road will get you there.
I am respectful of everyone learning at his own pace, yet I know of someone in a Democratic school that is 15 years old and cannot yet read. I am very uncomfortable with that. I feel like that child has missed out on years of beauty, learning, independence - the very thing that Democratic/Open schools are supposed to nurture. Can you comment on that?
This is the central riddle I try to answer in my forthcoming book, American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community. The crux of the problem is that many schools are unaware of a fundamental tension that exists in all of us - on one hand, there is the irresistible, universal human impulse for freedom - and for feeling in control of our own destiny and determining the shape of the world around us. And on the other hand, there is an equally pressing human desire for structure, safety and a sense of order to the world.
These two universal needs – for freedom on one hand, and structure on the other – are particularly relevant to our nation’s school leaders, who must strike the right balance between the two in order to create healthy, high-functioning learning environments. And yet in my years as an educator, I have witnessed scores of schools that choose, consciously or unconsciously, to value one of these needs at the expense of the other. In some schools, like the one you described, students are given too much freedom, and adults end up abdicating their responsibility to serve as authoritative guides for the learning process. In others, schools provide too much structure, and adults end up becoming authoritarian presences who stifle student engagement and self-discovery.
We do not need to choose. It is possible – indeed, essential – to find the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure. In fact, research confirms that when school leaders do so, they create optimal conditions for student learning, motivation and engagement.
Now, more than ever, our country needs these sorts of schools. We need schools that provide young people with well-structured spaces in which to discover who they are and what they care deeply about. We need schools where adults prepare students for active citizenship and the 21st century workplace. And we need schools to reinforce democratic practices that extend beyond the school’s walls, helping adults unite behind the shared belief that all children deserve to be seen and heard. But before that vision can become a reality, we must ensure that the central elements of our social covenant are also in place in our schools: a clear sense of structure and shared identity on one hand, and an unwavering commitment to individual freedom on the other. And that's a very specific leadership skill, and one that isn't necessarily a part of most training programs today.
In the work world, if we are lucky, we get to choose which tasks to do, not whether or not to do a task. For example, Terri Gross, the host of Fresh Air on NPR gets to interview all sorts of interesting people. She can choose who to interview, but she doesn¹t get to to choose whether or not to interview someone she doesn¹t get to keep her job if she doesn¹t do something. Some schools give their students a lot of liberty. How does his much liberty prepare a person for much less of it in the work world?
In schools that don't have the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure, kids are sometimes not prepared well for the world beyond those walls. This is why it's so important for those of us committed to democratic practice to become experts in organizational change theory, systems thinking, etc. It isn't enough to just tell kids they have rights. Jim Collins has a good way to put this, even though he was talking about successful businesses. “Disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and take disciplined action – operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities – this is the cornerstone of a culture that creates greatness.” The same holds true for schools.
Without experience or much knowledge of the world about us, we don't know what we don't know. How do you expose children to new ideas, other cultures, the history of the world, the wonders of the universe and still preserve their freedom to choose what they want to learn?
The learning process is the process of personal transformation. It's the chrysalis, the experience of developing the knowledge and skills to use one's unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.
So the way you expose children to new ideas, cultures, and wonders is by aligning every aspect of your school to the shared goal of providing a healthy, high-functioning, supportive, relationship-driven culture of learning - one in which adults provide professional guidance and simple structures that help young people discover their passions and their inner voices. Once that is in place, the rest will take care of itself.
How does a Democratic school capitalize on the collective knowledge of our culture, for example our elders, our experts in a given field, our authors?
In short by creating a legitimate democratic learning community.
Myles Horton, the founder of the Highlander adult education schools that helped train activists like Rosa Parks, put it this way: “I think it’s important to understand that the quality of the process you use to get to a place determines the ends, so when you want to build a democratic society, you have to act democratically in every way. . . . When you believe in a democratic society, you must provide a setting for education that is democratic.”
Once such a culture is established, it's inevitable that the spirit of appreciative inquiry that is at the heart of democracy will ensure a steady stream of new ideas, opinions, experts, etc. This is because when we allow all voices to be heard, and when we engender a respectful exchange of ideas, we invite the creative power of “civil” friction. “One of the most reliable indicators of a team that is continually learning is the visible conflict of ideas,” Peter Senge explains. “In great teams conflict becomes productive. There may, and often will, be conflict around the vision. In fact, the essence of the ‘visioning’ process lies in the gradual emergence of a shared vision from different personal visions. . . . Conflict becomes, in effect, part of the ongoing dialogue.”
Identifying your own strengths, weaknesses, and interests comes from continually coming into contact with people, ideas and subjects, especially those previously unfamiliar to us. How does a Democratic School provide this environment for self-knowledge?
C. Otto Scharmer, a senior lecturer at MIT and an expert in organizational learning, offers a useful metaphor for the deeper level of understanding and awareness you describe. Scharmer, who grew up on a farm in Germany remembers his father teaching him to see the fields they tilled with a wider lens. “Each field, he explained to me, has two aspects: the visible, what we see above the surface, and the invisible, or what is below the surface. The quality of the yield – the visible result – is a function of the quality of the soil, of those elements of the field that are mostly invisible to the eye.”
Scharmer believes we should see “social fields” the same way. “Social fields are the grounding condition, the living soil from which grows that which only later becomes visible to the eye. And just as every good farmer focuses attention on sustaining and enhancing the quality of the soil, every good organizational leader focuses attention on sustaining and enhancing the quality of the social field – the ‘farm’ in which every responsible leader works day in and day out.”
Understood this way, the most “visible” aspects of a school culture are the things parents, educators and students do, say, and see. Trophy cases. School bathrooms. Test scores. Cafeteria food. Uniforms. Policies. All are important indicators of a school’s quality and commitment to young people. And because these cultural indicators are visible, they end up receiving the bulk of our attention.
By contrast, the “invisible” parts of a school culture are far more elusive – and essential – to the cultivation of a healthy learning environment. Scharmer describes these features as the inner conditions from which parents, educators and students operate with each other. Our hopes and fears. Our emotions. The quality of our relationships with each other. The issues we have informally agreed never to discuss.
These factors are the deepest determinants of a school’s success (or failure) at creating a high-functioning school. And yet precisely because they are invisible (and so much harder to work on), they tend not to factor into most school improvement plans.
The central challenge in any organizational culture, therefore, is to help people become more adept at different ways of seeing – and of being seen. “We need to learn to attend to both dimensions simultaneously,” says Scharmer. “What we say, see, and do (our visible realm), and the inner place from which we operate (the invisible realm, in which our sources of attention reside and from which they operate).”
Attending to both dimensions – and balancing individual and group needs – is an essential goal for any organization. When a school finds the right balance in its organizational culture, it encourages all people to discover the power and uniqueness of their own voices. It helps young people chart a navigable path on their ongoing journeys of personal development. It helps members of the school community foster more meaningful, trusting relationships with each other. And it turns the old maxim about young people on its head, by creating a learning environment based on the belief that all children deserve to be seen and heard.
Sometimes growth comes from doing things we don't like to do, or through continual practice or effort. How does a Democratic School nurture important qualities like resilience, mastery, persistence and the like?
The short answer is it doesn't - unless the school is intentionally set up as a place that welcomes "civil friction," and an environment that prepares people to feel comfortable with the discomfort of competing ideas.
This idea is not new - it's the core idea behind the First Amendment. And at the heart of that spirit is a framework for civil friction that my former colleagues at the First Amendment Center call the “Three R’s”:
• Rights: The First Amendment’s guarantee to protect freedom of conscience is a precious, fundamental and inalienable right for all. Every effort should be made in public schools to protect the consciences of all people.
• Responsibilities: Central to the notion of the common good is the recognition that the First Amendment’s five freedoms (religion, speech, press, assembly, petition) are universal rights joined to a universal duty to respect the rights of others. Rights are best guarded and responsibilities best exercised when each person and group guards for all others those rights they wish guarded for themselves.
• Respect: Conflict and debate are vital to democracy. Yet if controversies about freedom in schools are to reflect the highest wisdom of the First Amendment and advance the best interest of the nation, how we debate, and not only what we debate, is critical.
These are the ground rules of our democracy. Properly understood and applied, they are equally useful for our public schools.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Chicago Arts Partnership in Education - Bringing Integrated Arts to Schools - an Interview with Amy Rasmussen
Amy Rasmussen is the Executive Director of Chicago Arts Partnership in Education (CAPE) and is responsible for financial management, marketing, and organizational planning. Amy joined CAPE in October 2000 CAPE after working with The Chicago Chamber Musicians for six years. Amy holds an M. A. in Arts Entertainment and Media Management from Columbia College and a B. A. in Music from DePaul University. She currently serves on the advisory committee for the Chicago Arts Learning Initiative. I caught up with Amy to ask her about CAPE.
What is the mission of the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education and what does it do for schools?
CAPE’s mission is to improve student learning through the arts by improving students’ creative capacity and critical thinking skills through the arts. CAPE’s primary strategy is to partner closely with teachers and schools. CAPE works collaboratively with teaching artists in Chicago and beyond to bring more ideas into the schools. We recognize that if this initiative is to be sustainable it must impact adults in the building and the system within which we all work, not just the kids. We provide support for educators, working with them on development and curriculum design. We have seen substantial growth with teachers’ capacity to serve as leaders in school. For example, traditionally arts teachers serve as preps teachers. They get kids for 40 minutes once a week for half the year. We work with teachers to help them develop their leadership skills. They become curriculum designers and integrators, and become professional development providers in their own building. With our approach there is inter-faculty collaboration and collaboration with teaching artists and arts organizations. Chicago is a major cultural capital, and everyone wants to work in schools and support arts education. This works best when teachers and principals know how to negotiate partnerships that will best serve the needs of the students, school and community.
How does music help to develop physical, intellectual, and emotional development?
I am an oboe and guitar player and, in my experience, music study and performance is a different way to think. It facilitates the use of a different part of the brain. Kids in school need to develop different ways of thinking. I know when I create music, I feel energized and creative long after I put the instrument down. There are countless anecdotes of kids not doing well in other subjects and then they pick up an instrument and it changes them. Music allows you to express in different way. Music definitely impacts social and emotional development. When you feel better and you have ownership of your capacities it correlates to better school performance.
Young children can gain exposure to music with singing and listening to songs. How early can children learn instruments?
I am a big advocate of early music – music education starts at birth! As early as age three, children can be encouraged to try an instrument or can be encouraged to listen to music or see a concert. The goal is not necessarily to develop a child prodigy, but to develop literacy in the broadest sense, recognizing patterns, developing language – in order to develop those pathways of thinking. It should not just be about listening; rather it should be actively creative.
There are many authors and innovators (Daniel Pink, Sir Kenneth Robinson, Richard Florida, to name a few) that are talking about creativity and imagination being among the most important qualities in our economic success going forward. How will music instruction play a part in that vision?
It’s huge! I think that our economy is totally tied to creativity and innovation. In order to train people to be creative and innovative they have to develop the kinds of skills that are taught through the arts. I think that kids need exposure to all kinds of contemporary art making, focused on concepts and big ideas. Art making shifts between the literary and the aesthetic to the conceptual and the abstract. People who are working in innovation and developing new businesses, products, or disciplines need to be able to move between all of those ways of thinking. They need to move between frameworks and concrete actions. When learning a piece of music, like a sonata from the very beginning it doesn’t quite make sense. At the beginning you are just getting fingers to go to the right notes at the right time. Later you get to the bigger concepts, like “what was the composer trying to say with this piece?” Later still you interpret the piece through your own lens. Not enough learning takes place in that way! Kids studying the arts learn the creative process and then create their own thing.
How does music help with balance in life?
Schools are becoming more aware of this issue and are endeavoring to exercise different parts of the brain. You physically feel different after playing music. It refocuses energy in a completely different way allowing you to go on and accomplish other things well afterwards.
We’ve seen erosion in arts education, including music in our nation’s schools. What has been the consequence of this?
Look at the economy. I think the public greatly underestimates the connection between decreased quality in school and the decreasing economy. The challenge is that increased quality in education does not have an immediate payoff – there is no immediate economic benefit, this is why it is so difficult for our political leaders to choose to invest in high-quality education. Hopefully, President Obama will inspire more long-term thinking in this area.
What can a school with a limited budget do to offer some form of music education?
In Chicago there is quite a music scene. There are six or seven universities with music programs and many people to teach and provide music. It requires leadership at school to find these resources and put it together in a cohesive way. Parents need to think about 24/7 education rather than 30 hours in school. While we all would love for each school to offer a comprehensive music education, we know that it is not always going to happen in the deepest, richest way. A parent should question what his or her child is getting in school and where else can s/he go to get more. There are community music schools and programs and local arts organizations. Parents can form groups to decide what they want to advocate for in their school. There is a school here that had a part-time music program and they wanted a full-time program, so they raised money for it. Is it the best way to get this in place or even ethical? I think it is the state’s responsibility, but the parents were motivated and inspired. There are resources available but it takes the leadership of parents and heads of schools to pull them together.
How can the arts integrated into a curriculum provide a context for learning history, science, math and other subjects?
CAPE’s approach to arts integration is a multi-faceted strategy that addresses students’ academic and social challenges. The organizing principle of CAPE’s model is the engagement of professional teaching artists who collaborate with classroom and/or arts teachers, as well as school leadership and parents to plan, document and implement arts-integrated learning opportunities for students. CAPE’s model of instruction begins with teachers’, teaching artists’, parents’, and students’ questions about learning. This methodology is inspired by Dewey’s theory of education, which holds that optimal learning and human development and growth occur when people are confronted with substantive, real problems to solve, and that curriculum and instruction should be based on integrated, community-based tasks and activities that engage learners in forms of pragmatic action that have real value in the world. The instructional process includes Inquiry, Documentation, Assessment, Evidence, and Reflection.
This inquiry approach to curriculum development creates common themes and ideas across networks of classrooms and schools, and creates opportunities for collaboration and sharing of successful practices. This process does not put in place a set of pre-designed activities, rather it creates a common approach for addressing curriculum content and standards, with ample freedom for creativity, and room for developing a wide-range of effective teaching strategies based on the needs of individual learners.
CAPE’s instructional methodology is based on its 17 years of practice and research on effective teaching and learning in and through the arts. CAPE’s achievements are documented in the landmark publication Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts On Learning, released in 1999 as well as cataloged at www.capeweb.org
Some specific examples:
The Green Unit at Agassiz Elementary School focused on increasing students’ knowledge of renewable energy and empowering students toward social action through the visual arts. Students were given the opportunity to explore, investigate and develop strategies to improve environmental behaviors at school and at home. Students also investigated how we power our cities and developed ideas for changes. The curriculum included science experiments with plants, soil, energy, light, heat and electricity. Students toured Agassiz School with their school’s engineer for a hands-on experience of vocabulary words like “boiler,” “compressor,” “generator.” The students developed a collective visual project that incorporated many of the ideas of renewable energy and energy conservation; expressed through photography, collage, painting with watercolors. “SOLAR TOWN” was a miniature city installed on the front lawn of the school made of small solar-powered houses that stayed aglow through the nights. Students documented their own work throughout the unit with poetry wheels, journals and digital cameras. Students also created a questionnaire and mailbox as part of the installation and asked for feedback from neighbors and passersby.
In the “INVENTORS MEET THE MEDIA” unit, 4th grade students from Mark Sheridan Academy compared processes and character traits of both inventors and video artists through creating short films. The fine arts teacher worked with the fourth graders on camera technology, shots, angles and artistic expression with film. Students practiced with digital still cameras and eventually camcorders. Students then researched specific inventors and created biographies about the inventors’ lives and inventions. This research served as a springboard for the content of the student videos.
After initial shots, students watched the footage using a rubric they created to make decisions about what to change, what takes they wanted to cut and what effects were needed. The teachers and teaching artists also used this rubric to evaluate student performances, filming technique, and content/storyline, but also to determine how well the students were able to self-assess their work.
How can parents encourage a love and learning of music outside of school?
This is done by example. When parents get excited about it, the kids get it. Parents can provide the opportunities for learning and enrichment. My parents let me take any class or course I wanted. I experimented with all sorts of courses, like the arts, great books, and a computer class. Eventually something sticks. Be open to all of the possibilities and opportunities.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The Renegade Lunch Lady - An Interview with Ann Cooper
Chef Ann Cooper calls herself the renegade lunch lady. She works to transform school cafeterias into culinary classrooms for students and change school districts’ policies on food spending in favor of foods that are fresh, regional, organic, seasonal and sustainable. Ann has revamped and reformed public school cafeterias in New York, California and now Boulder, Colorado, where I caught up with her recently to talk about her work.
What are the challenges of being a renegade lunch lady? Do you encounter a lot of resistance?
The challenges in Berkeley as well as Boulder are food, finance, human resources and marketing. For finance, it’s about having less than a $1.00 a day to pay for food for a child’s lunch and for facilities- what to do when there is no kitchen available. For human resources it is about how to get staff in place that knows how to cook, not just serve frozen chicken nuggets. And for marketing, how do you get the kids to eat it.
How does school lunch reform positively impact student health, behavior, motivation, and interest in learning?
Kids cannot learn if they are not well nourished. Adults and educators have known this forever, and in fact, that is how the school lunch program got started, because kids were hungry and couldn’t get through the school day without the food. Now our challenge is to feed kids good food. The obesity and diabetes crisis has exacerbated the whole thing.
Berkeley just finished a three-year study with UC Berkeley Center for Weight and Health, which will be coming out by beginning of 2010. For now, though, we know anecdotally that if kids are not well nourished they can't think, focus or behave. When you eliminate refined sugar and flour from their diet their behavior and focus improves dramatically.
Also, we now live in a country where two out of four meals are eaten in a car or in front of a screen. When do we socialize and sit down at a table and interact? We need to turn off the Wii, the iPhone, the computers, and the TV and actually communicate. That sense of vital growth and learning is lost if you don't have it at the table.
How can your work give students a sense of context or a frame of reference in the study of math and science?
Gardening and cooking classes give hands-on, experiential learning and it educates in all kinds of curricula. For example, when planting, how much organic compost do you need in so many yards of dirt? That’s practical math and it can easily relate in similar ways to science and other studies.
How do kids respond when allowed to grow or prepare their food?
Although kids are not involved in food preparation in the cafeteria, they do have cooking classes and gardening and they can eat the food they produce. Experiential learning is important. When kids get to have some power over their choices, it gives them a sense of importance and ownership over what is their food.
What does a kitchen look like in your ideal school and who is in it?
We don't have kitchens in all schools; we have centralized production kitchens. They look like real food service operations with equipment that is dedicated to cooking from scratch. The kitchens are staffed with skilled culinarians and other people that care about the preparation of food for kids.
How can parents and communities get renegade lunches for their students?
Every school district has a wellness policy starting in September of 2006. Ask to see that and then eat lunch in one of the schools to see if that policy is being followed. Get like-minded parents together to advocate for better food for our kids. Parents have tremendous power. They elect the school board members so they really can make a difference.
I think what is important is that we need to make changes. We will either pay now for quality foods or we will pay later in a health care crisis. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has said that of the children born in the year 2000 one out of three Caucasians and one out of two Black and Hispanic people will have diabetes in their lifetimes, many by the time they graduate high school. They will be the first in our country’s history to die at a younger age than their parents. With all the money we spend on the war and corporate bailouts, we only spend $8.5 million on feeding 30 million kids, which is less than a dollar per student spent on food. When we live in a country where people spend $5 on their morning coffee, it seems reasonable to spend more on quality foods for children. That really has to change.
What are the challenges of being a renegade lunch lady? Do you encounter a lot of resistance?
The challenges in Berkeley as well as Boulder are food, finance, human resources and marketing. For finance, it’s about having less than a $1.00 a day to pay for food for a child’s lunch and for facilities- what to do when there is no kitchen available. For human resources it is about how to get staff in place that knows how to cook, not just serve frozen chicken nuggets. And for marketing, how do you get the kids to eat it.
How does school lunch reform positively impact student health, behavior, motivation, and interest in learning?
Kids cannot learn if they are not well nourished. Adults and educators have known this forever, and in fact, that is how the school lunch program got started, because kids were hungry and couldn’t get through the school day without the food. Now our challenge is to feed kids good food. The obesity and diabetes crisis has exacerbated the whole thing.
Berkeley just finished a three-year study with UC Berkeley Center for Weight and Health, which will be coming out by beginning of 2010. For now, though, we know anecdotally that if kids are not well nourished they can't think, focus or behave. When you eliminate refined sugar and flour from their diet their behavior and focus improves dramatically.
Also, we now live in a country where two out of four meals are eaten in a car or in front of a screen. When do we socialize and sit down at a table and interact? We need to turn off the Wii, the iPhone, the computers, and the TV and actually communicate. That sense of vital growth and learning is lost if you don't have it at the table.
How can your work give students a sense of context or a frame of reference in the study of math and science?
Gardening and cooking classes give hands-on, experiential learning and it educates in all kinds of curricula. For example, when planting, how much organic compost do you need in so many yards of dirt? That’s practical math and it can easily relate in similar ways to science and other studies.
How do kids respond when allowed to grow or prepare their food?
Although kids are not involved in food preparation in the cafeteria, they do have cooking classes and gardening and they can eat the food they produce. Experiential learning is important. When kids get to have some power over their choices, it gives them a sense of importance and ownership over what is their food.
What does a kitchen look like in your ideal school and who is in it?
We don't have kitchens in all schools; we have centralized production kitchens. They look like real food service operations with equipment that is dedicated to cooking from scratch. The kitchens are staffed with skilled culinarians and other people that care about the preparation of food for kids.
How can parents and communities get renegade lunches for their students?
Every school district has a wellness policy starting in September of 2006. Ask to see that and then eat lunch in one of the schools to see if that policy is being followed. Get like-minded parents together to advocate for better food for our kids. Parents have tremendous power. They elect the school board members so they really can make a difference.
I think what is important is that we need to make changes. We will either pay now for quality foods or we will pay later in a health care crisis. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has said that of the children born in the year 2000 one out of three Caucasians and one out of two Black and Hispanic people will have diabetes in their lifetimes, many by the time they graduate high school. They will be the first in our country’s history to die at a younger age than their parents. With all the money we spend on the war and corporate bailouts, we only spend $8.5 million on feeding 30 million kids, which is less than a dollar per student spent on food. When we live in a country where people spend $5 on their morning coffee, it seems reasonable to spend more on quality foods for children. That really has to change.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Education Focused on Today, not Tomorrow
Daniel Bigler is my guest blogger today. Daniel's blog can be found at http://www.danielsaurus.com/
I don't think ever before in our history as America have we rested so much or asked for so much from a single system. It's as if education, if only we could unravel its mysteries and at last get it right, will solve all of the problems of the future, problems whose prospects so horrify us today. We hold education high, with great expectations, and perhaps rightly so – its impact can be great, it's potential unlimited. Education can dramatically change what Tomorrow looks like. But with such promise comes a hefty burden – an encumbrance that comes in the form of the diligent many, with all their priorities to emphasize, proposals to make, suggestions to offer for education.
Alfie Kohn recently made a "simple proposal": http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/22century.htm of his own for crafting an Education that truly addresses our future as a society:
"Many school administrators, and even more people who aren’t educators but are kind enough to offer their advice about how our field can be improved, have emphasized the need for “21st-century schools” that teach “21st-century skills.” But is this really enough, particularly now that our adversaries (in other words, people who live in other countries) may be thinking along the same lines? Unfortunately, no. Beginning immediately, therefore, we must begin to implement 22nd-century education.
What does that phrase mean? How can we possibly know what skills will be needed so far in the future? Such challenges from skeptics – the same kind of people who ask annoying questions about other cutting-edge ideas, including “brain-based education” – are to be expected. But if we’re confident enough to describe what education should be like throughout the 21st century – that is, what will be needed over the next 90 years or so – it’s not much of a stretch to reach a few decades beyond that."
Kohn jests, delightfully poking fun at much of the hyperbole surrounding the promise of education. But I'm afraid he's far too right in his underlying sentiment: In facing the future, I'm afraid we've become obsessed with fixes. With proposals. With plans.
There are too many – especially those wonderful civil servants making the decisions, in the upper-echelons of the American public education system who feel that it's their job to fix things and come up with all the answers. George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" initiative might have left our system wounded and our schools overwhelmed, but now the promises of a new start – a new beginning, with exactly what's needed to fix the system – are commonplace. We need more funding, more accountability, more planning. These are the solutions to fulfill the unfunded mandate of NCLB and rechristen education as the means for a golden future.
But in reality, these offer only limited hope because they still fail to address the real problem.
To discover the problem – and find the answer to it – I think we have to fundamentally reconsider the philosophy of the entire education system. What is the role of education in society and how has it changed throughout time? Why is it that our classrooms today remain fundamentally unchanged from the classrooms of the early 1900s
It's easy to forget the roots of the educational system we know today – roots that began in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was then that we saw American public education emerge as a systematic movement, predominantly out of an industrial age mindset to accommodate what were largely and exclusively economic purposes. At the time there was a fairly linear, predictable path of economic progression allowing us to reasonably, though not completely judge what the future workforce would need to be like to accommodate it. And we assumed we knew how to engineer a given set of educational experiences to fill the social "deficits" of children, to get them "ready" for this unforeseen future. Education was then – as best articulated by the sociologist Émile Durkheim, whose writings were popular at the time – a way to maintain social order and cohesion, allowing society to control its own evolutionary trajectory and continually improve upon itself.
But the world has changed, and changes still. Of that simple fact there is no doubt. I could argue that the world has always been in flux, never as fully within our control as we expect, and thus education – at least in the Durkheimian sense – has always been on some deeper level inherently flawed.
Yet today, despite the radically accelerating technological and global change happening breathlessly all around us, the sheer unpredictability of the future, and an ever-flattening globalized economy with impacts we can't imagine, we remain more intent than ever on using education to fix tomorrow.
Author and teacher Ken Robinson quietly articulated this in his 2006 speech at the TED conference. "It's Education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue ... what the world will look like in five years time and yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary."
If we know anything about the future, it's that we can't truly know it or predict it. And who are we to say that we can craft a "21st Century Education" to match this that we do not know?
Robinson went on in his speech to make a compelling argument for the need for education to emphasize children's unique and extraordinary capacities for innovation and creativity – capacities he sees schools today as having done a remarkable job at squandering. Robinson believes, and rightly so I think, that "Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status."
Take away the expectations, the assumptions about the skill sets and knowledge children will need to be "ready" in for the future, the drive for a competitive edge in an unseen economy and we will be left simply with the children right in front of us and their natural creative capacity. Children, as we discover, are born with an insatiable spirit of inquiry and curiosity. The children in our classrooms now have an enormous ability for creative thinking, a keen willingness to make mistakes and to learn. It's only in our misguided efforts to ready kids and fill them with answers for tomorrow that they lose all these things.
What's truly ironic is that it is this creativity, this willingness to make mistakes that is at the heart of real economic innovation. We've educated it out of kids to satisfy the needs of the economy and society, but if it weren't for the outliers who escaped education's impact, we wouldn't have an economy or society today. We need to recognize this and choose to honor and respect children for their innate creative abilities by working with them to help develop these abilities. We need to let them ask questions, and spend our classroom time allowing them to explore their inquiries and think critically about every day problems and ideas they might be interested in. We need to build supportive communities around them, where children truly feel empowered to learn – where they truly feel they are valued as individuals and members of the community. We need to allow the world of the classroom to be oriented to their needs, and not some standard of the future.
Literacy and knowledge-building alone, implemented out of a desire to fill future deficits, will not prepare our children. To pay homage to John Dewey, education needs to align with the needs of each individual child – trusting in that child to serve as the system's center of gravity. Education needs to comes from those students in the classroom, rather than being systematically imposed on them from outside. We need a system oriented in the present instead of the future, an education that strengthens and upholds the creativity and curiosity children have today.
We need to pull education out of the future and put it back in the present. It's this philosophical shift, and this only, that will make the difference. A "21st Century Education" will always and continually fail, as long as it looks forward toward tomorrow. Only in meeting kids where they're at now and letting them explore the present can we help them truly develop the creative skills, love of learning, and spirit of innovation they'll need for the future.
That's my proposal for 21st Century Education.
I don't think ever before in our history as America have we rested so much or asked for so much from a single system. It's as if education, if only we could unravel its mysteries and at last get it right, will solve all of the problems of the future, problems whose prospects so horrify us today. We hold education high, with great expectations, and perhaps rightly so – its impact can be great, it's potential unlimited. Education can dramatically change what Tomorrow looks like. But with such promise comes a hefty burden – an encumbrance that comes in the form of the diligent many, with all their priorities to emphasize, proposals to make, suggestions to offer for education.
Alfie Kohn recently made a "simple proposal": http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/22century.htm of his own for crafting an Education that truly addresses our future as a society:
"Many school administrators, and even more people who aren’t educators but are kind enough to offer their advice about how our field can be improved, have emphasized the need for “21st-century schools” that teach “21st-century skills.” But is this really enough, particularly now that our adversaries (in other words, people who live in other countries) may be thinking along the same lines? Unfortunately, no. Beginning immediately, therefore, we must begin to implement 22nd-century education.
What does that phrase mean? How can we possibly know what skills will be needed so far in the future? Such challenges from skeptics – the same kind of people who ask annoying questions about other cutting-edge ideas, including “brain-based education” – are to be expected. But if we’re confident enough to describe what education should be like throughout the 21st century – that is, what will be needed over the next 90 years or so – it’s not much of a stretch to reach a few decades beyond that."
Kohn jests, delightfully poking fun at much of the hyperbole surrounding the promise of education. But I'm afraid he's far too right in his underlying sentiment: In facing the future, I'm afraid we've become obsessed with fixes. With proposals. With plans.
There are too many – especially those wonderful civil servants making the decisions, in the upper-echelons of the American public education system who feel that it's their job to fix things and come up with all the answers. George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" initiative might have left our system wounded and our schools overwhelmed, but now the promises of a new start – a new beginning, with exactly what's needed to fix the system – are commonplace. We need more funding, more accountability, more planning. These are the solutions to fulfill the unfunded mandate of NCLB and rechristen education as the means for a golden future.
But in reality, these offer only limited hope because they still fail to address the real problem.
To discover the problem – and find the answer to it – I think we have to fundamentally reconsider the philosophy of the entire education system. What is the role of education in society and how has it changed throughout time? Why is it that our classrooms today remain fundamentally unchanged from the classrooms of the early 1900s
It's easy to forget the roots of the educational system we know today – roots that began in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was then that we saw American public education emerge as a systematic movement, predominantly out of an industrial age mindset to accommodate what were largely and exclusively economic purposes. At the time there was a fairly linear, predictable path of economic progression allowing us to reasonably, though not completely judge what the future workforce would need to be like to accommodate it. And we assumed we knew how to engineer a given set of educational experiences to fill the social "deficits" of children, to get them "ready" for this unforeseen future. Education was then – as best articulated by the sociologist Émile Durkheim, whose writings were popular at the time – a way to maintain social order and cohesion, allowing society to control its own evolutionary trajectory and continually improve upon itself.
But the world has changed, and changes still. Of that simple fact there is no doubt. I could argue that the world has always been in flux, never as fully within our control as we expect, and thus education – at least in the Durkheimian sense – has always been on some deeper level inherently flawed.
Yet today, despite the radically accelerating technological and global change happening breathlessly all around us, the sheer unpredictability of the future, and an ever-flattening globalized economy with impacts we can't imagine, we remain more intent than ever on using education to fix tomorrow.
Author and teacher Ken Robinson quietly articulated this in his 2006 speech at the TED conference. "It's Education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue ... what the world will look like in five years time and yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary."
If we know anything about the future, it's that we can't truly know it or predict it. And who are we to say that we can craft a "21st Century Education" to match this that we do not know?
Robinson went on in his speech to make a compelling argument for the need for education to emphasize children's unique and extraordinary capacities for innovation and creativity – capacities he sees schools today as having done a remarkable job at squandering. Robinson believes, and rightly so I think, that "Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status."
Take away the expectations, the assumptions about the skill sets and knowledge children will need to be "ready" in for the future, the drive for a competitive edge in an unseen economy and we will be left simply with the children right in front of us and their natural creative capacity. Children, as we discover, are born with an insatiable spirit of inquiry and curiosity. The children in our classrooms now have an enormous ability for creative thinking, a keen willingness to make mistakes and to learn. It's only in our misguided efforts to ready kids and fill them with answers for tomorrow that they lose all these things.
What's truly ironic is that it is this creativity, this willingness to make mistakes that is at the heart of real economic innovation. We've educated it out of kids to satisfy the needs of the economy and society, but if it weren't for the outliers who escaped education's impact, we wouldn't have an economy or society today. We need to recognize this and choose to honor and respect children for their innate creative abilities by working with them to help develop these abilities. We need to let them ask questions, and spend our classroom time allowing them to explore their inquiries and think critically about every day problems and ideas they might be interested in. We need to build supportive communities around them, where children truly feel empowered to learn – where they truly feel they are valued as individuals and members of the community. We need to allow the world of the classroom to be oriented to their needs, and not some standard of the future.
Literacy and knowledge-building alone, implemented out of a desire to fill future deficits, will not prepare our children. To pay homage to John Dewey, education needs to align with the needs of each individual child – trusting in that child to serve as the system's center of gravity. Education needs to comes from those students in the classroom, rather than being systematically imposed on them from outside. We need a system oriented in the present instead of the future, an education that strengthens and upholds the creativity and curiosity children have today.
We need to pull education out of the future and put it back in the present. It's this philosophical shift, and this only, that will make the difference. A "21st Century Education" will always and continually fail, as long as it looks forward toward tomorrow. Only in meeting kids where they're at now and letting them explore the present can we help them truly develop the creative skills, love of learning, and spirit of innovation they'll need for the future.
That's my proposal for 21st Century Education.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The Magic of Montessori - an Interview with Nichole Holtvluwer
Nichole Holtvluwer has a way with children. Her gift has benefitted many families at the Montessori Academy of Colorado where she is a Directress. I asked Nichole to share her thoughts on the theory and practice of the Montessori model of education.
How did you come to be a Montessori Educator? What led you down that path?
I discovered Montessori in the winter of 2001 when I was 20 years old and utterly confused as to what I should do with my life.
One afternoon I opened up the phone book to the “Childcare” section and called every school in Denver on the list. The Montessori International Children’s House (TMICH) in Denver, CO happened to be the only place with positions open, and two week later I was hired on as an assistant in one of the toddler communities. I recall my first week as torture and constant question about why I had say yes to the position. Between toileting, lack of verbal communication and general chaos, toddlers, especially toddlers in a Montessori community, can be a challenge! But the second week my eyes opened up to the beauty and intelligence of the young child and forever I was changed. I was blessed with an amazing Directress who taught me all about the Montessori philosophy. It was a true serendipitous event, and lead me to my life calling.
After TMICH closed down due to financial problems I decided to return to college to pursue my early childhood education, attending Metro State College of Denver. Traditional education has never felt right for me, so after one semester I left Metro State and enrolled in the Association Montessori International Assistants to Infancy Course (Birth to Three Years) at the Montessori Institute of Denver studying under Judi Orion and Liz Hall. Not only did I learn and embody just about everything there is to know about the human from conception to three years old, I also learned a great deal about myself and the world.
I completed my Montessori training in 2004, and from there decided to take some time off and really get to know myself before becoming a Montessori Directress. I did some traveling, left Denver for awhile, but always knowing that Montessori was a part of me. Maria Montessori puts it best, saying, “It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.
Feeling confident and ready to put my all into a community I was hired at Fiddler’s Green Montessori in Greenwood Village, CO in 2006 as the Toddler Directress. Wanting more of a community feel at a school I left Fiddler’s Green and started work at the Montessori Academy of Colorado (MAC) in Denver, CO in 2007. I am currently one of four Toddler Directresses at MAC, with 15 children in my community ranging in age from 16 months to 3 years old. You will notice as you read on that I call it a “Montessori Community” rather than a “Classroom”. I feel deeply that Montessori is not only for the child, but also for all those who surround the child. Thus, a Community is what is being established. I have found my life calling through Montessori and feel blessed each day I walk into my Toddler Environment.
While I am a “Montessorian” through and through, I also have my own take, as all educators do, on the philosophy and pull a great deal of my strength as an educator from the way I see the world and the way I see the child in the world. I feel deeply that we need to make a 180 degree turn in or educational system, and am doing all I can to facilitate that change. As Maria Montessori said, "The child is much more spiritually elevated than is usually supposed. He often suffers, not from too much work, but work that is unworthy of him.”
What is the history of Montessori?
Maria Montessori was truly a miraculous woman, who through her life journey developed the most comprehensive, honest and true form of education for children, especially children under the age of six years old.
Through her observations of the child, she came to understand that it was not the adult who the child learned the majority from, but rather the environment they lived in. The adult in the Montessori Environment is considered another material with which the child constructs himself, independently. She came to this understanding after a great deal of education, struggle and experience.
Maria Montessori began her medical studies of mental and nervous diseases at the University of Rome in 1883 with great difficulty. Being a woman she was denied acceptance many times, but due to her persistence she eventually was accepted at the University where she became the first woman in Italy to receive a Master’s Degree in medicine in 1896.
Some of her first work was done in working with children in insane asylums. It was there that she found that the children were starved for experience, recognizing that their minds were not useless, just unused.
After continued studies, and her discovery of Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard and Edouard Seguin’s work with impaired children, Maria Montessori became convinced that education, not medicine, was the answer to helping children who were mentally impaired. She believed that the human mind is made to work and know and can not help but take in information about the surrounding environment. After seeing how well the impaired children whom she worked with learned, it lead Montessori to wonder how the same methods would work with children who were not impaired.
Montessori decided to change her course of direction, and began to focus on working with “normal” children who were not medically defined as “impaired”. Through her work with “normal” children, Montessori wondered how a bad mark in school could make a child clever? She concluded from this that the teacher’s role is to help guide, enlighten and awaken. She felt that the school is there to help, not judge.
At this time the Philanthropic Society of Rome was renovating a poor quarter of the city. The young children of this area had no where to go during the day, so a place was set aside were the children could go. Montessori was asked to set up an environment to help these children.
On January 6th, 1907 the first Casa dei Bambini was started by Maria Montessori. Montessori felt that if the children were to be happy here they must feel as though they belonged. The children were given the opportunity and guidance to care for their environment. Montessori had furniture made that was child-sized, along with the introduction of plants and flowers for the children to take care of. She also introduced to the children the idea of caring for themselves through washing their hands, brushing their teeth, their hair, etc. This gave the children a measure of independence from adults and through repetition the children were able to develop concentration and finally master the skill.
The idea of allowing the children to choose their own work came about one day when the cabinet containing all the materials, which was always locked, was left open. The children began to spontaneously choose their own work, without the assistance of the adult. From this point, the materials were never locked up again, and low shelves were built so that the children had this continued opportunity of choosing work independently.
The children began to show and convince Montessori that the child’s characteristics were different from their usual characteristics when they were given an environment that met their needs.
A great deal of Montessori’s work came about during World War II when she and her son, Mario were put on house arrest in India because of their Italian passports. India was ruled at the time by the British and considered Italy enemy ground. Montessori had recently stood up to and refused Mussolini’s desire to nationalize all the Montessori schools in Italy, so no political asylum was granted for Montessori and her son to return safely to Italy.
While in India Montessori and Mario lived on a compound/community of families where she spent most of her time observing the children of the community. It was here that Montessori wrote the Absorbent Mind, became interested in the child under three, and also developed the elementary curriculum.
In 1929 the Association Montessori International (AMI) was established to support Montessori’s work and ideas. The headquarters are currently in Amsterdam, with a US branch in Rochester, NY.
Maria Montessori ended her days in Holland after travel throughout the world to bring about a new form of education. She strived for peace, with the goal to bring to the general public the importance of education for peace, saying that it is “the young child who possesses the possibility for the construction of a new humanity”. In 1952, Maria Montessori passed away. On her tombstone is written, “I beg the dear all-powerful children to unite with me for the building of peace in Man and in the World.”
How does a Montessori classroom look and feel compared to a traditional classroom?
The main difference between a Montessori community and a traditional classroom is that in the Montessori Community the aim is to always “Follow the Child” rather than “Follow a Set Curriculum”. One of the ways that a Montessori program does this is by breaking down each community into mixed age groups, called the Montessori Age Groups:
Nido (Italian for “nest”): 6 weeks to 16 months
Toddler: 6 months to 2.5 - 3 years
Primary:2.5 - 3 to 6 years
Lower Elementary: 6 - 9 years
Upper Elementary: 9 - 12 years
Adolescence: 12 - 15 years
High School: 15 years
Montessori programs for high school students are rare, not only in the US, but around the world. It was Maria Montessori’s hope that a child who had grown up with the Montessori philosophy would enter a traditional high school and college with ease. There are some high schools in the US following Maria Montessori’s philosophy.
This mixed age range allows for each child not only to work at their own pace, but also gives the older children the opportunity to give lessons and help teach the younger children in the community. By following the child, we are seeing each child as they are, not where we think they should be. It is less determined by their specific age, but instead their individual growth.
As Montessorians, we see each child as an individual and thus allow for that individual to construct herself through the prepared environment that has been set up for them by the adult. As a Directress it is my mission to prepare an environment that is full of beautiful, natural, developmentally appropriate materials that will literally “call to the child” from the shelf to aid in their development. The children in a Montessori community are free to choose whatever they would like to work with, as well as receive lessons from a trained Directress on materials within the environment that will aid to the child’s growth of independence, and the integration of the will, movement, and intellect.
Many people opposed to the Montessori philosophy see the child as free to do whatever they so choose. While this is true, the children of the community also have limits to the freedom they are allowed. With too much freedom, a child feels abandoned, and with too many limits a child feels restrained. Montessori strives for a balance between the two: freedom AND Limits.
Unlike a traditional classroom, children in a Montessori community do not work from individual desks, but are free to work at a table or on a rug placed on the floor.
As I touched on earlier, the language in a Montessori community is always directed in a positive light. For example, if the child is standing on a chair, rather than telling the child to get down a Montessorian will simply tell the child that chairs are for sitting in. The results of working in a positive environment, one that is filled with “I Can!” changes the entire mentality of the community. Children who develop in an environment filled with positive reinforcement in turn absorb that positivity into their daily life.
Through her observations of children, Maria Montessori learned not only to follow the child, but also saw that preparing an environment where the child is set up to succeed resulted in a group of children who were confident, eager to learn and joyful with their surroundings.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of having the mixed ages in a classroom over the course of three years?
One of the most difficult tasks of any Montessorian, whether it be an infant directress or an elementary directress, is observing the child and knowing what task to lead them into to aid in their development. It can be quite difficult to pinpoint the exact task, at the exact moment for the exact child. This is the goal of any educator, and something that only comes after years of purposeful observation.
With a mixed age range, this task grows ever more difficult. Especially when there is a child wanting to work with a material that is above and beyond his developmental capacity. Maria Montessori saw this, and through her development of materials for the community, found that each set of materials could be worked with, by each age, in different ways. While a 3 year old may find great joy and development in the shape and sound of a letter, a 6 year old will then in turn write a sentence using that letter. And while a 2 year old may only be able to open and close a pair of scissors, the 3 year old can then cut paper using those same scissors. So through Maria Montessori’s countless hours of observation, and development of materials, she saw that each item could be used to aid in the development of the child, at whatever age and ability level they are at.
What I personally love the most about the mixed age group in a Montessori community is the growth of the child. The child enters the community like a foreigner, trying to find her footing, unknowing of the routine, and basically alone. While the child typically finds refuge in the adult at first, it is the older children who pave the way from the new, young child.
I’ll never forget a little boy, Charlie, who started in my community at 18 months. Charlie had never been in group care, and was totally freaked out by the experience at first. Charlie bonded with me at first, and came to me for comfort when he was feeling overwhelmed. As he found his footing, my oldest child at the time, Nate, took Charlie in and began to show him around the community, give him lessons, showed him how to set the table for snack, etc. At 2.5 years, Nate was guiding Charlie through the community. Charlie looked up to Nate and would speak of him at home. In turn, Nate took on a leadership role, sharing his knowledge of the community, which in turn was aiding to the development of his confidence.
How do you handle the more energetic children in your classroom with dignity and yet still bring order?
The first understanding of the energetic child is discovering where all this energy is coming from and having compassion for the child who wants and needs to move in order to construct their being.
Often the energy of the child is stemming from the lack and ability of natural movement. Our society has designed all these contraptions to “contain” the child. For the young child there is the crib, being swaddled, the walker, bouncy seat, high chair, etc. The lack of movement is appearing now in a new generation of children who are babysat by a television or video games, which is a “container” of sorts. While these containers make an adults life easy, they are a detriment to the child, who needs to move in order to learn. A child learns best through the exploration of the environment.
The second understanding of the child who is overly energetic is learning about his diet. Sugar and wheat products greatly heighten a child’s energy level, unknowingly to the child. Many children are fed high levels of sugar and wheat for breakfast in the form of cereal bars, cereal, oatmeal, fruit cups, etc. Low-sugar, gluten-free food greatly helps the child with extra, uncontrolled energy. That being said, some children are naturally energetic. These are the children who are constantly moving, even when focused on a task. These are the children who need hands on, gross motor activities.
In a Toddler Community the children with high energy are directed into materials that will stimulate that energy, but focus it into a developmentally appropriate activity. So, if I have a child who is very high energy I am going to lead the child into work with mud clay where their hands are really working to create, or cloth washing, where the child has to move throughout the environment to gather water across the room many times, fill tubs with that water, and then scrub with soap on a washboard, using all of their energy to do so. These are purposeful activities where the child can use that energy to develop concentration and focus. Time outside to run and play freely is also a great benefit for not only the highly energetic child, but all children.
There are times however where the highly energetic child is disturbing the other children involved in focused work. When this happens, it is the responsibility of the adult to explain to the child, using kind, honest language that they are being unfair and disrespectful to the children working. Adults sometime forget to simply explain to the child why their behavior is inappropriate. Just saying to a child, “NO!” or “Find something to do” does not benefit the child. A simple reminder to calm down, or to take a deep breath can work wonders.
Young children are excited for life! The worst thing an adult can do with an energetic child, or any child for that matter, is stifle that eagerness for life and experience.
How does Montessori acknowledge different learning styles and intelligences and then work with them?
Through observation of each child a Montessorian acknowledges all the different learning styles and intelligences. There is no blue-print on how children learn, because each child is internally creating an original, one-of-a-kind “map of existence”. The well trained and dedicated Montessorian knows this, and thus creates individual learning plans for each child. This is the beauty of “following the child”. There is no one way to do it in a Montessori Community and as long as the child is being respectful, each material is designed to engage the child in his/her own personal experience.
Through constant observation of the child, the adult begins to see developmental pathways for the child. It is these pathways that the adult then directs the child through. For example, a child who is eager to paint, or draw, or sculpt with clay, the adult will see this and in turn work on language and counting through this passion for art. Or a child who is obsessed with books, the adult will then use the books to work on sharing, reading to others, discussion, etc. Each material is designed to expand on the child’s knowledge. A book is not just a book, it is a tool for learning so much more. The same goes for each material in the community.
There is no one-size-fits-all model of education. What kind of students do well in a Montessori setting and what kind do better elsewhere?
It is difficult to say there is a “one-size-fits-all model” for education, when Montessori is done right, I feel passionately that is does in fact fit all children. Because the environment is designed for the individual, specific needs are met on a daily basis. Where in traditional education, each child is learning and required to progress at the path of the class, in the Montessori environment each child is learning at their own pace and in their own individual way. It is rare to see a child who does not succeed and really do well in a Montessori environment.
That being said, there are many different levels to a “Montessori Educator” and many different levels of Montessori training. Unfortunately for those Montessorians who have gone through a comprehensive training program, there are those who get a lack-luster education as to the Montessori Method. The Montessori Method is not trademarked, so really anyone out there can call themselves a “Montessorian”.
It is also true that some adults do not comprehend the important role they play in a child’s life. This has nothing to do with the Montessori Method, but rather the adult who is running the community. This is not just limited to Montessori, but to all forms of traditional and non-traditional education.
What makes the Montessori Method work and come to life for the child is the adult who is establishing the community. The core of Montessori will always work and benefit the child, but only if it is done with true compassion, constant observation, passion for the life of the child, humility, and the awareness of the world around.
What is the magic of Montessori?
The magic of Montessori does not reside in the method, is resides in the child. What Montessori does is allow for that magic to be nourished and embraced. Maria Montessori said herself that, “Montessori is an approach to education, a system of guidance that does not proscribe, instead it permits. Montessori permits the talent that every person possesses, whatever it happens to be, to be discovered and developed.”
How did you come to be a Montessori Educator? What led you down that path?
I discovered Montessori in the winter of 2001 when I was 20 years old and utterly confused as to what I should do with my life.
One afternoon I opened up the phone book to the “Childcare” section and called every school in Denver on the list. The Montessori International Children’s House (TMICH) in Denver, CO happened to be the only place with positions open, and two week later I was hired on as an assistant in one of the toddler communities. I recall my first week as torture and constant question about why I had say yes to the position. Between toileting, lack of verbal communication and general chaos, toddlers, especially toddlers in a Montessori community, can be a challenge! But the second week my eyes opened up to the beauty and intelligence of the young child and forever I was changed. I was blessed with an amazing Directress who taught me all about the Montessori philosophy. It was a true serendipitous event, and lead me to my life calling.
After TMICH closed down due to financial problems I decided to return to college to pursue my early childhood education, attending Metro State College of Denver. Traditional education has never felt right for me, so after one semester I left Metro State and enrolled in the Association Montessori International Assistants to Infancy Course (Birth to Three Years) at the Montessori Institute of Denver studying under Judi Orion and Liz Hall. Not only did I learn and embody just about everything there is to know about the human from conception to three years old, I also learned a great deal about myself and the world.
I completed my Montessori training in 2004, and from there decided to take some time off and really get to know myself before becoming a Montessori Directress. I did some traveling, left Denver for awhile, but always knowing that Montessori was a part of me. Maria Montessori puts it best, saying, “It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.
Feeling confident and ready to put my all into a community I was hired at Fiddler’s Green Montessori in Greenwood Village, CO in 2006 as the Toddler Directress. Wanting more of a community feel at a school I left Fiddler’s Green and started work at the Montessori Academy of Colorado (MAC) in Denver, CO in 2007. I am currently one of four Toddler Directresses at MAC, with 15 children in my community ranging in age from 16 months to 3 years old. You will notice as you read on that I call it a “Montessori Community” rather than a “Classroom”. I feel deeply that Montessori is not only for the child, but also for all those who surround the child. Thus, a Community is what is being established. I have found my life calling through Montessori and feel blessed each day I walk into my Toddler Environment.
While I am a “Montessorian” through and through, I also have my own take, as all educators do, on the philosophy and pull a great deal of my strength as an educator from the way I see the world and the way I see the child in the world. I feel deeply that we need to make a 180 degree turn in or educational system, and am doing all I can to facilitate that change. As Maria Montessori said, "The child is much more spiritually elevated than is usually supposed. He often suffers, not from too much work, but work that is unworthy of him.”
What is the history of Montessori?
Maria Montessori was truly a miraculous woman, who through her life journey developed the most comprehensive, honest and true form of education for children, especially children under the age of six years old.
Through her observations of the child, she came to understand that it was not the adult who the child learned the majority from, but rather the environment they lived in. The adult in the Montessori Environment is considered another material with which the child constructs himself, independently. She came to this understanding after a great deal of education, struggle and experience.
Maria Montessori began her medical studies of mental and nervous diseases at the University of Rome in 1883 with great difficulty. Being a woman she was denied acceptance many times, but due to her persistence she eventually was accepted at the University where she became the first woman in Italy to receive a Master’s Degree in medicine in 1896.
Some of her first work was done in working with children in insane asylums. It was there that she found that the children were starved for experience, recognizing that their minds were not useless, just unused.
After continued studies, and her discovery of Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard and Edouard Seguin’s work with impaired children, Maria Montessori became convinced that education, not medicine, was the answer to helping children who were mentally impaired. She believed that the human mind is made to work and know and can not help but take in information about the surrounding environment. After seeing how well the impaired children whom she worked with learned, it lead Montessori to wonder how the same methods would work with children who were not impaired.
Montessori decided to change her course of direction, and began to focus on working with “normal” children who were not medically defined as “impaired”. Through her work with “normal” children, Montessori wondered how a bad mark in school could make a child clever? She concluded from this that the teacher’s role is to help guide, enlighten and awaken. She felt that the school is there to help, not judge.
At this time the Philanthropic Society of Rome was renovating a poor quarter of the city. The young children of this area had no where to go during the day, so a place was set aside were the children could go. Montessori was asked to set up an environment to help these children.
On January 6th, 1907 the first Casa dei Bambini was started by Maria Montessori. Montessori felt that if the children were to be happy here they must feel as though they belonged. The children were given the opportunity and guidance to care for their environment. Montessori had furniture made that was child-sized, along with the introduction of plants and flowers for the children to take care of. She also introduced to the children the idea of caring for themselves through washing their hands, brushing their teeth, their hair, etc. This gave the children a measure of independence from adults and through repetition the children were able to develop concentration and finally master the skill.
The idea of allowing the children to choose their own work came about one day when the cabinet containing all the materials, which was always locked, was left open. The children began to spontaneously choose their own work, without the assistance of the adult. From this point, the materials were never locked up again, and low shelves were built so that the children had this continued opportunity of choosing work independently.
The children began to show and convince Montessori that the child’s characteristics were different from their usual characteristics when they were given an environment that met their needs.
A great deal of Montessori’s work came about during World War II when she and her son, Mario were put on house arrest in India because of their Italian passports. India was ruled at the time by the British and considered Italy enemy ground. Montessori had recently stood up to and refused Mussolini’s desire to nationalize all the Montessori schools in Italy, so no political asylum was granted for Montessori and her son to return safely to Italy.
While in India Montessori and Mario lived on a compound/community of families where she spent most of her time observing the children of the community. It was here that Montessori wrote the Absorbent Mind, became interested in the child under three, and also developed the elementary curriculum.
In 1929 the Association Montessori International (AMI) was established to support Montessori’s work and ideas. The headquarters are currently in Amsterdam, with a US branch in Rochester, NY.
Maria Montessori ended her days in Holland after travel throughout the world to bring about a new form of education. She strived for peace, with the goal to bring to the general public the importance of education for peace, saying that it is “the young child who possesses the possibility for the construction of a new humanity”. In 1952, Maria Montessori passed away. On her tombstone is written, “I beg the dear all-powerful children to unite with me for the building of peace in Man and in the World.”
How does a Montessori classroom look and feel compared to a traditional classroom?
The main difference between a Montessori community and a traditional classroom is that in the Montessori Community the aim is to always “Follow the Child” rather than “Follow a Set Curriculum”. One of the ways that a Montessori program does this is by breaking down each community into mixed age groups, called the Montessori Age Groups:
Nido (Italian for “nest”): 6 weeks to 16 months
Toddler: 6 months to 2.5 - 3 years
Primary:2.5 - 3 to 6 years
Lower Elementary: 6 - 9 years
Upper Elementary: 9 - 12 years
Adolescence: 12 - 15 years
High School: 15 years
Montessori programs for high school students are rare, not only in the US, but around the world. It was Maria Montessori’s hope that a child who had grown up with the Montessori philosophy would enter a traditional high school and college with ease. There are some high schools in the US following Maria Montessori’s philosophy.
This mixed age range allows for each child not only to work at their own pace, but also gives the older children the opportunity to give lessons and help teach the younger children in the community. By following the child, we are seeing each child as they are, not where we think they should be. It is less determined by their specific age, but instead their individual growth.
As Montessorians, we see each child as an individual and thus allow for that individual to construct herself through the prepared environment that has been set up for them by the adult. As a Directress it is my mission to prepare an environment that is full of beautiful, natural, developmentally appropriate materials that will literally “call to the child” from the shelf to aid in their development. The children in a Montessori community are free to choose whatever they would like to work with, as well as receive lessons from a trained Directress on materials within the environment that will aid to the child’s growth of independence, and the integration of the will, movement, and intellect.
Many people opposed to the Montessori philosophy see the child as free to do whatever they so choose. While this is true, the children of the community also have limits to the freedom they are allowed. With too much freedom, a child feels abandoned, and with too many limits a child feels restrained. Montessori strives for a balance between the two: freedom AND Limits.
Unlike a traditional classroom, children in a Montessori community do not work from individual desks, but are free to work at a table or on a rug placed on the floor.
As I touched on earlier, the language in a Montessori community is always directed in a positive light. For example, if the child is standing on a chair, rather than telling the child to get down a Montessorian will simply tell the child that chairs are for sitting in. The results of working in a positive environment, one that is filled with “I Can!” changes the entire mentality of the community. Children who develop in an environment filled with positive reinforcement in turn absorb that positivity into their daily life.
Through her observations of children, Maria Montessori learned not only to follow the child, but also saw that preparing an environment where the child is set up to succeed resulted in a group of children who were confident, eager to learn and joyful with their surroundings.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of having the mixed ages in a classroom over the course of three years?
One of the most difficult tasks of any Montessorian, whether it be an infant directress or an elementary directress, is observing the child and knowing what task to lead them into to aid in their development. It can be quite difficult to pinpoint the exact task, at the exact moment for the exact child. This is the goal of any educator, and something that only comes after years of purposeful observation.
With a mixed age range, this task grows ever more difficult. Especially when there is a child wanting to work with a material that is above and beyond his developmental capacity. Maria Montessori saw this, and through her development of materials for the community, found that each set of materials could be worked with, by each age, in different ways. While a 3 year old may find great joy and development in the shape and sound of a letter, a 6 year old will then in turn write a sentence using that letter. And while a 2 year old may only be able to open and close a pair of scissors, the 3 year old can then cut paper using those same scissors. So through Maria Montessori’s countless hours of observation, and development of materials, she saw that each item could be used to aid in the development of the child, at whatever age and ability level they are at.
What I personally love the most about the mixed age group in a Montessori community is the growth of the child. The child enters the community like a foreigner, trying to find her footing, unknowing of the routine, and basically alone. While the child typically finds refuge in the adult at first, it is the older children who pave the way from the new, young child.
I’ll never forget a little boy, Charlie, who started in my community at 18 months. Charlie had never been in group care, and was totally freaked out by the experience at first. Charlie bonded with me at first, and came to me for comfort when he was feeling overwhelmed. As he found his footing, my oldest child at the time, Nate, took Charlie in and began to show him around the community, give him lessons, showed him how to set the table for snack, etc. At 2.5 years, Nate was guiding Charlie through the community. Charlie looked up to Nate and would speak of him at home. In turn, Nate took on a leadership role, sharing his knowledge of the community, which in turn was aiding to the development of his confidence.
How do you handle the more energetic children in your classroom with dignity and yet still bring order?
The first understanding of the energetic child is discovering where all this energy is coming from and having compassion for the child who wants and needs to move in order to construct their being.
Often the energy of the child is stemming from the lack and ability of natural movement. Our society has designed all these contraptions to “contain” the child. For the young child there is the crib, being swaddled, the walker, bouncy seat, high chair, etc. The lack of movement is appearing now in a new generation of children who are babysat by a television or video games, which is a “container” of sorts. While these containers make an adults life easy, they are a detriment to the child, who needs to move in order to learn. A child learns best through the exploration of the environment.
The second understanding of the child who is overly energetic is learning about his diet. Sugar and wheat products greatly heighten a child’s energy level, unknowingly to the child. Many children are fed high levels of sugar and wheat for breakfast in the form of cereal bars, cereal, oatmeal, fruit cups, etc. Low-sugar, gluten-free food greatly helps the child with extra, uncontrolled energy. That being said, some children are naturally energetic. These are the children who are constantly moving, even when focused on a task. These are the children who need hands on, gross motor activities.
In a Toddler Community the children with high energy are directed into materials that will stimulate that energy, but focus it into a developmentally appropriate activity. So, if I have a child who is very high energy I am going to lead the child into work with mud clay where their hands are really working to create, or cloth washing, where the child has to move throughout the environment to gather water across the room many times, fill tubs with that water, and then scrub with soap on a washboard, using all of their energy to do so. These are purposeful activities where the child can use that energy to develop concentration and focus. Time outside to run and play freely is also a great benefit for not only the highly energetic child, but all children.
There are times however where the highly energetic child is disturbing the other children involved in focused work. When this happens, it is the responsibility of the adult to explain to the child, using kind, honest language that they are being unfair and disrespectful to the children working. Adults sometime forget to simply explain to the child why their behavior is inappropriate. Just saying to a child, “NO!” or “Find something to do” does not benefit the child. A simple reminder to calm down, or to take a deep breath can work wonders.
Young children are excited for life! The worst thing an adult can do with an energetic child, or any child for that matter, is stifle that eagerness for life and experience.
How does Montessori acknowledge different learning styles and intelligences and then work with them?
Through observation of each child a Montessorian acknowledges all the different learning styles and intelligences. There is no blue-print on how children learn, because each child is internally creating an original, one-of-a-kind “map of existence”. The well trained and dedicated Montessorian knows this, and thus creates individual learning plans for each child. This is the beauty of “following the child”. There is no one way to do it in a Montessori Community and as long as the child is being respectful, each material is designed to engage the child in his/her own personal experience.
Through constant observation of the child, the adult begins to see developmental pathways for the child. It is these pathways that the adult then directs the child through. For example, a child who is eager to paint, or draw, or sculpt with clay, the adult will see this and in turn work on language and counting through this passion for art. Or a child who is obsessed with books, the adult will then use the books to work on sharing, reading to others, discussion, etc. Each material is designed to expand on the child’s knowledge. A book is not just a book, it is a tool for learning so much more. The same goes for each material in the community.
There is no one-size-fits-all model of education. What kind of students do well in a Montessori setting and what kind do better elsewhere?
It is difficult to say there is a “one-size-fits-all model” for education, when Montessori is done right, I feel passionately that is does in fact fit all children. Because the environment is designed for the individual, specific needs are met on a daily basis. Where in traditional education, each child is learning and required to progress at the path of the class, in the Montessori environment each child is learning at their own pace and in their own individual way. It is rare to see a child who does not succeed and really do well in a Montessori environment.
That being said, there are many different levels to a “Montessori Educator” and many different levels of Montessori training. Unfortunately for those Montessorians who have gone through a comprehensive training program, there are those who get a lack-luster education as to the Montessori Method. The Montessori Method is not trademarked, so really anyone out there can call themselves a “Montessorian”.
It is also true that some adults do not comprehend the important role they play in a child’s life. This has nothing to do with the Montessori Method, but rather the adult who is running the community. This is not just limited to Montessori, but to all forms of traditional and non-traditional education.
What makes the Montessori Method work and come to life for the child is the adult who is establishing the community. The core of Montessori will always work and benefit the child, but only if it is done with true compassion, constant observation, passion for the life of the child, humility, and the awareness of the world around.
What is the magic of Montessori?
The magic of Montessori does not reside in the method, is resides in the child. What Montessori does is allow for that magic to be nourished and embraced. Maria Montessori said herself that, “Montessori is an approach to education, a system of guidance that does not proscribe, instead it permits. Montessori permits the talent that every person possesses, whatever it happens to be, to be discovered and developed.”
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