Playing The Whole Game

“...in variants of games like little league baseball, players do not spend a year learning to catch and another to pitch and another to bat. Rather, they play the whole game from the start, just at the level at which they can play it. The idea is that playing the ‘whole game at the junior level’ helps the players see how baseball as a whole works, as well as why they would want to put practice time into learning the specific skills.”

— David Perkins, quoted in In Search of Deeper Learning (2019)

At Guidepost, the idea of “playing the whole game” is directly reflected in the structure of our curriculum. Students do not spend years accumulating isolated skills and knowledge in preparation for meaningful work somewhere down the road. Instead, they encounter the whole intellectual task from the beginning, at a level appropriate to what they can currently do.

Each curriculum unit is built in layers, moving from a basic understanding of the material toward a deeper understanding of its meaning, connections, and significance. Each unit is organized around a challenging, open-ended key question that students return to repeatedly. At the beginning, they may have little more than an intuition about how they would answer it. By the end, they have accumulated the knowledge and evidence they need to develop and defend a thoughtful response. This culminates in what we call “application work,” in which students use what they have learned to answer the unit's key question by creating something tangible and meaningful. 

This structure helps resolve a longstanding tension in education between traditional and experiential learning.

Rote memorization is often denigrated these days, and with good reason. The endless cram-and-forget cycle that many of us adapted to in our own education is demotivating and exhausting. But the solution is not to abandon factual knowledge. Students can’t think deeply about something they know very little about.

The problem is not that schools ask students to learn and remember things. It is that too often there is no meaningful payoff for doing so. Students memorize information for a test, write the test, promptly forget it, then move on to the next test. The acquisition of knowledge becomes the endpoint rather than the first step in a progression toward using that knowledge.

At Guidepost, we build trust with our students that the work they put in at the beginning of a unit is leading somewhere. Learning vocabulary, mastering foundational skills, remembering important facts, and practicing procedures all require effort. But students know that we are not asking them to do these things simply because they might need them someday. They will need them in the later stages of the unit—to wrestle with a difficult question, solve a problem, participate in a debate, or create something of their own. 

To take one example, as part of our science unit on chemistry and nutrition, students learn about macro- and micronutrients, food preservatives, chemical reactions during cooking, digestion, and metabolism. The unit routines include readings, videos, comprehension questions, quizzes and lab work. Then, for their final application, they work in small groups to design recipes and meal plans for their year-ending 3-day camping trip, shop for the food, and prepare it themselves while on the trip, using what they have learned.

Or, another example: as part of a math unit on data and statistics last year, students learned about various types of data displays, how to calculate measures of central tendency, and how statistics can be used in misleading ways. Then, for their application work, they were each asked to think of a real statistical question that was personal to them; something that they truly wanted to understand in order to make better decisions. One chess-obsessed student chose to investigate the statistical outcomes of various chess opening moves. Another chose to look at crime statistics in various countries to determine where they wanted to travel on an upcoming vacation. They were evaluated on how well they used the concepts of the unit within their analyses and how well they supported their conclusions with their researched data.

Deep learning requires both knowledge of the fundamentals and the ability to analyze, connect, evaluate, and apply that knowledge. It is the union of the two that creates complete and lasting learning.

John Dewey identified the problem more than a century ago:

“Much of present education fails because … the value of [school] is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation.”

One of our students captured the difference particularly well last year. Paraphrasing, he said: “What’s different about the learning here is that after we do the ‘regular’ type of schoolwork, you ask us to think about what it means and actually use it for something.”

Building learning in this progression also reflects a Montessori principle: isolation of difficulty. Students are not asked to learn new factual material, master unfamiliar skills, analyze complex ideas, and create an original product all at the same time. The step-by-step progression from simple to complex allows them to focus their energies on one kind of challenge at a time.

This curriculum structure also reflects yet another fundamental Montessori idea: the connection between the mind and the hand. Montessori wrote that “the hands are the instruments of man's intelligence.” For her, intellectual development was not separate from purposeful activity. Understanding is deepened when ideas are tested, expressed, built, and used.

For adolescents, the “hand” can be understood broadly. It can mean building a model, conducting an experiment, or making a product. But it can also mean writing a story, creating a budget, developing an argument, designing a solution, or solving a real problem. In each case, students take what they have learned and make something of it. The product is not an entertaining extra added after the “real” learning is finished. It is part of the real learning.

Our students know that the foundational work within a unit is leading somewhere, and that they will eventually be asked to do something interesting and difficult with what they know. That creates motivation, but it also creates pride. We are asking adolescents not merely to complete schoolwork, but to make, argue, investigate, design, and contribute.

And that reflects something fundamental about Montessori adolescent education: a deep trust in the capabilities of adolescents.

As Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine wrote in In Search of Deeper Learning:

“To ask teenagers to strive, with whatever degree of success, to create ‘products of lasting value,’ after all, is to communicate deep respect for who they are and what they can do—to honor what they can achieve in the present instead of focusing only on equipping them for the future.”

“Playing the whole game” means allowing students to experience the rewards of learning while they are still in school. They acquire knowledge and practise skills, but they also get to see, fairly immediately, what those things are for. So, if a student asks, “Why do I need to learn this?” we, as guides, can do more that explain why. By the end of the unit, the work itself demonstrates the answer.