Sara Armstrong, Ph. D. is an educational consultant, keynote speaker, presenter, and writer working to provide resources and tools for change in education. With over 44 years as an educator, Sara has developed and implemented workshops on many topics, including information literacy, storytelling, technology integration, global resources for education, project-based learning, and integrating true social-emotional learning for living.

I’ve known and worked with Sara since the 1990’s. In fact, my first educational technology class at Berkeley was from Sara and Flora Russ. Sara and I have been friends and worked together for a long time, and I really wanted to have a conversation with her to share all that she does including her storytelling. Just listen and enjoy. Below are many of the excerpts from the podcast.
 
Storytelling
Sara starts the podcast with a story that has a moral. I have been fortunate to work with Sara over the years and always looked forward to her stories. Her voice is so calming and the stories have deeper meanings that encouraged me to really think and reflect. Most of the stories do. Sara also is actively involved with the Bay Area Storytelling Festival.
https://www.facebook.com/bayareastorytellingfestival/
 
A little about you
My dog, Beatrice, a cattle dog mix is very smart and busy. She’s still very active at 8 and very cute. That’s the important thing. She and my husband, Robert, live in Berkeley, CA. I have been in my house in Berkeley, CA a long time and seen lots of changes here. I’m sort of mostly retired now so that means I get to only work on things that I care about. That means working on transforming education and making the systems and processes more meaningful to everybody who is involved. Less stress, more relaxation, and engagement in what people are doing by increasing the possibilities for happiness and flow to take place. So the way we do that is with project-based learning and giving students voice and choice.
 
Starting with Montessori
I’ve always been fascinated early on by Maria Montessori’s methods and philosophy of education, mainly because little kids were engaged for a long period of time. I took the training and became a Montessori teacher and had my own Montessori elementary school. That was my first, for a long time, my work in education. So that’s what I thought it was always like and should be like. The idea that kids can choose what they want to work on for their own learning. In the preschool, it is really wide open so kids move around here and there in different parts of the classroom focusing on different aspects of education. In the elementary school, it is a little more directed, but again following kids’ interests. So that’s what we do in project-based learning. There’s always something in whatever content we are trying to impart that gives them pathways to what they are interested in. Then the education sticks, and what we want them to learn, they learn.
My first year teaching five-year-olds. Kids had a movable alphabet which is letters cut out of wood or plastic and they make words on the rug. This one little guy spent a long time writing on the rug with the movable letters. So he came over and got me and I asked him if he wanted to read it back to me. He said, “No.” The act of creating was what it was all about. Not the communication aspect at that moment. In the Montessori method, we work with writing before reading. Montessori had K-12 schools. For the upper grades, she had an environment that traditionally was a farm school. The idea for the older kids when their bodies and minds are changing and are interested in other things was to give them skills that they can use when they get into college or the workplace along with their studies. So at the Farm School,