Preparing the Environment: Remote, Blended, or In-Person

Thank you to all who participated in Friday’s discussion!

Over 40 adolescent guides from around the world joined together online on Friday to discuss the Prepared Environment for the coming school year. The discussion focused on the needs of young adolescents (12-15 years old), but many of the ideas can be extended to older adolescents (15-18 years old) as well. 

We know as Montessori teachers that the prepared environment is an essential element of our work. Remember that while we are preparing the physical environments for the adolescent community we are also preparing the psychic environment. That is, keep in mind whether or not the environment will feel physically and emotionally safe. 

In this year when some adolescent communities will be learning remotely, some in person, and some a combination of the two, we asked ourselves these questions:

1. How will we prepare our environments so they provide the order and security our adolescents will need to thrive?

2. What is necessary in the prepared environment to allow adolescents to continue their process of self-construction?

We asked participants to provide their school situations if known. The group divided almost evenly into three groups: remote, hybrid, and in-person. Take courage in that! Whatever your situation, you are not alone in this adventure. 

Special thanks to our facilitators: 

Erin Foley, Sam Rotker, Susan Holmes-Glazier, Emily Dowell, Chris Marks, and Kira Donnelly!

The following are summaries of the notes from each of the breakout sessions. 

*Please note, these are shared ideas to help you think through how to successfully create your spaces for learning this year. They are not official recommendations. Please follow all state and local guidelines. * 

In-Person Learning

The Physical Space 

• Look at your spaces and strip them down, get rid of extra 'stuff' and clean, clean, clean!

• Be outdoors as much as possible because virus transmission seems to be much lower outdoors.

• Set up an outdoor tent (or more than one), like a field station

• A carport tent because it is taller, meant to be outdoors for long periods, and the flaps stretch out to optimize spacing 

• Students bring in their own camp chairs

• Use labeled personal lap desks or clipboards rather than tables 

• Bins (plastic for easy cleaning) for students to carry around personal belongings

• All students have their own, labeled, individual supplies

• Remove couches and soft chairs because they can't be easily cleaned

• Sanitizing stations (including outdoor stations) for shared materials - ie: science equipment

• Have students design posters to help with reminders of sanitization, traffic flow, or general guidelines to follow

• Despite our practice of student responsibility for cleaning the environment, admin. must set up outside cleaning to happen daily during this time. 

• Consider purchasing electrostatic cleaners and UV wands

• Merv 13 or HEPA filters for HVAC

• Plexiglass dividers

• Unidirectional pathways

• Remove large tables and replace with individual

• Masks inside at all times and off outside only when 6ft or more apart

• Use of big hula hoops to help designate spacing outside

 Reentry ideas:

• Orientation is key! 

• Phase reentry into smaller groups to practice and provide orientation lessons on traffic flow, how to wear a mask, bathroom use, eating etc.

• Lots of sanitizing lessons. Think of them as repeated 1st period lessons.

• Invite specialists - physician or psychologists into school to meet with students to ask questions and inspire a greater understanding from an expert

• Facial reading Creative Expression work or workshops on masks: 

  • Theater with masks - neutral mask techniques, communicating with your whole body 

  • Discuss Historical context of how masks were worn in different cultures and contexts. Make masks replicating historical masks

  • Study the history of Black plague and Spanish Flu

  • Use of clear masks for better communication

• Community building in place of an Odyssey Trip: canoeing, community building games socially distanced

• Creative Expression outdoors: earth art, nature sketching, watercolor landscape painting

• Mandatory removal of shoes upon entering building 

General Thoughts:

• Prepare ahead but include students in process

• Invite reflection and process on how we live in a community safely at this time  

• Employees are asked to sign a 'return to work waiver' so invite students to sign one too

• Code of Civility should now include - emotional safety and tech safety

• If doing live streaming of classes for any students at home, check into picture release requirements

Remote Learning

Remote learning is a challenge for all. In the spring, we were just trying to get through to the end of the academic year. We need to approach this year with a solid plan and to meet the needs of the adolescent. 

Code of Civility

• This sets the tone for everything that follows. Start with this and build from it.

• Use breakout rooms to create the code of civility.

• Small groups could create a video to share their component with others.

• Give 9th year students the opportunity to schedule their own time.

• Schedule time for the 7th and 8th year students to collaborate - this will help the 7th year students acclimate and give the 8th year students a chance to lead.

Welcoming and orienting new students -

• Encourage 8th/9th year students to offer words of advice.

• Build community early with younger students by including 6th year students in activities such as an online scavenger hunt.

• Create an online game like Minecraft, but make it “classcraft”

• Meet with 7th year advisory separately.

• Provide support for 7th year students to help them adjust to the adolescent work.

Structuring the day - 

• Students are looking for outlets to feel useful, to find purpose, to have ways to discover themselves. Provide opportunities for this in the day and week.

• Work on projects away from zoom. Help students schedule time to collaborate.

• Challenge students to take on new responsibility at home and report back.

• Provide students with a template for planning their day/week with two columns: planned time and actual time spent. Check in regularly on progress.

Useful platforms and structures

• Students can create lessons to teach others.

• Use Flipgrid to make and share videos. 

• Work on etiquette for posting comments: positive and constructive feedback.

• Padlet is another platform.

3rd Period Ideas

• A rap battle in Humanities based on their study. For example, Civil War, one rap for the North, one for the South - make a TikTok video.

• Create a collaborative work of art. Choose a piece, grid it out, and give each student their grid to re-create with food.

• Students prepare lessons for lower elementary students: read aloud, a cooking lesson, cartoon drawing lesson. 

• “How-to” videos for a household chore that students have never done before. Present using flipgrid.

Math Seminar

• Using Google Whiteboard or Google Jamboard, students can prepare their work prior to the workshop time. They can create different pages for their work and then share it as they explain their work. 

Creative Expression

• Send essential items home in individual kits.

• Sidewalk chalk art.

• “Chopped” cooking challenges to do over video chat.

• Bob Ross day - dress like him and create a video to present to the class.

• Have casual “knit-in,” or drawing/painting sessions over Zoom.

Physical Expression

• Make a workout that is 30 minutes long and complete it together over zoom.

• Students create a physical fitness plan - they set a goal and frequently check-in with guides or advisory groups.

Community and Work on the Land

• Deliver a kit of food to each house. Cook it together over video chat. 

• Decide what meal to cook at each house, then eat it together over video chat.

• Gardening at home: Start the seeds at home, bring transplants to school at a scheduled time to plant in the school garden.

• Complete farm work with fewer students who meet there and work for a couple of hours.

• Meet on a rotating basis in small groups at school every Friday to work in the garden.

• Invite guest speakers to join by video call: Senators, Congresswomen, climate change experts, other Montessori students.

Hybrid Learning Situations

Work on the land / Production and Exchange / Service

• Microeconomy in a box - providing materials to take home

• Farm in a box - providing materials to take home or deliver to students

• Look for individual economic ventures

• Create an online microeconomy with ability to take orders and payments

• Service projects at a distance: cooking and baking at home for a school lunch program

• A collective plant sale

Community

• Fear of Missing Out - how do we connect the group that has to stay at home?

• Webinars with specialists

• Making global connections - zoom with other programmes

Local Travel

• Involve parents

• Camping with individual tents

• A series of day trips

• Keep in mind respecting the natural distancing between adolescents and parents

• Preparing campsites can be hospitality work

• Independent travel

What is next? 

We plan to host more discussions as the school year approaches. Please feel free to suggest topics for discussion at contact@montessoriadolescent.com and check the Events tab for announcements and instructions about registration. Have a story about something that went really well in remote learning so-far? Please reach out to us. We are happy to have guest bloggers share their experiences. 

Charting the Course: Forming Community from the Start

Thank you to all who participated Tuesday’s discussion!

Over 40 practitioners came together to share their experience and ideas. The following is a summary of the conversation.

What we know is that there’s still a lot we don’t know about COVID-19 and adolescents.

Current scientific evidence suggests that school aged children, especially those under ten, are: less likely to contract the COVID-19 virus; less likely to develop severe symptoms; and less likely to be vectors of transmission to others in the community. Children older than ten may have the same susceptibility and ability to pass along the virus as adults. Growing evidence shows adolescents are at a greater risk to be negatively affected by the physical distancing measures put in place to mitigate community transmission. Studies are starting to show increased levels of depression, anxiety, sleep disorders due to the prolonged isolation from peers and social groups

The developmental tasks of adolescence are to form a sense of personal identity and build the skills necessary to function as an adult in society. These tasks can only happen within the context of a social group, in the context of community. This is why adolescents are so drawn to their peers and why community is emphasized in Montessori adolescent programmes.

Themes that emerged in the discussion

The Importance of Face-to-Face interactions

Even if schools are starting virtually at the beginning of the year, can you find ways for your community to meet that are in keeping with your jurisdiction’s physical distancing guidelines?

• Meet at local parks or open community spaces for to see each other in person before having to interact online

• Plan physical or creative expressions that can be done safely at a distance

  • scavenger hunts

  • orienteering

  • painting murals or chalk art

• Community service project done in small pods

  • Creek or park clean up

  • Neighbourhood beautification projects

  • Making masks

  • Organizing food drives

  • Creating care packages for unhoused individuals

  • Supporting those in Long Term Care Facilities

• Work on the land

  • Repairs/maintenance on school buildings that can be done in small groups

  • Harvesting gardens and caring for animals in a rotation

  • Partnerships with local farms who are without workers to help bringing in crops

  • Processing vegetables and fruits outside for preserving

• Re-think start of the year rituals and trips

  • Odysseys that are local and respect physical distance guidelines

Intake and Orientation

• Host student goal-setting conferences out of doors (at school or on a front porch)

• Mentorship between current adolescents and new students

• Set clear guidelines and expectations within which the adolescents can design their community contract/code of civility/ charter for the year

• Involve the parents, their observations of their children are essential in online learning situations

• Ask adolescents returning from last year to share their perspectives as you plan for this year

• Have returning adolescents hold instructional tutorials or make videos about how to navigate the online learning environment :

  • How to sign on to GoogleClassroom

  • How to post an assignment

  • Etiquette of a Zoom meeting

Building Community Online

Remember all those “experiences of social life” that are integrated into the day of an adolescent programme. How can those be recreated/replicated online?

• Cooking together

• Eating together

• Sharing in cultural celebrations and rituals

  • Birthdays for example

• Creative and physical expression

• Community Meeting

• Social activities

  • Games/Trivia

  • Virtual Escape Rooms

  • Murder Mysteries 

  • Clubs and extracurricular activities

  • Movie nights

Production and Exchange

Experiences the economic system (production and exchange) build community because they appeal to the adolescent needs for economic independence and collective work.

• Engage your adolescents in the challenge of converting your in-person micro-economy to an COVID safe business.

• What can still be done in person?

• What products can still be made?

• How will you sell them? Advertise?

• How will people pay?

• How are other business managing during this moment in time?

Involve Returning Adolescents

When programmes moved to distance learning in the spring, communities had been together, in person, for many months; the culture was set. We will be starting from scratch in the fall, but we will have adolescents with institutional memory.

• Recruit older students to help plan events, set the culture, make suggestions for what works and what doesn’t

• Talk with them separately from the new students about the responsibility they have in building this new community from their memories of pervious years

• Empower them with information, get them to lead the charge for adopting health and safety measures be it mask wearing, hand washing, and physically distancing in person or cyber safety, responsible technology use, and making time to be offline.

What is next? 

We plan to host more discussions as the school year approaches. Please feel free to suggest topics for discussion at contact@montessoriadolescent.com and check the Events tab for announcements and instructions about registration. Have a story about something that went really well in remote learning so-far? Please reach out to us. We are happy to have guest bloggers share their experiences. 

Tools for Remote Learning

On June 16th, 2020, 36 Montessori guides joined us for an online discussion titled Montessori in a New Reality. Among other things, guides shared tools that they tested and found useful in remote learning. 

*Note - We are not getting paid to promote any of these, we get no personal benefit if you use them, and we have not personally tested them all. 

Here they are…

• Google Classroom - for organization

• Zoom and Google Meet - for online classes and meetings

• Jamboard - a shared whiteboard in the google suite of tools

• Canvas - a learning management system

• Slack- for organization and communication

• Flipgrid - allows students to create and share short videos

• Daily Calm - for group mindfulness

• Prezi video - allows you to record videos and add graphics

• Parlay - was helpful for Socratic seminar discussions

• Loom - for pre-recording video lessons

Montessori in a New Reality: reflections on remote learning

So many questions! So many good ideas! We are all better if we do this work together.

THANK YOU to everyone who joined us (virtually) on June 16th for discussions about remote learning for Montessori Adolescent Communities! We heard from 36 people in a variety of school settings in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. 

Our overarching theme was this: What did we do well? What can we do better? 

In the spring of 2020 we did the best we could while in crisis management mode. Now we have some time to reflect, to share our observations and experiences, and to ground our planning for next year in the foundations of Montessori educational principles. 

Themes that emerged from the discussions:

Communication and Community! 

• Be in touch often with students and families. 

• Hold an open parent forum online every few weeks. 

• Have advisory meetings at least weekly. 

• Make sure students know how to get a hold of you and when you are available. 

• Group work was essential.

• The students asked for opportunities for social fun, whether online or events such as birthday parades. 

• Have community council meetings 1-2 times per week.

• Try moving to the platforms the students like to use - Tik Tok, Minecraft, etc.  

• Create cooking challenges such as making a particular type of cookie or creating a delicious dish with a strange ingredient.

• Organize small groups of students to do menu planning and cooking. The cooking would happen in their own kitchens. The meal would be to share with their family, perhaps with some formality. 

• Create a cookbook of recipes created by students.  

Routine and Consistency

• Be intentional and consistent about how you communicate, when work is due, when students are expected to be online. Decide on a platform and teach everyone how to use it well.

• Some options for work and study structures online: 

  • Start together, log off (or use breakout rooms) and do follow up work individually or in small groups, then check back in as a whole groups. Be available during the “second period” work time. 

  • Have seminar discussions. Math seminar can happen by individual students presenting their screens and explaining their work.

 Balance of Head and Hand

• If there are animals to feed or chores to do at school, have families rotate weekly responsibility for them. 

• Take on challenges such as the “egg drop” or “egg catch” where students must construct protection for an egg dropped from up high. Record these and share the videos.

• Do building projects in person with small groups of students, wearing masks, outdoors. 

Engagement and Balance

• Take pictures of Creative Expression and Physical Expression adventures to share weekly. This is both for accountability and inspiration.

• Have a pre-recorded online coffeehouse that is then watched all at the same time.

• Hold a virtual art show.

• Encourage creative writing about the experience of remote learning during the pandemic.

• Encourage small groups of students to work together on video calls to paint, cook, or take on other creative activities. 

• Food for thought: are we demanding more during remote learning than we would have been in the classroom because we feel like we should be providing something? Are we prioritizing and modeling rest and reflection during a stressful time? This does not have to be the most productive time of one’s student years. 

 Student Safety  

• Create a policy about acceptable numbers of adults and students on a call. Check out school and local regulations for guidance.

• Create an Online Technology Use Agreement together as an Adolescent Community. Write it up and have everyone sign it. Include norms for video calls and chats, intellectual property, and more.

This is a beginning. It does not answer all of our questions or make remote learning easy. However, it was comforting to find patterns in our observations and inspiring to hear stories of what went well. Hopefully it is the beginning of ongoing, rich conversations.

What is next? 

We plan to host more discussions throughout the summer. Please feel free to suggest topics for discussion at contact@montessoriadolescent.com and check the Events tab for announcements and instructions about registration. Have a story about something that went really well in remote learning so-far? Please reach out to us. We are happy to have guest bloggers share their experiences. 

Saying Goodbye From a Distance - Remote Farewell Ceremonies

What is at the core of end-of-year farewell ceremonies?

Individual reflection

Group reflection

The emotional disbanding of the tribe

The hopeful beginning of something new

These are a few of the many pearls of wisdom shared in the “Saying Goodbye from a Distance” online discussion today hosted by Project Erdkinder. Thank you to everyone who participated! Most of us are in the wild days of the end of a school year, and we really appreciate the time you took to come together.

Special thanks to the facilitators:

• Emily Dowell

• Erin Foley-Wirts

• Susan Holmes-Glazier

• Pat Ludick

• Colin Palombi

• Robb Wirts

Why do we have farewell ceremonies?

• To honor our togetherness as a community.

• To reflect on who these young people are becoming.

• To honor that human connection and civility are at the core of Montessori teaching.

• To give a sense of closure for individuals, families, and the school community.

What are the important elements of farewell ceremonies?

• Personal self-reflection of students.

• A private, emotional ceremony that recognizes the disbanding of the tribe.

• A public recognition of the gifts of the individuals who are completing this phase of their adolescence.

• To have adults, including guides who were with these children as very young children, say to the students, “I see you, I know who you are, I trust you to take your gifts forward into a new community.”

• To say goodbye, or at least, it will be a while before we see one another again.

Practical ideas

• Give graduates a blank journal. Ask each of their previous guides (Toddler, Children’s House, Elementary, Adolescent) to write a personal note to the student in the front of the journal.

• Incorporate symbolism, such as a lantern or other representation of light, into the ceremony.

• Hold a drive-in graduation where families can social-distance in their cars and broadcast the speeches on a short wave FM radio station.

• For some, finding a way to be physically together (please check your local guidelines for what is safe at the moment).

• A slide show of the Adolescent Program’s year.

• A slide show of graduates from their earliest years in Montessori to the present.

• Involve the students in the planning of farewell rituals, even at a distance. Ask them what is essential, and in turn, what rituals to let go of in this time of distancing.

• Donate money from the microeconomy to a local charity as an act of service.

• Include a new tradition that represents these months of remote learning. Could be a time capsule, a piece of artwork, or collection of writing.

• Record student speeches live, at school, in small socially-distanced groups. Put them together and stream them later online for the whole school community.

We can do this. Together, we can translate existing rituals into ceremonies that make sense for the present moment and still honor the human beings who are completing a cycle in their lives. Thank you to all Montessori Guides for your creativity and flexibility.

“Adaptability, …this is the most essential quality”

-Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence