Workshop 2024 Overview

4:00 – 4:15 PM Eastern Time

Welcome!

4:15 - 5:15 PM
Eastern Time

Jennifer John, Dale Naranjo, Dwight Mōdy, Zoey Cordero, Colin Jai Quintana, Marshall Suina (Keres Children's Learning Center) - adolescent breakout

Reviving Voices: Language & Culture

In the Pueblo worldview, success is defined as the ability to learn, share, and utilize knowledge for community benefit. At KCLC, this philosophy guides our educational practices, emphasizing a strong academic foundation through the Montessori Method to nurture the “whole child.” This approach encompasses linguistic, spiritual, intellectual, social, emotional, and physical development, ensuring the comprehensive growth of Pueblo children.

In our adolescent program, we empower students to explore their unique gifts and contribute to the community while learning skills that support the revitalization of the Keres language and Cochiti Pueblo culture. This session aims to showcase the Montessori materials created by students, specifically tailored to the Keres language and cultural teachings, values, and customs.

Pueblo tradition holds that each individual has a unique gift to share, reflected in their contributions to the community. Our prepared classroom environment facilitates learning across various subjects—language, math, history, art, and more—allowing children to discover and develop their potential. By fostering a culturally sustaining environment, we help each child realize their gifts, preparing them to become engaged and active members of their community, fully embodying the concept of the Whole Pueblo Child.

5:15 - 5:45 PM Eastern Time

Break

5:45 -7:15 PM Eastern Time

Geoff Bigler (The Math Institute)

Teaching Mathematics in the Age of Social Media Tricks

In this age of social media, we are flooded with life hacks and simple tricks which will solve our problems quickly. This is no different in the math education sphere. We have all seen the seemingly simple arithmetic questions go viral, or the multiplication questions done quickly, but do these math tricks work? Is there a place for them in our environments?

In this session, we will look at the benefits and drawbacks of viral math tricks and questions, how we might use them to start conversations, teach lessons, or give in math seminar. Get ready solve all the math problems in this interactive session with simple tricks to hack your math teaching!

7:30 - 8:30 PM Eastern Time

Emma Rodwin, Hanna Holcomb, Leslie Cook (Butler Montessori School and Teton Science Schools - Adolescent presentation)

Connecting Science, Place, and Montessori Adolescents through Place-Based Education

In April 2024, students at Butler Montessori visited Teton Science Schools for a week of place-based, field science education. The week was a part of a Peace & Biodiversity study, and the goal was for students to compare and contrast the biodiversity of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem with their home environment outside of Washington, D.C. In this session, you will hear from Butler Montessori teachers and students who were a part of the trip as well as the Teton Science Schools staff who facilitated the experience. Both adults and students will discuss how the trip was put together, the activities that were designed to engage students, and what impressions and knowledge the students walked away with. Attendees will have time to discuss how other schools have facilitated trips like this and hear recommendations. Everyone will leave with new ideas for conducting place-based educational opportunities for their students!

8:30 - 9:00 PM Eastern Time

Closing Remarks & Opportunity to Network

Eastern Time (EDT)

Saturday - October 19, 2024

Please use the timezone converter to check your availability.

10:00 - 10:15 AM Eastern Time

Welcome!

10:15 - 11:15 AM Eastern Time

Feliz Perez (She/Her) - Laren School, Philippines

Getting Dirty in Field School: An Application of Montessori's Principles of Adolescent Education

The Laren School has been conducting what we call Field School since the genesis of our Adolescent Program in 2010. The school is in the highly urban city of Makati in Metro Manila, Philippines. Here, space is always an issue and when we started the adolescent program having our own farm school was simply out of the question. We dove into the text of Maria Montessori and from there built the concept of field school to apply and reinforce the principles that we found.

Field School is a bi-annual trip to a rural community and farm 2 hours away. Students and teachers live on the farm for 10 days at a time. Here the students and teachers apply the disciplines studied back home including science, mathematics, language and production and exchange. The students work with members of the farm community to plant, harvest and tend the fields and care for livestock. They all live together and cook and clean for our community the entire 10 days. We have observed over the years that the students always return home as changed individuals. Here is what getting dirty, cleaning up and cooking for a community with a Montessori touch does for our students.

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Delia Venema - Steppingstones Montessori

No Kiln, No Problem! Bring Pre-Agriculture Ceramics to Your Classroom

The invention and use of ceramic pottery was an important development in human history. The ability to use pottery for collecting, storing, and cooking shaped human culture and behavior. Including it in the study of pre-agricultural humans allows a guide to braid together world history, creative expression, and cultural studies into one unit. Working with clay allows students to connect with early humans through their hands.

Often having a ceramics component as an option for creative expression feels impossible due to a lack of experience with clay and the need for a kiln. In this session we will show how we were able to make it an option for our middle school students.

During our time together, we will be presenting the ins and outs of how we brought a ceramics unit to our classroom and connected it to the Stone Age timeline. We will also share where ceramic advancements were first discovered and how we can still see the influence of these ceramic practices in modern day indigenous artwork.

In our classroom students, inspired by early humans, used the same hand building and firing techniques traditionally used to build pinch pots and then fired them in a pit firing. We will share resources, photos of our firing process, a supply list, and firing protocols.

The goal of this session is for the audience to walk away with enough knowledge that they feel they could include a ceramics unit when guiding a class through the pre-agricultural era.

11:15 - 11:45 AM Eastern Time

Break - Talk to a Trainer

11:45 - 1:15 PM Eastern Time

Andrew Faulstich and Kelly Jonelis (Oneness-Family Montessori High School and Wheaton Montessori)

More than Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: Healing Educational Trauma for Positive Psychic Formation

In From Childhood to Adolescence, Dr. Montessori categorized language, math, and moral education as psychic development: the three pillars that adolescents use to construct their identities in the context of their time, space, and place. What unites these subjects is that they aid the adolescent in existing socially within the adult world. They are not areas of content to be covered; rather they are the means – the symbol systems – through which adolescents communicate and engage in all other disciplines. Despite their central importance in Montessori’s writings on adolescence, language and math are commonly taught in isolation from their developmental context which stifles psychic formation and becomes an obstacle to development. In order to foster positive psychic development, adolescent guides must counter educational trauma and aversion that adolescents may have toward math and language as a critical part of their work. In this joint session, Kelly Jonelis and Andrew Faulstich will discuss strategies to identify this educational trauma and support students in seeing language and math in a holistic context, with a particular focus on equitable representation across the prepared environment. This is designed to be a highly interactive session for practitioners to reflect on their practice and incorporate new strategies.}

-OR-

Dr. Paige M. Bray and Bodeene Amyot Cairdeas (University of Hartford and Digital and Audiovisual Archivist at James Madison University Libraries)

Knowledge Commons, Data-Informed Practice, and the Montessori Glossary Community Project

Get ready to dive into the world of the collective Montessori knowledge commons! In this interactive session, “Knowledge Commons, Data-Informed Practice, and the Montessori Glossary Community Project,” you’ll discover how to contribute to this ongoing endeavor to ensure the Montessori Glossary remains relevant and inclusive for all. Community scholar Dr. Paige Bray and librarian Bodeene Amyot Cairdeas will guide you through the history and development of the glossary, emphasizing shared knowledge authority and co-construction. As youth, practitioners, families, and researchers, we will co-construct meaning about Montessori to inform our work.

We will actively annotate the glossary in real time, learning how to use and contribute to this evolving multilingual, multi-perspective living vocabulary. Additionally, we will explore how subject terms can help us find open-access research. You’ll leave the session with concrete know-how for annotating and contributing to the glossary, accessing research, and integrating this resource into your practice. This hands-on experience highlights how collective participation in building a shared resource by and for the Montessori community strengthens the movement.

1:15 - 1:30 PM Eastern Time

Break - Talk to a Trainer

1:30 -2:30 PM Eastern Time

Michael Rode and Justin Metz (Strata Montessori)

How to Host a Summit!

Strata Montessori's annual Climate Change Summit brings together hundreds of adolescents from Montessori schools across Canada to engage meaningfully in discussions, workshops, and student-led initiatives. Over the three day event, students are tasked with taking their newfound knowledge back to their respective communities to enact positive change.

How might you get inspired to start thinking about hosting a summit in your community?

Michael Rode and Justin Metz will walk you through the process of facilitating a summit, using their specific environment as the template. Through videos of prior years, detailed documents, and stories of adolescents rising to new challenges, you can begin dreaming up summit ideas within your unique community.

-OR-

Koen Schaap

A Case Study: Creating a Montessori Professional Learning Community in Amsterdam (the Netherlands)

The landscape of Montessori schools in Amsterdam, with over 5,000 adolescent students and 500 teachers across five public secondary schools, is unique in the world. This scale enables us to foster a vibrant professional learning community where Montessori principles are taught and adapted for the 21st century. In this session, I will demonstrate how we are shaping an urban learning community through in-service teacher training programs, participation in national and international networks, conducting research, and aligning with data-driven, scientific education. This process is filled with challenges and opportunities but is ultimately very rewarding.

2:30 -3:00 PM Eastern Time

Closing Remarks & Opportunity to Network

Eastern Time (EDT)

Sunday - October 20, 2024

Please use the timezone converter to check your availability.

10:00 - 10:15 AM Eastern Time

Welcome!

10:15 - 11:15 AM Eastern Time

Suhana Raphael and Phrog Yuen (Butler Montessori - Adolescent presentation)

Pencils on Paper

Our goal for the session is to inform people about our special interest project, Pencils on Paper, which raised money for girls' education in India, and to demonstrate how other schools can develop similar projects.

-OR-

Jose Aarts (IVKO (Montessori Schools Amsterdam)

Montessori and the Forgotten Citizens: an inclusive approach to civic education in the Netherlands

Theory and scientific research on citizenship and social justice in education show that the pedagogical-didactic learning climate and curriculum are important in order to be able to offer a coherent citizenship curriculum. The building blocks incorporate the two visions of citizenship; on the one hand (actively) shaping society and on the other hand conforming to society. To be able to help shape society as a critical citizen (the 'forgotten citizen' according to Montessori), you have to learn to adapt to society. Democratic involvement, social involvement, accountability and responsibility can contribute to actively taking note of what is happening in society.

Citizenship deals with complex issues of morality, social justice and ethics. Montessori education focuses on making choices, but as a teacher, can you trust students to make the right moral choices?

In this session I will focus on my research on civic education on a Montessori art school in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and how we are constructing an inclusive Montessori approach to civic education.

11:15 - 11:45 AM Eastern Time

Break - Talk to a Trainer

11:45 - 1:15 PM Eastern Time

Andrew Faulstich - (Oneness-Family Montessori High School)

Discarding the Five Paragraph Essay: Revisiting Language for Psychic Development

In Montessori’s Plan of Work and Study, language is categorized under self-expression and psychic development, alongside math and moral education. Rather than being a set of discreet skills to master, Montessori saw language as a social practice and the tool that adolescents use to construct their identities in context of the adult world. When viewed through the lens of expression and psychic development, language learning can be a space for creativity, individual exploration, and a development of the personality. Yet, the way we often teach language, using writing forms like the five paragraph essay, aligns with a technocratic paradigm of language learning, not a constructivist, psychic paradigm which Montessori described. This session will invite participants to explore their own personal journey with language development, interrogate their pedagogical approaches to language arts in their Montessori environments, and envision new possibilities for language learning within the Montessori adolescent paradigm. This will be a co-lead presentation between students and a guide from the Oneness-Family Montessori High School.

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Jimmy McCue and adolescents (Embark Education)

Empowering Adolescents: Real Work, Real Impact, and Coffee

This session will explore how Embark Education's competency-based micro middle school cultivates learner-centered, real-world programs. By integrating hands-on projects and community partnerships, our learners engage in authentic work with real consequences, developing critical skills for the future. Participants will explore our approach to Production & Exchange, where adolescents take ownership of their learning through learner-driven, competency-based projects (all of which are authentic, relevant, and embedded in our coffee shop). We'll discuss how open-walled learning environments foster agency, independence, and accountability while aligning with Montessori principles. Attendees will leave with strategies to implement real-world, impactful work in their own educational settings, inspiring learners to lead projects with authentic, measurable outcomes.

1:15 - 1:30 PM Eastern Time

Break - Talk to a Trainer

1:30 -2:30 PM Eastern Time

Megan Matilda Abad Jugo, Colin Daniel Abad Jugo, Lorenz Allan Hernandez (Temple Hill International School - Hiraya (The Official Student-led News Publication)

Hiraya: Youth Journalism

Hiraya: Youth Journalism is an adolescent-led presentation that documents the story and background of Hiraya (Filipino term: “The fruit of one’s hopes, dreams, & aspirations”), the student-led news publication of Temple Hill International School (THIS). THIS is a non-profit Montessori school under the Philippine Montessori Center. Hiraya was founded in 2022 as part of the journalism requirement in the high school’s English class, where all content, from news and feature articles to literary works, is created entirely by students. Guided by Maria Montessori’s teachings, its main goal is to provide a platform for the youth's voice, experiences, and stories. This presentation aims to showcase effective methods for integrating authentic journalism into Montessori education and highlight the crucial role of a journalism program in combating misinformation. Adolescent journalists and practitioners will present interactive slides and engaging videos that explore the publication’s development, student initiatives, and Hiraya’s integration into the English curriculum. Through hands-on writing workshops, participants will gain first-hand experience as student contributors, editorial board members, or teacher advisers.

2:30 -3:00 PM Eastern Time

Closing Remarks & Opportunity to Network