When we come together with others that share our passions, we find solidarity and strength our solutions and ideas can take flight.Īn idea did fly. When we struggle alone with big, complex problems like equity, we often feel overwhelmed and tempted to give up. “What if that report also let a guide group by IEP or SPED?” “What if this report could land in a guide’s inbox at the start of each week?” “What if guides could receive push notifications that told them when a group was being underserved?” There was so much wisdom and passion in that room, just looking for a place to go. Questions and ideas flew around the group. The initial meeting was a brainstorming session about Genevieve’s work and what it might look like in an online record-keeping platform such as Transparent Classroom.
Elizabeth assembled a group of 20 Montessori guides, administrators and coaches to sit down with Transparent Classroom during the NCMPS Public Montessori Symposium in March. This led Elizabeth Slade at NCMPS to organize a larger collaboration. Her next step was to share her work with the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector (NCMPS) and Transparent Classroom. Genevieve saw the potential for this approach to be automated inside of Transparent Classroom, her online record-keeping platform. She wanted an early indicator, to share with her team of guides and coaches, of how her community was serving different groups of children. This challenge inspired Genevieve D’Cruz, a Montessori Coach at Lee Montessori Public Charter School in Washington, DC, to start measuring equity by manually tracking presentations by gender, background, and ethnicity. We need the right information at the right time. Often the assessment is too late, not capturing the right metric, and not actionable by the teacher. But summative, standardized assessment has proven incomplete in capturing a true picture of the whole child, and it can’t tell us much about how where “gaps” came from or what to do about them. The so-called “achievement gap” was uncovered by academic assessments. But at the end of the day, we are often left wondering if it will be enough to fill the opportunity gap. In response, we prepare ourselves and our classroom environments as best we can to meet the needs of our community. We inevitably discover experiences of inequality and hardship. We look for a child’s interest and use that as the key to connecting them to the world. We observe, take notes and experiment with our presentations.
In our practice as Montessorians, we strive to see and support each child in our care. Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhoodīut how can children reach normalization if they’re not offered the work in the first place? Thousands and thousands of experiences among children of every race enable us to state that this phenomenon is the most certain datum verified in psychology or education.
Among the revelations the child has brought us, there is one of fundamental importance, the phenomenon of normalization through work.
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