I Thought you might find this interesting…….

There is something great about joining a school and learning community where parents are so connected to the philosophy of the school. The other day I received an email from a parent which began, “I thought you might find this interesting…”, together with a link to an interview with Rebecca Winthrop, co-author with Jenny Anderson of The Disengaged Teen. Here’s the link: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43FZtdF2RcY

I haven’t read the book yet but it’s now on my list now. I found the interview really interesting, I kept seeing connections with Montessori education, especially with the kind of learning environments we create in the Elementary and Adolescent years.

Winthrop describes four different modes of learning or engagement that young people can move between at school. These are not four fixed types of child. A young person might be an Explorer in one environment and a Passenger in another.

There is Passenger mode which is going through the motions, doing enough to get by, but with little real ownership of the learning. There is Achiever mode, this is the student who is highly motivated to succeed but whose motivation may be driven by grades, praise, perfection or other external measures of success. There is Resister mode where the young person who pushes back, withdraws or acts out, sometimes signalling that something about the learning environment is not working for them.

And then there is Explorer mode. This is the one that I found most interesting. The Explorer is actively engaged and curious. They ask questions, take initiative, pursue things that interest them and begin to take ownership of their learning. They are not waiting for somebody else to tell them what to do next. I found myself seeing how connected Montessori is to this

One of the ideas at the heart of Montessori education is that human beings have certain natural tendencies which help us develop and understand the world. Exploration is one of these. Exploration is the tendency that helps us to know and understand our world. We explore because we are curious. We want to find out what is around the corner, how something works, why something happens and what might happen if we change something.This is closely connected to Winthrop’s Explorer. She talks about young people being driven more by internal curiosity than by external expectations.

Montessori was talking about something very similar many decades earlier. In The Formation of Man, she writes:

“To the young child we give guides to the world and the possibility to explore it through [their] own free activity.”

The words “through [their] own free activity” are important to me. The adult can introduce something, prepare the environment and provide materials as well as open doors, but ultimately the learner has to be able to act upon their own curiosity. This is where the environment becomes so important.

Winthrop’s argument isn’t that some children are born explorers and everyone else is not. Schools and adults can create conditions that make Explorer mode more likely and this is exactly what the Montessori prepared environment is intended to do.

Montessori starts from the belief that the desire to explore and learn is already present in the child. Our job as educators is not to fill children with knowledge. It is to prepare an environment in which those natural drives have somewhere to go.This is an important question for all schools: Does the environment develop the child’s natural curiosity, or gradually suppress it?

The Elementary Montessori plane of development from ages 6 -12 is described as Cosmic Education. It’s not about seeing the curriculum as a series of separate subjects and tasks in Montessori, children are first given some big ideas and stories. The story of the coming of the universe, for example, can lead to questions about matter, stars, volcanoes, oceans and the formation of the Earth. From there children move naturally into areas such as physics, chemistry, geology, geography and many other areas. This is a constuctivist and integrated approach to learning.

Montessori writes about this in To Educate the Human Potential:

“If the idea of the universe be presented to the child in the right way, it will do more for [them] than just arouse interest, for it will create in [them] admiration and wonder…”

The teacher does not then have to guide the child through a rigidly planned curriculum. The Great Stories give children the keys. One question leads to another and suddenly they are looking at volcanoes, chemistry or the development of human beings because they genuinely want to know more. When children are curious, they explore.

There is still knowledge to acquire, work to complete and an important role for the adult. But there is a fundamentally different relationship with learning.

Instead of the curriculum always saying, “Here is the next thing you need to learn,” we want the child to begin asking, “What is this? Why does this happen? Where could I find out more?”

For the adolescent, from 12–18, the exploration changes again. The child’s exploration of the universe becomes increasingly an exploration of self, society and their own place within the world.

Adolescence is a natural period of experimentation. Young people are trying out ideas, relationships, responsibilities and increasingly thinking about who they are and the kind of adult they might become. This is why Montessori adolescent education places such importance on real work, community, collaboration, production and exchange, encounters with adults beyond the classroom and opportunities to take genuine responsibility.

If every major decision is made by an adult and every question is supplied by a teacher, as well as every task having one predetermined outcome which is graded, it is difficult for young people to practise taking initiative and initiative is something we increasingly need them to have in this modern A.I. influenced world.

I also found Winthrop’s Achiever mode interesting. In many traditional schools the Achiever is exactly the student they celebrate. That has certainly been the case in many traditional schools I have visited in the last 25 years. The student works hard, gets excellent grades, meets deadlines and understands what the system requires of them. There is nothing wrong with achievement. We want children to ne inspired to work hard and experience the satisfaction of doing something well,but there is an important question underneath it:

Am I learning because I am genuinely engaged with what I am doing, or because I have become very good at giving the system what it wants?

The two can look very similar. An Explorer might achieve highly too, but achievement is not the only thing driving the learning. There is also curiosity, ownership and a willingness to follow an idea somewhere unexpected.

Winthrop’s four modes give us quite a nice way of thinking about our own education. What were you like at school? Were you usually a Passenger, Achiever, Resister or Explorer? Did that change with different teachers or subjects? Was there a particular environment or adult who suddenly made you interested in something?

A question we need to ask ourselves as adults is “How would we like our own children to experience learning?”

For me, that is one of the exciting things about Montessori education. It deliberately creates space for curiosity, initiative, independence and exploration rather than hoping these things somehow survive alongside the curriculum.