My Journey to Montessori
Whenever I meet another Montessori educator, we inevitably share our “Montessori journeys,” or how and why we entered the Montessori realm. I personally learned about Montessori through my mother, who discovered Montessori when looking for a preschool experience for my younger sister, Theresa (otherwise known as Kaleidoscope’s Creative Strategist). My mom is never one for half measures, so she established a Montessori play space in our living room for my two youngest siblings. We even had a trinomial cube and puzzle maps!
When I decided to become a teacher, my mother advocated for Montessori, but I forged ahead with traditional teacher training. I read about inspiring constructivist philosophies in graduate school before starting my first job as a kindergarten teacher. The school district gave me a moldy room piled high with damp boxes and a stack of scripted curriculum. Regularly, a well-dressed administrator would observe me, clipboard in hand, to ensure that I adhered to the plan. However, nothing in my life prepared me to coax 26 five-year-olds to sit criss-cross applesauce for hours and trundle through scripts that not only spelled out what I was to say, but also how the children should respond. In reality, that meant that we veered off script immediately. “What do you see on this page of the book?” I inquired. “I’m five and a half!” “My birthday is this year!” “My mom can’t get a dog cause she’s ’lergic.” Though I worked long days and really cared about my students, I could feel how I was failing them. Learning lost its luster, and I tried to shoehorn children into developmentally inappropriate expectations at every turn. At the end of the year, I resigned, exhausted and disillusioned.
And that’s when I had to admit to myself that my mom was right! I needed to pursue Montessori as an educator because it would enable me to understand and deploy developmentally appropriate, enriching, and nourishing educational experiences for children. I took a year off of teaching, awoke at 4:00 a.m. daily to work a Caribou Coffee drive-through (now there’s a difficult job!), and went back to school to get my Montessori diploma. Fast forward ten years, and my approach to teaching looks far different from year one. Children dance over the threshold and happily gather materials. I talk in a wholly unscripted manner. Learning is fun again, and I feel calm and content.
But what is this mysterious pedagogy (teaching method)? Below, I detail the basics of Montessori education. Who knows? Maybe it will kickstart your own “Montessori journey.”
What is “Montessori”?
The pedagogy gets its name from its originator, Dr. Maria Montessori, a visionary Italian physician. She first worked with children with learning differences, creating hands-on learning apparatuses, and wondered if these methods would aid the learning of all children. In 1907 she established the inaugural Casa dei Bambini (or Children’s House) in San Lorenzo, a disadvantaged region mostly populated by low income families. Her hypothesis proved correct: the children engaged with the learning materials and demonstrated incredible growth. Dr. Montessori continued to develop and refine her approach over the following decades, focusing largely on early childhood, though she and her collaborators did establish elementary schools and a roadmap for adolescent education.
Dr. Montessori based her ideas on observations of children, and she shifted the paradigm of children from passive receptors to active, curious investigators. To use an analogy, children are not empty vessels in need of filling but candles in need of a spark. As an educator, I appreciate how Dr. Montessori provided the “how” in addition to the “why.” Even since graduate school, I celebrated the promise of constructivism–enabling children to construct their understandings through experiences and experimentation. However, I never learned how to implement these big ideas. Thankfully, Dr. Montessori not only explained her philosophy but detailed what it looks like in practice.
Today, Montessori schools proliferate around the world. In the United States, about 90% are private and 10% public, and many focus on early childhood. That said, some extend through high school. Montessorians have their own lingo. Instead of “teachers” they say “guides.” Instead of “classroom” they use “environment.” Instead of “lesson” they say “presentation.” And they dispense with the traditional idea of grades. Instead, children progress from Nido (for infants), to Toddlers (self-explanatory), to Children’s House (ages 3-6), to Elementary One (ages 6-9), and then to Elementary Two (ages 9-12).
There are no requirements for a school that calls itself “Montessori,” but you should expect to find the following principles at play when you visit a Montessori classroom environment:
Individualized Learning
Rather than having everyone learn the same thing at the same time, children receive individual or small-group instruction, thus individualizing their learning experience. Guides strive to “follow the child,” identifying and responding to their academic needs and interests.
Mixed Ages
Each environment contains a range of ages. This provides a more authentic social experience where experienced leaders help newcomers and avoids the tumult of changing environments on a yearly basis.
Hands-On Educational Materials
Dr. Montessori developed beautiful, scientifically-designed learning materials that teach everything from colors and size to place value and parts of speech. Hands-on materials make abstract concepts concrete and accessible to young children and provide a strong conceptual basis to build upon.
Focus on Practical Life Skills
Montessori environments promote practical life skills such as food preparation, cleaning, getting dressed, sewing, hammering, and so forth. This helps cultivate children’s independence and helps them feel capable.
Evaluating Criticisms of Montessori
I’ve heard many criticisms of Montessori that misunderstand the philosophy or apply to only some interpretations. However, I do think that some feedback is salient. First, most (but not all) Montessori environments fail to emphasize–and even prohibit–unstructured play or only allow it when outside. Montessori materials have a distinct purpose, and guides demonstrate their specific use–a very structured activity. We know the importance of unstructured play to a child’s cognitive and social development, and I do think that Dr. Montessori, the consummate scientist, would embrace this well-researched observation. As an educator, I find it easy to integrate unstructured play into the Montessori environment through the inclusion of a loose parts shelf and high-quality toys such as Legos, baby dolls, magnet tiles, and train tracks.
Second, modern Montessori schools in the United States are overwhelmingly private and therefore financially inaccessible to most families. I don’t see this as an indictment of the Montessori community but rather a failure of our public schools to widely adopt alternative pedagogies. Of course, many Montessori and public school educators seek to rectify this issue.
Finally, many people argue that Montessori introduces academic concepts too early in a child’s development. However, I wholeheartedly disagree with this assessment. I do see how the scourge of high-stakes standardized testing drove districts to apply second grade learning to standards to kindergarten, which causes these early grades to employ developmentally-inappropriate teaching-to-the-test methods (see above: my first year of teaching) and causes children and teachers alike to feel like failures. Alternatively, Montessori individualizes instruction and capitalizes on developmentally advantageous windows for learning new concepts. For example, children have a Sensitive Period for language acquisition from birth through six. We invite three- and four-year-old children to learn about early reading concepts because they are excited to trace sandpaper letters and play rhyming games. When I begin this journey when children are five and older, they are less interested, and the endeavor, while not impossible, becomes more challenging.
Montessori at Kaleidoscope
Thank you for learning about Montessori with us! We are founded and staffed by Montessori educators, and our toy library contains many Montessori or Montessori-inspired materials. In coming blogs, we will discuss integrating Montessori principles in the home, which is also something I learned from my mother. Upon reflection, I really should have listened to her in the first place!
Some Montessori materials in the Kaleidoscope Toy Library
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