A Paragraph to Sixty Pages in Seven Weeks

- 4 mins
PQP IQP ID2050 Hangzhou China

Beginning August 23rd and ending October 11th, my Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) team developed a project description, a little over a paragraph in length with few details, into a sixty page project proposal. The first few days, it seemed like an insurmountable task. How could we take so little and turn it into a project that will last for (another) seven weeks on the other side of the globe?

First, the numbers… I like numbers

Word Cloud

Word Cloud

How it all happened

0: Who are you people?

We went through the getting to know each other phase pretty quickly. I think the four of us quickly realized that we would all get along pretty well and be able to work together - it helped that I already knew one of my team members from previous projects. Luckily that realization held true for the following seven weeks - personally and professionally, we have all gotten along.

Between the four of us, there are two computer science majors, one biomedical engineering major, and robotics engineering major. Notably, no one majoring in education of any form, so we were all on pretty equal footing when it came to prior knowledge of our project - none of us knew anything. But from day one, we all embraced it, quickly researching and reading about Montessori education.

1: What is Montessori education?

The first topic after introductions when something like: “Montessori? What is that?”. We had been assigned to this project with very little knowledge of what Montessori education even is, so we had to familiarize ourselves with the topic. As it turns out, the Montessori method focuses on letting children learn about what they’re interested in - “follow the child”. Students, in mixed age classrooms, have uninterrupted learning time in which they can choose from any learning materials they choose. These materials help guide the child to make a discovery, and learn, on their own with little guidance from teachers. There’s a lot more to it, but that covers the basics.

It turns out that there is no set definition of Montessori education. When Maria Montessori developed the method in the late 1800s and early 1900s, she chose not to trademark the term. As a result, anyone can use the name, leading to some confusion about what Montessori is. For example: Maria Montessori herself started an international organization, Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), which has an American child organization, AMI/USA. And yet, there is also the American Montessori Society. Both organizations serve to accredit and guide Montessori schools, but have somewhat different philosophies, including on the usage of technology in the classroom. Essentially, we’ve had to navigate the differences in various types of Montessori education that exist today.

2: What is the project?

To write a proposal for completing project, you first have to know what that project is. Or at have a ballpark idea of what the project is, because a short paragraph isn’t a lot to go off of. From the intial project description and discussions with our advisors we started off with the idea of helping the sponsor start up their Chinese-English bilingual Montessori program. Initially they had planned on starting the program in the fall of 2018, but by the time we started our research, that had been delayed to next year due to a lack of qualified teachers. We thought we could help them. However, after talking with our contacts, the project morphed into helping the school determine the best way to implement a teacher exchange program with a Montessori school in the United States. That is, have a teacher from our sponsors school spend an extended period of time teaching in an American Montessori school to learn new techniques and methods to bring home.

4: How are we doing that? (aka: the methodology)

From that general goal, we broke the project into three objectives:

  1. Figure out how Chinese Montessori differs from American Montessori by interviewing teachers in both countries
  2. Determine what requirements the stakeholders (parents, teachers, and school administrators) have for a program using surveys and focus groups
  3. Using examples of other exchange programs, combined with the results of objectives one and two, compile recommendations for our sponsor

All of this took numerous iterations - surveying parents didn’t even exist in our first draft. Most of the work involved developing the various questions we planned on asking in our surveys, interviews, and focus groups. We had to get our process approved by an ethics review board (IRB), which mostly focused on the questions we’re asking and protecting our participants.

Conclusion

While this didn’t go into much detail, I hope it gives a general idea of what the ID2050/PQP process was like. At times, it was just as hectic and time consuming as other students make it out to be, but it also had its quieter moments. There were times I felt like we didn’t have a chance at finishing everything. But it turns out the Professors know what they’re doing, and slowly (very quickly), everything came together into a (mostly) polished proposal and final presentation. It was fun, stressful, and worth it. Now on to part two!