Organizing for Change: Lessons Learned Part three

Go Sow To Get Fast: There is part of us that wants to see change happen QUICKLY! so we
are eager to “get down to business”. However, investing time and energy to make sure the entire
group is looking at the same thing (problem) in the same way (all perspectives are expressed and
understood) by (1) making all information explicit, (2) giving as much attention to the process as as
the content, and (3) fostering a “win-win”, “both-and” culture, can embed ownership and
alignment within the process, ultimately making the group more coherent and effective. [The
Collaborative Operating System]

Create a Community of "Fearless Leaders": To accomplish something we have never done
before, requires us to travel through “the land just beyond proficiency”. Whether it is struggling
with a camera during a video conference, having difficulty accessing Google docs, or stretching
ourselves to stay engaged in a conversation that feels threatening, we will need to grapple with
feelings of incompetence, frustration, and vulnerability. Anticipating the learning curve
normalizes and depersonalizes the awkwardness. Establishing a culture where learning is
supported and mistakes are embraced will nurture personal and collective growth, as well as
group cohesion.

Define Who "We" Are: In her book, Children Who are Not Yet Peaceful, Donna Bryant Goertz
illustrates the healing power of inclusion. The mindfulness community considers
loving kindness/compassion to be a skill set we can develop by reflecting on: What are we paying
attention to? Whom are we paying attention to? Whom becomes the other? Whom do we
ignore? By observing and being aware, we train our attention to include or exclude.
Improving our ability to monitor our attention gives us the potential to harness the healing power
of inclusion.

Leverage the Power of Systems Thinking: Dr. Montessori understood systems! (The power of
Montessori education lies in its totality and interrelationships; it can never be replicated by
piecemeal copying because the synergy of Montessori education is created by the way all the
parts work together.) Montessorians can leverage the power of systems to shift our community
from fragmentation to cohesion (until we do, time and energy shortages will remain one of the
greatest obstacles to collaborative work), anticipate “delays” (collective work to promote public
awareness and affect policy will ultimately lighten our individual loads, but there will be a time
lag between these actions and their consequences, which, unrecognized, might lead to
discouragement), and harness Collective Impact to create a unified voice for policy change.
[The Fifth Discipline]

Welcome Chaos: Today’s rate and scale of change, and degree of complexity, require more
innovative, adaptive, and self-regulating systems. There are many organizational tools and
structures that harness the group’s dynamic capacity to self-organize (a concept that has many
parallels to the child’s drive to self-construct), including Dynamic Governance/Sociocracy,
Open Space Technology, World Cafe, and Appreciative Inquiry; by inviting in chaos (in the sense
of “having many possibilities”) they allow innovative solutions to emerge. [Mapping Dialogue]

Tomorrow's entrry will bring this thoughtful article full circle.

Organizing for Change: Lessons Learned Part Two

Enjoy part two of this article on Organizing by Laureen Golden, M.Ed.

Anticipate Crucial Conversations: A Montessorian’s task to “aid life” touches on the sacred.
So although diversity can increase a group’s intelligence, when it comes to the ideas we care
most deeply about, diverse opinions can feel profoundly threatening and trigger our “fight or
flight” response, causing us to respond with violence (by attacking each other’s ideas and
feelings), or silence (disengaging from the conversation). By anticipating crucial conversations
as part of our process, we can better prepare ourselves, and effectively manage these moments.
[Crucial Conversations]


Prioritize a Need for Safety: How can groups leverage the power of diversity, even
when the stakes are high and emotions are running strong? Monitoring feelings of safety enables
us to recognize when we are in the midst of a crucial conversation. In “real time”, we can make
“repair attempts”, by letting the other person know we care about his/her best interests and goals
(mutual purpose), and that we care about him/her (mutual respect), thereby reestablishing safety
so collaborative work can continue. [Crucial Conversations]

Invest in Building a "Pool of Shared Meaning": When ideas, feelings, and opinions are openly
shared, a group develops a “pool of shared meaning”. The more information that is in that
pool, the better decisions the group can make. Developing a rich pool of shared meaning
requires an investment of time, but it ultimately serves the group’s effectiveness and efficiency,
by helping us move beyond “your way” and “my way” so that we can discover “our way”.
[Crucial Conversations]

To be continued tomorrow.

Organizing for Change: Lessons Learned Part 1

Humanity is grappling with the limits and potentially dire consequence of our current model of competition, conquest and consumption, and desperately needs an alternative vision. Dr. Montessori provided a vision for a global community and a peaceful world, as well as a method to bring this vision to fruition! What remains for us, is to organize our community and cultivate the unified cooperation required to bring this transforming education into the lives of more children!


Organizing for Change: Lessons Learned

by Laureen Golden, MEd, LISW
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
~African Proverb
Working together is indeed powerful ... but it can also be quite difficult, especially when we consider the
complexity of the problems we seek to address, and the diversity within our community. Our ability to aid
life and transform society hinges on our ability to stay cohesive despite these challenges. When working
together to create change, it is helpful to:
Tap our Collective Intelligence: A group can be amazingly intelligent -- smarter than its
smartest members -- IF we maintain:
*Diversity (of opinion, perspective, knowledge, experience, and resources),
*Independence in thinking (ensuring that no one is dominating others), and
*Decentralization (leveraging tacit knowledge), and
*Aggregation (mechanism for turning private judgments into collective decisions).


[The Wisdom of Crowds]

This is part one of an excellent article on organizations and how they can function. Look for part two tomorrow.

Essential Elements of High Quality Montessori Education

Members of the Montessori Forward List serve group have recently been sharing thoughts and ideas about just what are the essential elements of high quality Montessori education. We would like to thank Marci Martindale from CT for sharing a document on Essential Standards. (The CT version can be found at Montessori Foward under the resources tab).

The original, from which the Montessori Schools of CT. worked, was chaired by Betsy Coe in collaboration, and agreement, with AMS, AMS, NAMTA, MEPI, and the Southwestern Training Center. Does anyone know when it was completed?

In condensed form, here it is:

• A Montessori credentialed teacher in every classroom
• A Montessori credentialed administrator
• The full compliment of Montessori materials
• A 2-3 hour uninterrupted work cycle
• Multi-age grouping with an, ideally, 3 year age span
• A school that, ideally, starts at the Early Childhood level
• Assessments that are congruent with best Montessori practice
• All staff participate in ongoing professional development

In the current public policy clamor for accountability, many of these Montessori Essential Elements components are required of all early childhood education programs, albeit without the Montessori philosophy behind them.

Most state QRIS and all proposed federal and state initiatives and proposed legislation have a teacher education requirement as a measure of quality. The requirement of a bachelor's degree in early childhood is more and more becoming the norm. Teachers have to register through the Career Lattice and/or Professional Registry which gives them a rating based on education level, years of experience, and professional development (often state course mandated). These scores are counted towards a QRIS rating.

All state QRIS and most federal, state and city initiatives and proposed legislation have requirements for program administrators.

All state QRIS and most federal and state initiatives and proposed legislation have requirements that curriculum align with Early Learning Standards, and have specific materials in the ECE classroom.

All state QRIS have specific assessment tools to determine quality in the environment, of the staff, and program components such as parent communications, cultural diversity and working with special needs students.

We all know the emphasis being placed on early childhood education through Universal Pre-K, Pre-School for all, and many other initiatives and grants. A recent Gallup poll (June 13, 2014) determined that 65% of those polled support passing new legislation providing access to high quality pre-school to every child in America.

These are initiatives that are not going away. Accountability is not going away. More and more states are mandating accountability through QRIS and publishing rating results to the public. Public funds are being made available to all levels of families for their children to attend pre-school.

As a Montessori community, shouldn't it be up to us to define what quality Montessori education looks like? We need to have our teacher credentials recognized as high quality and not simply equal to a CDA. We need to define what materials are in our classrooms and have a rationale so that we can educate parents, decision makers, policy implementer s and policy  makers. We need to support multi-age groupings at a ratio and maximum group size that we know benefits children. We need to "translate" what we do so that when our classrooms and programs are rated, it will be understood why we do what we do. The Montessori ECE curriculum should be recognized as high quality in every state.

We can move this discussion forward. We can invite our colleagues from across the country to join in (there are currently 22 state groups with no voice on this website). Let's agree that we can talk about our similarities and our differences with grace and courtesy. But let's start the conversation. Comment here or better yet, join in the Montessori Forward List serve.

Montessori Forward

What Is Advocacy?

In a conversation with a fellow Montessori educator, just a few days ago, the conversation turned to QRIS, and with it, recognition of the Montessori early childhood credential as meeting a standard way above that of a CDA (A Child Development associate certificate), the use of an environmental rating scale that does not accurately assess the true value and benefit of a fully implemented Montessori classroom and program, and the need to align the Montessori curriculum with early learning standards set by the state.

This dedicated Montessorian said, "We should just refuse to participate. We've been fine all along. Why should we compromise now?" "If we participate, we'll have to have soft toys in our classrooms, and we won't be allowed to use glass, tools, or real Montessori materials." "We just need to ignore all of this."

Here are the standard answers:  QRIS ratings are published and can be used by parents to make early education decisions for their children.State agencies make judgments about Montessori education and its lack of legitimacy (such is the case in most states which do not currently recognize national organization accreditation of Montessori program, like they do accreditation by the National Association for Education of the Young Child (to read the history of that organization and its significant impact on early childhood education standards and assessments, go to the Library at MF and read the article on the history of ECE public policy). Funding both for enrollment and professional development is tied to these ratings. Policy makers continue making choices based on the only information they have regarding quality and these initiatives and legislation will continue to impact our community. The general public continues to have misconceptions, and just wrong ideas, about what Montessori education is all about.

But the real reason we cannot ignore the accountability movement in education is that we don't want to compromise.  We know from personal experience just what is so special about "authentic" "real" "valid" "fully implemented" Montessori education. And we do risk losing that if we give in, give up, or simply turn our backs on the educational policies that require certain ratios and group size, that mandate rules and regulations that dictate materials we can have in the classroom, that require professional development that is "hoop jumping." QRIS may morph into the next big thing, just like Common Core is getting push back in so many southern states, but accountability is not going to go away. These initiatives can be traced back even before the Governor's Summit of 1980 declared in a document that has impacted educational policy for the past 34 years, that we were, and are, A Nation At Risk.

Advocacy starts with a dedication to high fidelity, high quality Montessori philosophy fully implemented in our classrooms, and our schools. The fundamental reason for us to engage in advocacy is our belief in the importance of adhering to the practice of Montessori education based on the teachings of Dr. Montessori, our own empirical evidence of its value for children and their families, and our commitment to implementation of that authenticity as we best understand it. If we don't have that commitment, if it just seems too hard to work for those elements we know are essential, if we just want to long for the "good old days" when we could just run our schools and teach our kids, then there is no reason to advocate. As accountability standards are set by politicians, by policy makers, by state agencies who do not know, or understand, the actual benefits of a Montessori education but continue to rely on the only information they do have (from NAEYC, from Head Start, for the ECERS), our community will continue to be put in jeopardy. And we will stand back and watch as our classrooms are mandated to compromise on curriculum and materials, our teachers are not recognized for the professionals they are, and parents choose "free public school pre-K" for their 4 year olds.

As Montessori educators, in the classroom or has heads of schools, do we care enough about the children we teach, the families who see the benefits for their children and themselves as parents, the work we are doing to advocate for it? If we don't do it, no one else will. It is the Montessori educator that is the most crucial element in the implementation of the philosophy. We know how to prepare the environment and to connect our students to the materials so that they can make the discoveries and become the people we know they can. It is us who can educate the public, policy makers, state agencies.

This requires a paradigm shift for many of us. It requires that we take a stand, that we stand up and speak up, and that we create a Montessori culture of collaborative community that agrees to essential elements, that works together to educate those who don't know or understand what Montessori education is all about, and which insists, through our actions of respect, that we find the ways to support high quality Montessori education.

Each of us has a role to play. Each of us can make the decision to take a stand in support of Montessori education.

C. Lowry
Montessori Forward