If you stroll through our school gardens on any given Monday afternoon, you are likely to find Marcia Jones volunteering alongside our lead environmental educator, Eliza Hudson. As a retired educator, Marcia looks forward to her weekly gardening class with our Primary students, and with her 31 years of experience as a kindergarten teacher in Guilford County, we look forward to all she has to offer the children and the school. In a recent interview, Marcia shared with us how much she loves teaching young children the value of tending the earth, especially her four grandchildren including Foster, who is enrolled in our Primary program.

In addition to helping in our gardens on a weekly basis, Marcia supports several other community gardening projects in and around the Greensboro area. She uses her green thumb to tend the gardens at the Wentworth Museum in Rockingham County, the Guilford College Community Garden and Jones Elementary School. “Gardening helps me relax,” Marcia shared, "and its so nice to be able to see the product of all your effort. I think that’s especially true for young children." Many years ago, she started a gardening program with her kindergarten students at Sedgefield Elementary School. “The children loved it. We grew a wide variety of vegetables from seed, including squash, radishes, potatoes, peas, and pumpkins. The children especially liked the pumpkins because they would grow all summer and could be harvested in the fall,” she shared.

With her family’s roots in this area of North Carolina, Marcia is deeply connected to the land, and her knowledge of farming is much greater than what her humble demeanor might initially suggest. She grew up working on her family's farm in Rockingham County just north of Greensboro and she has many fond memories of driving the tractor out in the fields. “My sister and I were working on the family farm up until two years ago. Over the years, we’ve grown tobacco, corn, wheat, soybeans and apples.” Even with those years of experience in her back pocket, Marcia continues to express her modesty about having a green thumb and loves learning new gardening techniques from those around her. “Lately, I’ve been learning more about which herbs to plant around my vegetable garden to deter deer and other wild animals,” she told us.

Needless to say, Marcia's time and talent, both as an avid gardener and an experienced educator, have been a tremendous gift for our school this year.  We are grateful for all that she has done to enrich our environmental education program and to support our students and faculty with her skills and expertise.  When asked about the best part about working with Marcia this year, Eliza Hudson shared these words of appreciation:
"Working with Marcia has been one of the highlights of the year for me and the Primary children in the Encore program at Greensboro Montessori School. It is rare to meet life-long educators who still have energy to volunteer with youth these days, yet Marcia is truly one such educator. A teacher to her core, I gain significant insight about children, gardening, and teaching from her every time we work together. Thank you Marcia!"

We recently began a discussion on the quintessential similarities between computational thinking and the Montessori method. The three-part blog series is inspired by a recent New York Times article by Laura Pappano entitled “Learning to Think Like a Computer.” In our first post, we explained how even the simplest of Montessori materials teaches computational thinking skills. In this second installment, we highlight how the Montessori approach to education develops computational thinking within students.

We met with Jonathan McLean to talk about his semester-long assignment in the Middle School’s Creative Labs course. Like all classes in the Montessori curriculum, this visual and performing arts class integrates subject matter from other areas of study. More specifically, Jonathan is weaving together STEM (Science, Technology Engineering and Math) and Art History through a complex science fiction role-playing game involving student-built robots and drones. To make sense of the story and succeed in the game, Jonathan’s students must employ computational thinking skills.

Just what are these skills? In her New York Times article, Laura Papanno says they are “recognizing patterns and sequences, creating algorithms, devising tests for finding and fixing errors, reducing the general to the precise and expanding the precise to the general.”

Our middle school students are flexing all these mental muscles in a battle royale between the Drones and the Bots, the only remaining cultures in the elaborate story guiding this semester’s coursework. The setting is such: The Earth has overheated making it inhabitable for organic life. Only two warring cultures, Bots and Drones remain, but neither are safe. Volcanic activity threatens the Bots on land and atmospheric change jeopardizes the Drones in air. The Bots and Drones must appeal to an Alien culture to save them, and it just so happens the Aliens have tremendous reverence for the visual arts. As the Bots and Drones compete for the Aliens’ benevolence, they must do so with aesthetically appealing design and decoration which aligns with the Aliens’ favorite artistic movements.

As the facilitator, Jonathan plays the role of the Alien culture. The students are divided into multi-age teams aligned with either the Bot or Drone culture. Jonathan gives the students data sets with which to design, build and operate their Bots and Drones. The teams consist of students in the various rolls such as officer, designer, engineer and pilot. As the students receive, process and make sense of the data they receive, they must adapt to survive. Whether either or both cultures escape the Earth will be determined in a three-hour Bot versus Drone showdown next week. The teams’ performances are the students’ final exam for the class (and Jonathan has a surprise finale planned for the students if they find a win-win solution for the Bots and the Drones).

Rather than dictate or force rote memorization upon their students, Montessori teachers educate through integrated experiences. Jonathan has created a fictional and engaging theme to provide a framework in which the students are able to apply real-world skills. Students are absorbing data from multiple sources to identify problems, understand the scope of the problems and develop and test solutions. Additionally, Jonathan is purposefully withholding information forcing the students to uncover new information and draw conclusion on their own. Harkening back to Laura Pappano’s words about computational thinking: “Concealing layers of information makes it possible to get at the intersections of things, improving aspects of a complicated system without understanding and grappling with each part. Abstraction allows advances without redesigning from scratch.”

If all of this sounds like a lot of fun, it is. Our middle school students are learning science, technology, engineering and math in their visual and performing arts class. If a student loves art, he can pursue this interest through the final appearance of his Drone, but he must also ensure aesthetic enhancement doesn’t impact physical performance. On the contrary, if a student loves engineering, she can fuel her curiosity through building her Bot, but the structure must accommodate one of the Aliens’ preferred art movements, for instance, Cubism.

In most schools throughout the country, these two students couldn’t thrive in the same class, but the Montessori method demands they both succeed by allowing them to pursue their passions through integrated curriculum and independent study. No single class takes place in a vacuum of learning, and students must carry their knowledge and experiences from one class to another. Ultimately, it’s learning how to think (like computational thinking skills), versus what to think which prepares these students for a lifetime of achievement.