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Although most Montessori schools are private, the school where I work is a public charter school, so a persistent challenge for us involves synthesizing Montessori philosophy and practice with the antithesis of state standards and standardized testing. In other words, our identity depends on our staff finding creative ways to stay true to our Montessori soul while living in a public school body.

Because we are public, we are larger than most Montessori schools, with over 500 students spanning the first three planes of development, from our infant/toddler room all the way up through high school. Our adolescent program consists of more than 200 students in six classrooms. 12-14 year olds (7th and 8th grade) fill the first two of these classrooms, while 14-18 year olds (9th – 12th grade) who are earning high school credits fill the remaining four. Being such a large school has its advantages, but of course it limits how much individualized attention we can give to each student in our classrooms. Those of you who are Montessorians, I’m sure, noticed that we do not arrange our age groups in our secondary program according to the three-year age cycles that are so central to Montessori’s philosophy on human development – a concept that she referred to as “The Constructive Rhythm of Life.”

It was only last year that we made the tough decision to split the rooms along public school lines (credit-earning and non-credit earning) rather than three-year age cycles because we felt that we could serve each of these two groups better with this arrangement. Prior to last year, our staff found it very difficult to balance the needs of the credit-earning “third levels” (9th graders) with the needs of the first and second levels (7th and 8th grade). Due to the demands of earning high school credits, the majority of the time and energy of the teachers in these rooms got directed to the third levels, which meant missing key experiences in the development of the first and second levels.

Our staff did not take this decision lightly, and we actually debated it for three years before finally deciding that it just made the most sense to break up the rooms. The new age groupings allowed us to provide our 12-14 year-olds with the kind of authentic Montessori experience that would serve them well once they began the more directed public school experience of earning credits in our 14-18 year-old rooms.

With this new format, we wanted to return to the fundamentals of the cosmic curriculum for the 12-14 year-olds, which would provide the much-needed context for everything they study, but we still faced the problem of adapting the complexity of the content to make it suitable for their age level. Fortunately, we found the solution to this problem David Christian’s Big History course. There are a multitude of ways in which Big History serves the philosophical principles of Montessori’s Cosmic Education, but expounding on those would be the topic of another forum (I am currently working on an article that looks at the details of this link more closely).

What I’m curious about is whether or not anyone else has had any experience incorporating Big History at this level. I am eager to share my experience and the experience of our students, but I don’t want to influence the perspectives of any group members. Essentially, what I’m looking for in terms of the curriculum is what aspects of Big History have worked, which ones haven’t, and what you have had to adapt. Furthermore, have you found the course useful in achieving the philosophical outcomes that Montessori education aims to promote (i.e., a sense of place, understanding humanity’s cosmic task, dealing with the advantages and dangers that our supranature has introduced into our society and our planet, etc.)? Which of these Montessori outcomes have been most pronounced in your experience with Big History at the middle or high school level, and which ones need more “teasing out,”if you will? I would enjoy hearing your personal stories and would be grateful for any insights you can offer. I look forward to learning from you all!