Abstract/Notes: Integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education promises to enhance elementary students’ engagement in science and related fields and to cultivate their problem-solving abilities. While STEM has become an increasingly popular reform initiative, it is still developing within the Montessori education community. There is limited research on STEM teaching and learning in Montessori classrooms, particularly from student perspectives. Previous studies suggest productive connections between reform-based pedagogies in mainstream science education and the Montessori method. Greater knowledge of this complementarity, and student perspectives on STEM, may benefit both Montessori and non-Montessori educators. This instrumental case study of two elementary classrooms documented student characterizations of aspects of STEM in the context of integrated STEM instruction over three months in the 2016-2017 school year. Findings show that the Montessori environment played an important role, and that students characterized STEM in inclusive, agentive, connected, helpful, creative, and increasingly critical ways. Implications for teaching and future research offer avenues to envision STEM education more holistically by leveraging the moral and humanistic aspects of Montessori philosophy.

Language: English

Published: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2017

Abstract/Notes: In May, 1991, the newly chosen Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent, Dr. Ho,vard Fuller, visited Highland Community School. His main question to parents and staff assembled to greet him was, "What lessons can we public school people learn from you?" Highland people had cogent ideas to pass on to him. This book is a more formal response in which I hope the hundreds of people who have continuously created Highland in its first twenty-five years speak through me in answer to him and to his colleagues elsewhere in public education. Highland began in late 1968, and by 1994 was one of only ten schools in the entire country to qualify for state-financed vouchers to independent urban schools. It is small: about seventy ethnically and economically diverse students aged two-and-a-half to ten years, three teachers and three assistants, a full-time executive director, and three part-time helpers, including a parent coordinator. One of the teachers doubles as principal. Annual expenditures per pupil are about $2,800. The curriculum is Montessori-based. The building is a century-old mansion. The school is governed by a nine-member parent board of directors and helped, primarily in fund-raising, by an advisory group of trustees. It is located in Milwaukee's Near West Side, an economically depressed and violent neighborhood (Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, since razed, was only five blocks from the school). This is the story of a small school. Faced with the vastness of urban decay and its impact on educational institutions, the reader might question whether describing and analyzing this diminutive organization has any relevance to urban education. Despite differences between it and stereotypical urban public schools, however, it brings a message to American education much more important than its size seems to warrant. Its size is precisely the point. Change nucleates and incubates in small settings. Our huge society conditions us to think in terms of large numbers, sweeping change, vast federal programs. Government may be able to create contexts for change, but the changes themselves have to be brought about where individuals assemble to meet their mutual needs. Whether their relationships will be harmonious and productive, or acrimonious and dysfunctional, depends on how the organization is structured and what spirit has been breathed into it. This book fleshes out the organizational and attitudinal reasons that Highland works so well and what public education can learn from this small inner-city educational oasis. As a framework for the organization of this study, let us first review factors that research has revealed make a school effective.

Language: English

Published: New York, New York: Garland, 1997

Edition: 1st

ISBN: 978-1-315-05106-2

Series: Studies in Education and Culture , 10

Language: English

Published: Washington, D.C.: AMI/USA, 1989

Pages: 57-68

Language: English

Language: English

Abstract/Notes: The authors accept urban reform as their main calling with their aim being to break the poverty cycle with a multi-faceted, educational, and family-centered approach. The authors speak about providing a broad range of education programs and social services including low-cost housing in comfortable apartments for single mothers, early childhood educational programs, adult education programs, career coaching and job skills training, family support referrals, a home visitation program, a children's garden, whole-family practical-life orientation, and a community center. [This talk was presented at the NAMTA conference titled: "Montessori from Birth to Six: In Search of Community Values," Minneapolis, MN, November 7-10, 2013.]

Language: English

ISSN: 1522-9734

Language: Italian

Published: Milano: Marzorati, 1980

Volume: 2

Abstract/Notes: In the late 1980s, a group of parents, teachers, and community members were concerned about an abandoned nineplex unit that sat directly across the street from an elementary school in Northeast Denver, Colorado. The school was Mitchell Elementary. Only a few years before, it had been in noncompliance with the federal court order to desegregate the Denver Public Schools. Dr. Martha M. Urioste had been assigned as the principal to bring the school out of noncompliance -- she did this in nine years by adopting a Montessori curriculum and attracting students from all over the city -- and Mitchell Montessori soon became a beacon of hope and opportunity in a neighborhood that had often felt forsaken. Next to the shining star of Mitchell Montessori, the neglected building stood in stark contrast and seemed to attract illicit activity. Many people worried for the safety of the children. Rather than wait for someone else to do something, these concerned citizens decided to adopt the building themselves and transform it into an infant-toddler-parent Montessori education center. They named the center Family Star for the child -- the nucleus of the family. This is their story.

Language: English

Published: Edgewater, Colorado: Great Work Publishing, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-692-61020-6

Runtime: 20 minutes

Language: English

Published: Burton, Ohio, 2008

Language: English

Published: Rochester, New York: AMI/USA, 2011

Series: Parenting for a New World: A Collection of Essays