Montessori meets positive pyschology and mindfulness

A plan, a plan. Another new year turning around here. There's so much in hope in my heart. I feel full of joy, peace and love. I am anticipating a new year full of excitement and connection.

I've had the most incredible intellectual experiences in the past year and I think that's the direction I want to take this blog. Towards where Montessori fits in with other thinkers -- let's talk Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi(Flow) and Martin Seligman (Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness). How do Positive Psychology and Montessori Method compliment each other?

Montessori anticipated all kinds of thinks that today's psychologists are studying. I want to get on board all of this discovery.

I am also fortunate to have discovered the benefits of meditation and yoga thanks to the book Full Catastrophe Living, by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. The practice of mindfulness is definitely at play in Montessori teaching and the classroom environment. How is Montessori teaching children to be mindful? How can teachers incorporate mindfulness practices in the classroom and outside of it?

Also, I've been doing a lot of writing for the purposes of Montessori training and I'm considering posting it here or elsewhere.

happy 100 and a new year

Happy 100 years, Maria! You are the #1 genius soul sister shining light in my life. Thanks for inspiring me to embrace my own life and the lives' of children in a new way.

Here's my Montessori new year's resolutions:

1) Learn more about peace education
2) Complete more training over the summer (especially language)
3) Post my albums digitally for myself and maybe other folks
4) Observe 6-9 and 9-12 classrooms in action
5) Continue building my children's book library
6) Develop awesome author studies and post here

the lesson plan from 1912

Becoming a Montessori teacher means learning the minutiae of the lessons described in the writing of Maria Montessori. It means reading Dr. Montessori's flowery prose about her ingenious cylinders and rods and beads and distilling her poetic conceptions into a numbered procedure for a very generic lesson plan.

This process is tedious, but so incredibly necessary. It elevates the lesson into a scientific operation, but at the same time becomes the artist's script. The lesson plan exists as the notes the artist inspects before the first brush stroke, the script the actor consults before summoning her emotion.

The lesson plan is something meticulous. It breaks down what to say and when to say it, it may well be the first "scripted curriculum". However, the effectiveness comes from the fact that the "script" of actions and words lasts for five minutes or less. It is a scripted, ordered moment in a day that flows loosely. The lesson has demanded the concentration of the teacher prior to the moment. Yet, it is a lesson that can be completed again and again, at a different time with a different child. It doesn't get stale like the instructions for gluing together the latest thematic art project.

Obtaining someone else's interpretation of an exercise is quite easy. Typing your own interpretation and working your hand out during class time to transcribe the details of your intsructors work is not so easy. But definitely time consuming. And that is the idea folks. That's why future doctors have to memorize 5,000 things every year in med school. I'm sure there's a psych study out there that proves that the memorizing and transcribing of info may be tedious work but it gets the brain to a saturation point, where you just start always thinking about things in terms of three period lesson or blood type or civil tort or whatever.

I'd keep going, but I have some sensorial excercises to transcribe. Woo.