Disciplines
Workshops

Work within a specific content area.

Participate in interactive activities, learn about a successful program, take home lesson plans, ask your questions and get answers.This session provides a connecting place for Montessori art educators, guides who have questions about integrating arts into their class syllabus, or Heads of School who are interested in starting an arts program.

What can a Montessori high school’s history curriculum look like? This session will examine one model that combines three of Maria Montessori’s key insights: that meaningful student learning happens through real work, that students develop internal motivation to learn through structured choice, and that teachers enable independent learning by breaking skills into their smallest component parts.

Attendees will leave with:
1.) A list of historical skills that could be taught in a high school classroom -- a list that they can build on, refine, and revise for their own use at their school
2.) Example lesson plans that break each skill down to its smallest component parts.
3.) Concrete examples and suggestions on how to differentiate these lessons to meet the needs of diverse learners.
4.) Ideas and examples that show how you can adapt these lessons for various content use them immediately in your classroom.
5.) An understanding of how history curriculums can privilege skill acquisition while still covering chronology/historical narratives.

Using historical texts we will explore human conflict from the perspective of the persona involved, creating a dialogue that spans time and space.

Engage in interactive activities, as you learn how two different Montessori schools implement the Michael Waski Integrated Math Curriculum. Learn strategies for increasing student engagement, independence, and rigor and take home practical resources to use in your classroom. This session provides a connecting place for Math Educators and those interested in the Montessori Integrated Math Curriculum.

This session will use a case study as a starting point to discuss student-led initiatives in adolescent programs and highlight the ways of trusting teenagers and involving students in building their own curricula leads to a more engaged student body. Participants should leave with a format and strategies for helping adolescents to realize their goals and become more engaged to both their school and the land. Additionally, participants will discuss strategies for how to incorporate more authentic Erdkinder principles at schools without access to a full land program. 

Many practitioners struggle with creating and implementing Humanities projects that both reach across disciplines as well as capstone the current unit of study. Other challenges include designing an experience that allows the adolescent to work freely and independently, while also providing enough structure and support to generate a meaningful final product. Case study examples will include the Classical World, Elizabethan England, World Religions, Study of Peace, American Government and Civics, Study of Place, Immigration, the Civil Rights Movement, and more.

Participants will be given the nuts and bolts framework of a permaculture system that was constructed 100% from fundraising and community efforts. The takeaway is that these large scale systems are possible, and there are networks out there to connect to in order to make this more easily integrated into our schools. This workshop can be a bridge to achieving a Farm School for any program that is attempting to integrate an agricultural system but does not know where to begin or what the trajectory can be. An interactive component of the presentation after the presentation is to demonstrate Google Earth Pro (downloaded for free as an app on people's phones) and how it can be easily used as a free resource when starting the permaculture design process.

When confronted with a writing assignment a student may say “they have no ideas” when what they mean is they don’t know what their ideas are. Through learning to observe their own minds, and the world around them, material for writing becomes abundant and easily accessible. Participants will practice and explore three different techniques for working with adolescents in mindfulness and writing. 1) Starting with Silence 2) First Thought Best Thought, 3) Telling it Slant. Attendees can expect to leave with a more playful understanding of mindfulness practice, and a clearer understanding of its connection to the process of writing and intellectual work of all kinds.

Student self-reflection is an important aspect of the Montessori philosophy. This session will highlight sample self-reflection forms and templates that have successfully been used in a science classroom and will provide opportunities to generate a self-reflection form or template that can be used in your own classroom.

To make the most of this session, teachers should bring 1 or more assignments that they use for assessment purposes - this assignment may be formative (for learning purposes) or summative (end of unit/term snapshot of where a student is with their current understanding/process).

Tests are the standard way to assess learning outcomes in a traditional science classroom, but a Montessori classroom should allow for student choice and ownership in how students demonstrate learning. When given the choice, students feel much more in control of their own learning. This session will present differentiated learning objectives and summative assessment options used in a high school science classroom. Sample objectives, lessons, work and summative assignments (both a test and projects) will be shared. Participants will then have the opportunity to take a unit that is currently being taught in their classroom and apply the concepts to their own unit. To make the most of this session, teachers should bring a unit plan for a topic that they have taught before.