Who Forgot the Macaroni?? The Importance of Community Living for Adolescents

Community living opportunities are more than bonding experiences, they are critical for positive human development during adolescence

“We’re going where?”

“What if there’s nothing to do?”

“You mean we can’t use our phones at all???”

These are some of the questions that I often field when discussing community living experiences with adolescents. Most of my students have all their needs met without needing to consider where they come from or who provides them. A few years ago, a high school aged student of mine needed a lesson on washing dishes, because she had never done them. So the thought of going on a trip where students need to plan our itinerary and work together to meet all their needs is often anxiety producing. And yet, this is critical work for the positive development of adolescents.

These trips, often called odysseys in Montessori contexts, typically last a week or more and occur at the start and end of the school year. The fall odyssey is designed to build community while the spring odyssey is designed to celebrate the community build during the year. These are critical opportunities for adolescents to engage in adult roles and responsibilities.

In her book From Childhood to Adolescence, Maria Montessori wrote that “If puberty is, on the physical side, a transition from an infantile to an adult state, there is also, on the psychological side, a transition from the child who has to live in a family to the adult who has to live in society.” This opportunity for living society is not for the purpose of reproducing the society that we currently have, but allowing students to build and live in an ameliorated society where they are active agents in systems of interdependence that allow all members to meet their needs. These odysseys are that opportunity for students to “live” a society that is large enough to require a division of labor, but small enough to allow them to experiment with how they organize it. They are on the precipice of living independently in a democratic society, and therefore must be practically prepared for the task.

Living society does not just have a practical purpose for skill preparation, although that is certainly important. Montessori posited that education should be an aid to life and should respond to the developmental needs of children at each stage of their development. When students reach adolescence, they seek social and economic independence. They are no longer children- and if you are the parent of an adolescent they will tell you this all the time. They are also not yet adults, and need experiences which allow them to try on different “hats” in order to shape their new identities in the adult world.

In order to foster positive development for adolescents, they require valorization of their personality within their community. They need to take part in work which benefits others and be recognized authentically for their contributions. Developmentally, adolescents feel that those around them are judging their every action, as if they were constantly on a stage. Valorization gives them the self confidence to explore their identities and shape themselves in organic ways through their work in community. While this can, and should happen during the school day, living in community is where valorization happens the most.

Designing an Odyssey- Recommendations and Pitfalls

In designing an odyssey trip, it is critical that students feel meaningful ownership over the trip within careful limits. A few years ago, a colleague and I rented cabins for our students at a state park and had students plan our entire itinerary. The location was intentional because since the area was rural, there were a finite number of potential outings that would be feasible for our class. As such, this allowed our students to have ownership over the planning, but not feel overwhelmed with too many options.

During this planning phase, we connected students to adult forms of planning, communication, and trip organization, while letting them do the actual leg work of the trip. This included having students call to set up appointments for our excursions, which for young adolescents can be a difficult task. We supported with writing scripts and stood next to the student on the phone, but they had to be the ones to put themselves out there.

The beautiful part of real world work is that there’s a chance that not everything will work out, and that’s ok! Some students called locations three, four, or five times, only to be told that no reservations were available while we would be in town. This was an opportunity for them to build resilience, regroup, and make another plan. Had we done this work for them, the experience of valorization for a successful trip would’ve been stolen from them.

Why Students Should Push Boundaries

My favorite math teacher once said, “sometimes the lighthouse is on the rocks.” Montessori argued that students needed to have freedom within a carefully defined structure, and this is critical for a successful odyssey. Often, upon first arriving, students push boundaries in ways which upset adults, yet this is critical to their normalization to the norms of the experience. You need to hit the rocks before you can get to the lighthouse. Adolescents push boundaries to know that they’re there, and once the boundaries are established, the work of living society can begin in full.

On one of my first odyssey trips, a group of students had snuck the game Cards Against Humanity into their bag, despite explicit instructions from the adults not to do so. For those unfamiliar with the game, it creates humor by using derogatory language, often making inappropriate jokes out of somber and serious topics.

My students thought they were being sneaky by all meeting in one of their rooms to plan their strategy to play the game without detection. However, they did not take into account the thin walls of our cabin, and the reality that I could hear them discussing their plan (very loudly) while sitting in the living room.

The students discussed their plan at length: They would hold Uno cards in their hand in addition to the Cards Against Humanity cards, and would sit on top of their explicit cards if a teacher walked in. I waited until they started to play the game when I snuck upstairs and threw open the door.

Upon my surpise entrance, one student hid their cards, two threw their cards in the air, and the rest stared at me, frozen in their action which I asked them not to take.

We had an emergency community meeting to discuss the incident, and took a real look at what kind of society this game was reproducing; and if that is what we wanted our community to be. When taken out of the “humorous” atmosphere of the game, the students were stunned by what the cards actually said, and we were able to have a thoughtful discussion as a community about why the game was not a representation of who we wanted to be.

So was I mad that they had pushed the boundaries?

No! I was glad, because the conversation that came about allowed us to deepen our commitment to each other and our experience of living society. It was a strong foundation for the rest of the trip.

On each odyssey trip I have led, Montessori’s work has proved true: Once students are meaningfully connected to caring for themselves, their community, and our collective environment, their intrinsic motivation kicks in. Students want to be like adults and take on adult responsibilities; which is why the student who is barely awake when school starts at 9:00am is eager to wake up before 7:00am to help with breakfast. Membership in their community meets their need for social independence, which is why these trips are so critical for positive development during the adolescent years.

Obstacles as Opportunities for Development

In the book, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, John Warner wrote the following:

For a long time I viewed my role as helping students shorten the learning curve.

Having made many mistakes during my own period of development, I believed I could aid students in avoiding potholes into which I’d once fallen and speed them along to proficiency. This involved lots of prescriptive teaching: do this, don’t do that, watch out for these other things…

My goals for students were too low, settling for proficiency rather than insisting on a process directed toward consistently and continually building expertise, not only in the class but beyond. I now recognize that deep learning, lasting, transferable knowledge, requires each individual to reinvent the wheel for themselves. Previously, I was giving students not just the wheels, but the entire car to go with them. At best, they were buying the gas.

Experiences which allow for positive development cannot be framed from an adult view of efficiency, because the task of adolescents is self-construction. In fact, the efficient path is often the wrong path for adolescents to take because it does not give them experiences which allow them to truly learn and grow.

For example, one year on an odyssey trip, the group in charge of making macaroni and cheese for dinner forgot to buy macaroni. When we returned from the store, students quickly realized their mistake, and had to work together to come up with a plan to return to the store while still completing all that needed to be done for the day. It required that my students create a division of labor so that each community member contributed to the needs of the group. It was about more than going to the store to get pasta, it was about allowing the potholes to be meaningful learning opportunities that would not have occurred if our goal was efficiency.

If we take all of the risk out of education, it won’t be real, and it won’t meet the needs of our adolescents. If our goal is education for human development, then we need to follow the student down the windy, pothole-filled path of positive development. Only then will we truly serve them.