COMMUNITY-BUILDING PLAN

Practical Assignment

We've doing during this class an interesting practical assignment. We've analyzed the Community-Building Plan of the school Montessori in Valencia, paying special attention to the aspects that are included in the plan and those who have been excluded.

Before this lesson, I didn't know that each school can modify and adapt their community-building plan, according to the values and way of working that they want to transmit to their students. Furthermore, there are some aspects that all the schools include and other ones that they adapt or choose if they have to appear.

By doing this practice, I've learnt that all the school community participates while drawing the aspects that must be included in the document. In this way, the director is at the head of this action, a teacher, a parent and a representative of the students from the school council have a say and opinion on the issue, but the director makes the final decision.

The most hard thing for us to do was, to find the elements that weren't included in the plan, because we had to look for some other community-building plans and what the different decrees say to be able to compare with the one we've selected where for example the corrective measures weren't explained at all.

From my view, they didn't include this aspect, because of the way of working they have. So you can understand better, I want you to see this video.

As you can see, they work in a different way than usual infant schools, giving their students the opportunity to learn by themselves, just looking at what the teacher does with the different materials and then copying what they have already seen. My opinion matches with Shernoff (2013) who says that the culture of the school revolves around the foundational values of a learning environment rather than a testing environment, nurturing relationships, principles rather than rules, and democratic life.

So this, significantly  affects the way the community building plan is created and that's why they avoid to speak about corrective measures, because they don't believe in bad conducts, they believe in bahaviours that help students to learn and grow.

Referencies:

Shernoff D.J. (2013) Models of Engaging Private Schools and the Case of Montessori Schools. In: Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement. Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development. Springer, New York, NY