Part 1: Setting Up a Community of Peace

Eran Livni

In this blog series, I am going to explain how we, at Roadstead Montessori Middle & High School, form one of the most fundamental components of a genuine Montessori school. This is a prepared physical as well as non-physical environment. 

This is Part 1 of the series. I am going to discuss here what in general a prepared Montessori environment is, what specifically makes it a prepared environment for adolescents, and how we form it at Roadstead from scratch at the beginning of every school year.

What is a Prepared Montessori Environment?

A prepared environment is what makes a space to be a Montessori school. It is everything outside the individual child which provides the optimal conditions to support the child’s natural needs of development. As a prepared environment we can include the indoor classroom, the outdoor space, the furniture, the materials (including their location and manner of usage), the guiding adults, the structure of the program, the light, the airflow, the sounds, the schedule and its flow, the manner of interpersonal communication, and much more. 

Maria Montessori defined four stages of development, from birth to early adulthood. She termed these stages as planes. The first is toddler and primary (0-3 and 3-6 years old); the second is elementary (6-12 years old); the third is of adolescence (12-18 years old); and the fourth is of early adulthood (18-24 years old). 

Adolescents’ Prepared Environment: Social Independence

Maria Montessori defines social independence, or more precisely the need to attain it, as the natural power that directs human development in the third plane, the period of adolescence. It begins with the breakout of puberty, which she considered as the second birth of the social individuum, and ends with passing the threshold from childhood to adulthood.

Based on extensive experiments over many decades, both Dr. Montessori and her son, Mario, formulated specific and detailed instructions about how to prepare environments for the first and second planes. They, however, did not arrive to experiment with the third and fourth planes, except articulating their basic frameworks and principles. 

In her book From Childhood to Adolescence, Maria Montessori conceptualized the framework for the adolescent period, which she called: Erdkinder (in German, children of the land). That is, in general, a boarding farm community, in which the academic study is fused in work with crops, livestock, machines and a hotel business.

While the farm offers the ideal model of prepared environment in Montessori secondary schools, a parallel model has emerged around the world of schools that attempt to materialize the Erdkinder principles within urban environments. There is one critical difference between the farm and urban adolescent Montessori communities. The farm environment is circumscribed and so it can more or less be canonized like the toddler, primary and elementary environments. However, the urban environment always takes the shape, form and character of its larger sociocultural context.

The Twofold Principle of the Erdkinder Environment: Individuals in a Community

Regardless if on a farm or in a city, all genuine Montessori adolescent programs share the same basic twofold principle. To support adolescents’ natural need to develop social independence, their prepared environment provides the students with many opportunities to experience and express their individual belonging to their peer community.

The starting point of this connection between being an individual and being a community member is that, unlike in the earlier planes, adolescents should take part in the preparation of the environment. The adults’ role is to guide adolescents and work side by side in building their own self in a manner that is not separate from building their own school community. These two actions mutually condition each other. There is no individual without its community and no community without its individuals.

The Power of the Twofold Principle: Agency in History

The deep tie between individuals and community requires that adolescents should experience their agency in history. Unlike nature which consists of permanent and universal laws, history consists of human actions which are contingent. Everything in human society could go in one way or another. Maria Montessori coined the term supranature to highlight the impact of human history over nature. We do not want the students to reify their environment; we should help them to take social order as different from natural order.  

The fact that we are familiar with the current arrangement of the space around us does not mean that this is the natural and objective order of things. We want the students to take part in the making of their own society, their supranature, to get involved in the constant process of people refashioning their collective lives in place and time. Our goal is to help them, first, to see that their present-day environment reflects past human actions, and, then, to feel that it is in their power to take that environment from the present to the future.

Our school, Roadstead Montessori Middle & High School, is an example of the urban version of Erdkinder. And just like other programs of our kind, the first question we keep being required to address is how to prepare an environment that is integrated in the history of the place in which we live. You may now press on this link to read a blog post about this place: Downtown Norfolk, VA.

In the remainder of this blog post I will narrate how we, the students and adults, form the synthesis of community and individuals in our school’s prepared environment.

Roadstead Students Prepare Their Own Environment

The First Step: Forming Peer Connection

We designate the first three days of every new school year as the time to lay the foundations of the community, which will serve us for the coming 9 months cycle, from late August to the end of May. We call it “a beginning of the year orientation.” It starts with the non-physical formation of the space, creating a shared sense of familiarity and ease between the returning students, who carry the memory of last school year’s community, and new students, for whom this is a brand new experience.

The non-physical level comes first before the physical one. Once the students form an initial feeling of connection and trust they are ready to start building their own school space. However, the non-physical work doesn’t end when the physical one begins. With every piece of furniture that they set up, the students deepen their relationship of collaboration and cooperation.

The Best Icebreaker: Food

To establish a positive attitude, we, the adults, address the most immediate human need: food (it’s also common knowledge that adolescents just love events that involve food). We serve the students a breakfast of fresh sweet and savory pastries, spreads, fruit and juice. The food remains available for the students throughout the orientation days.

An Introduction Game – More Than Just a Game

Thereafter, we continue with a short game of personal introduction. We sit in a circle mixed together, returning and new students as well as the adults. One student volunteers to be the first to tell their name, something about themselves, and something fun they did over the summer break. The next one in line repeats what the previous student said and then introduces themselves by following these three prompts, and so on.

As the game progresses, the need to listen and remember becomes more challenging. There are those who get confused, others who get immersed in their own thoughts, some who are so nervous that they cannot retain the information, and yet others who express their discomfort with partial or complete refusal to participate.

How we, adults and students, handle the different reactions to the game is a defining building stone in the initial formation of the environment. These are delicate moments in which everyone needs to be sensitive about how to respect different individual experiences while at the same time respecting that being together as a community means going beyond ourselves. Usually older returning students are those who dissolve the tension, because they already know how we, at school, attempt to resolve such conflicts.

Forming a Safe Environment

Open communication and respectful negotiation are the way to form a healthy balance between individual and communal needs. To be ready to be flexible, to go beyond one’s own point of view, a person needs to feel trust in others. I can give away from my own standpoint if I get assurances that others see me, my experience, my position, my feelings, thoughts and needs. When one trusts others, others also form trust in that person. And when everyone begins to trust each other, a space of trust starts being formed. People create a sense of togetherness. They act with joy, warmth, and happiness. They fill the space with peaceful vibrations.

We, Montessorians, call this sort of vibrations Grace and Courtesy. You can read more about it in this blog post. Gradually the students allow themselves to open up to each other, because everyone feels affirmed, feels safe.

The Second Step: Arranging the School’s Space

After laying the community’s initial non-physical foundations, next comes the turn of its material ones: arranging the school’s physical space. However, as you will see, the preparation of the physical foundations does not end the preparation of the non-physical ones. When the students set up the school’s space they actually dive deeper into the formation of their peer community.

Every summer, when we go on break, we do a deep cleaning of the physical space and then leave it behind in the way it was arranged during the school year that has just ended. Once we begin the new school year, we ask the students to make decisions about what relationship of continuity and change they would like to form with the old arrangement of the space.

Demolishing The Old School Year

The expected urge of the students is actually not to make any change but to stick to the existing arrangement. “Everything works just fine,” is the immediate reaction that we often hear. Change is threatening; it requires choosing something that does not exist over something that already exists. Returning students usually interpret the change as a loss of their seniority status. Newcoming students find it hard to envision change without any prior experience to fall on. Also, they have never experienced this sort of agency before. They have never been asked before to decide how the physical space of their own school would be. It feels strange to choose one option over others without any ability to predict that one option will be right and others will be wrong, like in regular school exams.

Freeing the Mind From the Past

To help the students free their minds from the past and look forward (rather than back), we ask them first to “messify” the old arrangement. They need to remove all the furniture items from their previous location and place them somewhere else in a dysfunctional position. At this stage, we ask them not to take the next step of building in mind at all. We only need to destroy, that’s all. Unlike adults, teenagers’ minds are not yet caught in nostalgia. Once last year’s set up of the space vanishes and turns into a memory, they lose interest in preserving what existed before and actually become excited about creating something completely new.

There are always some hesitations when starting to demolish last year’s arrangement. It comes with a reaction of doing something forbidden, revolting against authority, feeling some sadness about letting the past go. But very quickly, the hesitation turns into an excitement of digressing into chaos without any thought or any attempt to control. There is another important element that adds to the pleasure of demolition. Without planning, the students start to form a sense of community based on the solidarity of being partners in “the crime” of demolishing the past.

Constructing the New School Year

After last year’s set up does not exist anymore, comes the next and more challenging stage, preparing the new environment for the coming school year. It is a challenge because demolition unites us with our animal killing instinct. Construction requires higher, more rational, faculties of collaboration: deliberation, negotiation and decision making. This phase usually starts with some nervousness. The immediate tendency is to withdraw from the community and seek refuge in the individual standpoint. We often see students who would like to design rooms either alone or with peers whom they already recognize as their friends.

The Organizing Principle: Consensus

To dissolve nervousness and scaffold collaboration, we, the adults, (re)introduce to the students the basic organizing principle of Roadstead as a democratic community. We believe in agreement not in compromise. Voting is a shortcut that forces the quantity over the quality of opinions. Whatever we have to make a decision on, we should discuss any topic until we arrive at a consensus.

Just as with the icebreaking name game, communal work toward consensus forms a safe environment. Everyone can trust that their voice will be equally respected and considered. Unlike with the rule of the majority, consensus makes it safe to express a voice even when it is only a single one. After all, it is always easier to sing in a choir than to perform a solo.

From Plan to Reality

The first step of construction is to envision a design. We ask the students to form small teams, three to four people at most. Each team should be a mix of returning and newcoming students. It should also mix students from different grade levels (as a Montessori school, our environment is a mixed age). Each team takes charge of a couple of rooms. We ask team members to discuss ideas among themselves about the function of each room and the furniture that will best serve the purpose.

The outcome of the discussion should become a plan drawn on paper, which each team shall present to all the other teams. A student from each team takes notes about the feedback their team receives and then the team revises their plan drawing accordingly. After all the plans get a consensual approval, the students start the set up stage. They relocate furniture room by room. With each new arrangement they stop to evaluate the outcome. If things do not fit, they can discuss and then try alternative solutions. It usually takes up to a couple of days with quite a few revisions until suddenly the space takes shape. Every room receives a character of its own; there is an integrative logical flow between the different rooms.

The Outcome: A Community of Peace

These two days of setting up the physical space are magical. Without paying attention, we all experience a deeper process that takes place than just moving furniture from one room to another. The students get immersed in their mutual communication, which, in itself, becomes a process of crafting their new peer community.

People from outside may not be able to see the outcome. But, from within the community, we can see and feel the process of communication embedded in every table, chair, couch and rug. The location of every individual item and all the items as a whole remind us that we are a community thanks to individual opinions that took part in the beginning of the year orientation days. Like in a philharmonic orchestra, all the individual voices evolved into a consensual decision through a process of negotiation and mutually acceptable agreement. In music, the outcome is called “euphony” (in Greek, “good sound”). In the larger society, this is the experience of creating a community of peace.

The equilibrium of community and individuals does not end with the initial formation of our prepared environment. It also structures the flow of our daily schedule. I am going to describe it in detail in a forthcoming blog post.