Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action to bring about social, political, economic, or environmental change. This action is in support of, or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_activism

Lately I find myself thinking about Montessori Activism and in the next few posts I will share some of these thoughts and questions.  In this post I would like to share a short list of activism movements.

• Women’s Rights
• Racial Equality
• Gay Rights
• Labor Movement
• Environmentalism

Compare the Montessori movement to these activism movements and next post I will share some of my thoughts.

If you are not familiar with MTIPS, here is the Mission Statement

The mission of the Montessori Teachers Institute for Professional Studies is to provide experienced Montessori teachers the opportunity to move beyond the initial learning gained from Montessori training courses and the first years of classroom teaching by offering a variety of services that will advance their knowledge, improve their skills as practitioners, and raise the standard of excellence in their schools and classrooms.

I attended a small rural high school with less than 400 students in the whole school.  Maybe 15% of the graduating class went straight to a 4 year college program.  Only one AP (Advanced Placement) course was offered and then only if you made a special effort to enroll in the test (3 members of my class chose to enroll). The school offered classes in Horticulture, Horse Husbandry, and Welding that were at least as well enrolled as Chemistry, Physics, and advanced Math.  Most of my classmates were farm kids and FFA (Future Farmers of America) was a well respected student group.

My wife attended a suburban high school just outside Detroit with over 1000 students.  Her school offered many AP courses and a far greater percentage of graduates went directly into a 4 year college program.  I doubt there was an FFA chapter at her school.

When my wife and I applied to colleges we were both required to submit transcripts with our GPA (Grade Point Average), and we were required to submit scores from a standardized college entrance exam (SAT or ACT).

GPA is an  internal assessment, meaning the method of testing and evaluated answers was determined within each individual system (each school was different) while the SAT or ACT was an external assessment, meaning the method of testing and evaluating answers was determined outside individual systems and is therefore consistent.  GPA is useful to look at general patterns of work and achievement within a system, but if you are comparing applicants from different systems an internal assessment is almost useless.

At first glance, my wife’s high school does a much better job of preparing students for college and admissions officers might favor students from that school.  So I would be at a disadvantage just because I grew up in rural Iowa.

The SAT and ACT ares private companies who created tests to deal with this concern.  Students take this external assessment, which removes all sorts of biases including: how easy or hard a teacher grades, the socio-economic level of the community, how much pressure parents apply to the school and teachers, etc…  A 1600 SAT score is a 1600 whether you attended a private college prep school with professors as teachers or if you were homeschooled.  The external assessment is unbiased.

Okay, now I’ll bring it back to Montessori.

Let us say that many people apply for the same job, and each received training from a different organization.  AMI,  AMS, NAMC, or any of the dozens of other training centers.   Diplomas are internal assessments and do not help the hiring committee assess understanding of the Montessori Method.  Of course an interview can do this, but you need a knowledgeable person interviewing and lots of time to ask in depth questions.  Brand new schools may be unlikely to have a knowledgeable person to help interview.

So now we are left relying on training center biases to assess teachers, and I believe this is a source of much of the bad blood in the Montessori community.  I received AMI training, and of course I think it was the best possible training, the Harvard or Oxford of Montessori training.  There are those who may disagree, but even if we grant that a particular training is the best, I think it is unfair to base our  assessment of a persons understanding solely on which training they graduated.

What if a person attended a really great training and just didn’t “get it”, or consider the natural prodigy who attends a “lesser” training and is black listed despite their amazing talents because they didn’t know that the training was “lesser” when they enrolled.

I think it is interesting to consider an external assessment for Montessori.  Of course there would be some problems (criticisms of the SAT and ACT questions, methodology, and evaluation are common) but it might be a worthwhile exercise to construct an assessment that measures understanding of the Montessori method.  An assessment of this sort would provide an unbiased measure for new schools hiring teachers, or for schools open minded enough to accept more than one training.  Just as the SAT and ACT are private entities, I think such an assessment could be created independent of any existing training organization.

As an interesting side note, an exam of this kind might also measure the relative effectiveness of various trainings.  For example, if correspondence courses score statistically different (either better or worse) than face-to-face courses this would provide empirical evidence regarding the value of correspondence training.  I would expect that any training that thinks it does a good job would be eager for the chance to prove it.

Here is a Kiwi-specific summary of Montessori written by ECE experts

More interesting for Montessori professionals is “The Historical Evolution and Contemporary Status of Montessori Schooling in New Zealand”, by Mary Jane Shuker and published in the New Zealand Journal of Teacher’s Work in 2005.

It is a short article, but the provocative language in this paragraph caught my attention

I am now more than a little curious about Cohen, Fisher, and Hainstock and whether words and phrases such as “vain”, “fanatic”, “cultist”, “total allegiance”, and “devoted disciples” come from these authors or Mary Jane Shuker herself.

Public Perceptions of Montessori is a dissertation written by Angela K Murray at the University of Kansas.

Here is the abstract

Read the entire paper online at SlideShare.

And with a total U.S. audience estimated to be around 150 million viewers, Thomas Harpointner, CEO of the e-business and interactive consulting company AIS Media, says many advertisers don’t want to miss it either.

“The commercials are the most talked-about commercials on the planet,” he said. “And that’s what makes the commercials and the opportunity to advertise on the Super Bowl so special.  So for a company that is just launching, or launching a new product line, or is making a big company shift, the Super Bowl offers a unique platform.”

Another unique feature of advertising on the Super Bowl is that even many who are not football fans, tune in just to watch the commercials.

VOANews.com

The Montessori Super Bowl Ad Project is aiming to reach this audience soon

The immediate and long-term GOALS of the Montessori Super Bowl Ad campaign are threefold:

1. 1)To air a Montessori commercial during the Super Bowl.
2. 2)To raise awareness about Montessori education.
3. 3)To jumpstart a Montessori movement that will land Montessori in the middle of the national education discussion.

With what is already projected to be the single largest television audience in history, at over one hundred million viewers, join our team and help put Montessori in the game!

Take a few minutes to check out the website and consider how you can help this ambitious effort to advance the Montessori movement and reach the tipping point.

Here is a particularly exciting excerpt to whet your appetite…

And if evolution has equipped us with one way of representing number, embodied in the primitive number sense, culture furnishes two more: numerals and number words. These three modes of thinking about number, Dehaene believes, correspond to distinct areas of the brain. The number sense is lodged in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that relates to space and location; numerals are dealt with by the visual areas; and number words are processed by the language areas.

….

For Dehaene, numerical thought is only the beginning of this quest. Recently, he has been pondering how the philosophical problem of consciousness might be approached by the methods of empirical science. Experiments involving subliminal “number priming” show that much of what our mind does with numbers is unconscious, a finding that has led Dehaene to wonder why some mental activity crosses the threshold of awareness and some doesn’t. Collaborating with a couple of colleagues, Dehaene has explored the neural basis of what is known as the “global workspace” theory of consciousness, which has elicited keen interest among philosophers. In his version of the theory, information becomes conscious when certain “workspace” neurons broadcast it to many areas of the brain at once, making it simultaneously available for, say, language, memory, perceptual categorization, action-planning, and so on.

And here is a sample of the type of brain scans scientists are now able to perform