In our Montessori secondary school, time is not an arbitrary schedule but an essential dimension of the prepared environment. In this blog, you will read how, at Roadstead, we organize the school day with patterns that form a rational framework of the time flow. With time patterns we also create cyclical routines that cultivate independence, executive functioning, and communal responsibility.
From left to right, Eliot, Sammy, Mason, Garrett, Charly and Lily making the time with Beau Turner at 757Makerspace
Stemming from the word “route,” routine is a course of time that provides the students with freedom to express their most urgent need of adolescence: being both individuals and meaningful members of a peaceful community – a balance we form within our Montessori prepared environment for adolescents.
Let’s start with the basic building stone of the school’s routine: patterns.
Time Patterns – Often Come in Threes
We, humans, make sense of time through events we recognize as similar and recurring within a defined period. “The Rule of Three” is not a magic formula but a common repetition that calls our attention to patterns. Once is just an incident. Twice is already a coincidence. Thrice tells us that we may expect future experiences of that kind. Expectation is the beginning of orientation in time.
Montessori Time Patterns in the Prepared Environment
Time patterns are fundamental in the architecture of the Montessori prepared environment. We use them when we create work tasks both in space and time. Not by rigid intention but almost organically, Montessori pedagogy is often organized in threes.
For instance, Maria Montessori defined every plane of development (except early adulthood) in pairs of three years: (a) primary: 0–3 and 3–6; (b) elementary: 6–9 and 9–12; (c) adolescence: 12–15 and 15–18. She also formulated lessons as sets of three periods: presentation, exploration, and assessment (or recall). A typical Montessori school day consists of three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon.
From Patterns to Routine
Patterns prompt us to see time as a route of beginning, middle, and end. Being able to return repeatedly to this path is what we call routine. With routine, we form habits that help us develop the capacity to organize our experience rather than react to chaos.
Routine is an essential need of every human being but above all of children who go through highly sensitive periods of development. It allows children to establish a positive relationship with their environment. Being able to recognize the course of the day, children can feel the world around them not as big and chaotic but as truthful, supportive, safe, and fair. They develop confidence that, as they grow, they will be able to take this route on their own.
It is important to remember that patterns and routine are not goals in themselves. We do not seek to create an environment of mere mechanical repetition. This is the reality of robots, not of humans. Time patterns and routine provide children with the needed framework for freedom to develop according to the needs of their current stage. We call it in the Montessori terminology Freedom within Limits. Without limits in time, freedom easily dissolves into restlessness.
Let’s move on now to discuss how we prepare the environment at Roadstead with time patterns and routine.
Routine Cycles
The annual calendar year in our Montessori adolescent program has 180 school days. That allows us to structure time cycles that work well with the rule of three. We divide this number of 180 days into six cycles of six weeks. Then we subdivide the six cycles into two halves of three cycles. In the first half (late August–mid December) we go away from last summer; in the second half (January–May), we go toward the next one.
Formally, the six-week cycles mark grading periods. At the end of every cycle, the students fill an assessment form in which they recommend a grade that best reflects their standing according to defined qualitative and quantitative criteria. We internally divide each cycle into the first and second rounds of three weeks. That helps the students set goals, plan ahead, assess their progress, and make adaptations toward the second half of the cycle.
Cyclical Time
The architecture of the calendar in sets of sixties, sixes, and threes is not arbitrary. It turns the flow of time from linear to cyclical. Psychologically, humans tend to perceive linear time as mechanical, monotonous, and arbitrary. Cyclical time, on the other hand, feels organic and synchronous with the internal cycles of our living body. Linear time trains responsiveness to external structures; cyclical time cultivates internal regulation.
We see the positive impact of cyclical time daily at school. It allows students to regulate the stormy ebbs and flows of adolescence. A routine patterned with time cycles helps our teenagers feel anchored within an environment that is predictable, stable, and trackable. Living in an organic and rational time cycle allows them to establish a much-needed state of being during the third plane of development: tranquility. During adolescence, when internal rhythms become unstable, a stable cyclical routine functions as an external scaffolding.
The Start of the Day – Individual and Community Routines Intertwined
The students start arriving at school a bit after 8am. The first ones usually turn on the lights and tune the temperature of the HVAC thermostats according to the season. Then I, Eran, the co-Head of School, take my usual seat at a corner across the main entrance. As each student arrives, I greet them with a “good morning.” They greet me back once or more. More than one greeting is needed if it does not involve eye contact. Eye contact is necessary not only when greeting but for all sorts of school communication. Sincerity is essential for us, so we take seriously the proverb that eyes are a window for the soul. Direct eye contact also signals that we are human beings before performing institutional roles.
Mornings are a time when we ask the students not to be on their electronic devices. We encourage them to interact with each other face-to-face, not necessarily to do or talk about anything special, just to be together. They are teenagers, so, of course, they check this limit. It is a school tradition that when an adult authority, most likely me, sees someone on their phone or computer, we tell the student to turn to the nearby peer and ask about their life. Interestingly, what starts with irritated compliance turns quickly into an actual conversation.
We open and close every period of the school day as a community. As Montessorians, we take adolescence as the social plane of human development. We call children turning into teenagers: “social newborn.” Communal transition points remind us that, in order for each one of us to be well, we need first to take care of the wellbeing of our community.
Morning Meeting
We lock the front door exactly at 8:45am and gather for the morning community meeting. Punctuality is the first skill of community making. For a community to come into being, we need to be present together in the same place and time.
The morning meeting always starts with five minutes of anapana meditation—an unguided observation of the natural flow of the breath. Thereafter Anna, my co-Head of School, or I greet everyone again with “good morning” and then go through the schedule of classes.
At Roadstead, we start and end everything as a community
This is a formal touching base that aims only to reinforce the routine. The students know that schedule very well. All the classes are set up for the entire school year. They appear on each student’s weekly schedule.
In addition to reminding the schedule of classes, we follow up with the students on daily and weekly chores: lunch blessing, table cleaning, trash clearing. These are duties that students in turn assign to the community members each cycle in advance. As part of the preparation for the school day, we expect the students to check their calendar each morning to verify whether they are assigned to any of the daily or weekly duties.
Individual Routine – Work Cycle
Following the morning meeting, the students take a few minutes to plan their work cycle time slots. This is an essential element of the Montessori prepared environment. The students have time to work independently either individually or in collaborative groups. For the first and second planes, especially 3–6 years old, work cycle is usually a block of roughly three hours. All the students take part in it at once.
Our work cycle is for adolescents, and so we spread it throughout the school day. Each student has individual time slots depending on their scheduled communal routine, particularly seminars and work-study sessions. We allocate around 13–15 work cycle hours weekly to every student. The time slots span the morning and afternoon as well as an additional 1–3 hours of home work cycle after school.
Students schedule their daily work either on a paper planner or a Google Calendar. The role of the teachers/guides is to go over the plans daily and provide constructive feedback.
Time planning in action at Roadstead: Lenorah’s weekly Google Calendar before (above) and after (below) planning work cycle time.
Daily planning of the work cycle cultivates executive functioning skills. Each student learns to shape a time flow that fits their own needs. With time, they become fully accountable for their own duties. They experience work as independence rather than coercion.
We know they have attained this independence when they become absorbed in tranquil, active learning — the hallmark of an authentic Montessori environment.
Lenorah (left) and Rose (right) absorbed in work cycle
Skills of Independence in Work Cycle Planning
Planning Ahead
We guide the students to respond to due dates of class assignments with strategy rather than pressure. Humans tend to put off duties until the last moment, creating unnecessary crunch time (that always comes with a high physical and emotional cost). With planning ahead, the students learn how to set up incremental steps for completing assignments within time limits.
Managing Short- and Long-Term Goals
The teachers typically schedule assignments a week in advance on the school website. Completing them by the due date is an example of a short-term goal. An example of a long-term goal is the ongoing work on math and Latin. Roadstead students study these two subjects as individual tutorials. We ask the students to schedule half an hour a day for Latin and about an hour a day of math. Once a week each student meets for a follow-up meeting with the subject’s tutor. The course of progress is based on the student’s own work pace. Once a student completes a lesson, a new lesson gets assigned. The goal is to complete all the required units by the time of graduation.
Knowing One’s Own Span and Flow of Concentration
The students learn to observe how long each one can work productively on literature, science, art, or any other subject. They plan their day according to their level of productivity on each subject in different parts of the day. They also know how to make productive transitions from one subject to another.
Accepting the 70% Rule
Children tend to focus on the activities they like and avoid the ones they dislike. Adolescents learn to accept (with much pain) that every task we like to do includes, at best, 70% tasks that we do not like to do.
The fruits of this lesson usually ripen when tasks become more complex. Many of our students express passion for science when conducting lab experiments that involve fire, explosion, cool tools, or changing the state of matter. They feel much less passion when we ask them to take notes, learn the scientific context of the experiments, understand them mathematically, and write methodical lab reports. However, by planning their individual work routine, they know that no real scientific learning can happen without accepting the hardship of doing these often tedious tasks.
Assessing One’s Own Work in Retrospect
The students fulfill their daily tasks when they write their own self-assessment reports. This is the counterpart of planning the daily work cycle calendar. It instills the skill of self-accountability by evaluating in retrospect how one has fulfilled the daily work plan.
Self-assessments are central in our grading process. At the end of every six-week cycle, we ask the students to review their weekly self-assessments when they write their grade recommendation form.
Communal Routines
Throughout the day, the students shift between individual work cycle time and time they share their work with others: communal meetings, lunch, seminars, and work-study projects.
Communal Meetings
They usually take place as transitions between different parts of the day. Transitions as a community signal the very essence of adolescence: being social individuals. The school day closes in the same manner as we start it in the mornings. We gather around the communal table; teachers and students make announcements, give reminders, and raise questions; thereafter, we close the meeting with a five-minute anapana meditation. The meeting ends with a dismissal.
Lunchtime
This is a routine of communal transition between morning and afternoon. Every day, at 11:35am, we gather around a large communal table. The meeting starts with a few announcements. Then the students take turns sharing a lunch blessing: a positive statement quoted from someone the student likes—a music performer, author, artist, actor, public figure, video game hero, or another meaningful figure. As part of this task, the student writes the blessing on a chalkboard on the sidewalk outside the school building to share the positive statement with the Downtown Norfolk neighborhood.
We allocate almost an hour for lunch (11:35am–12:30pm). Thirty-five minutes of it is fully communal. We ask the students to remain by the dining table until 12:10pm. The remaining time is for washing dishes and spending unstructured time with each other (without electronic devices).
Garrett sharing lunch blessing with the Downtown Norfolk community
Seminars and Work-Study Sessions
Science, literature, history, art, PE, 757Makerspace, theater, and more are communal time slots during which the students work together on shared topics and tasks. The preparation for this routine happens just like for college seminars, from one session to the next. The students work on this preparation mostly during work cycle. Participation in seminars and work-study sessions means that each student has to contribute one’s own prepared work for the benefit of the peers, whether through discussion, writing, creation of objects, or organization of activities.
Charly (right) and Cyprus (left) welding at 757Makerspace: individual concentration within a communal project
Weekly Community Meeting
This is a forum in which the students can discuss communal issues, plan events, and initiate improvement of the school’s environment. A student moderator and minute taker are assigned weekly on a student-created calendar. The moderator opens the meeting with a routine of setting up a positive tone. Each student and teacher share in turn one thing they enjoyed at school since the last meeting. During the discussion, everyone (adults and students alike) needs to receive permission to speak from the moderator. Decisions are taken only by consensus. The minute taker writes them on a shared Google Doc together with remaining topics for the next meeting.
Weekly Cleaning
We are proud that there is no cleaning service at Roadstead. The students and teachers maintain the cleanliness of our work environment. A cleaning committee manages the chores rotation, including assigning a couple of students as the moderator and quality control. Their role is to oversee the cleaning process. The moderator has an additional important role: creating a music playlist as the soundtrack of the cleaning. The committee members usually write on a white board the rotating cleaning chores of students and teachers.
We treat our cleaning tasks as communal, not individual. Once a student or teacher completes a chore (and passes the approval of quality control), the moderator sends them to help someone else. No one can rest until we complete all the cleaning chores. The end of the cleaning marks the cyclical end of the school week. We leave the space for the weekend, after which a new weekly cycle will start.
Weekly cleaning: the endpoint of the weekly routine cycle
Closing
This is how we prepare the school environment in regard to time.
For us, the adults, preparing time in a Montessori adolescent program is not an administrative task but a developmental responsibility. The way we experience time in adolescence shapes the kind of individuals and society members we will later become as adults. When adolescents experience time as fragmented, they tend to live reactively within it. When they experience time as rational and cyclical routines, adolescents begin to regulate themselves within it. They learn to anticipate, to prepare, to persist, to reflect, and to begin again.
In future blog posts, I will go in depth into the different aspects of our routine. The next stop in this series will focus on the place of Roadstead’s prepared environment for adolescents: Downtown Norfolk, VA. I am going to describe how our students developed a deep connection with this pace through active, place-based learning.