Montessori method

The Montessori method is an approach to educating children based on the research and experiences of Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori (1870–1952). It arose essentially from Dr. Montessori's discovery of what she referred to as "the child's true normal nature" in 1907,^[1] which happened in the process of her experimental observation of young children given freedom in an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning activity.^[2] The method itself aims to duplicate this experimental observation of children to bring about, sustain and support their true natural way of being.^[3]

Applying this method involves the teacher in viewing the child as having an inner natural guidance for his or her own perfect self-directed development.^[4] The role of the teacher (sometimes called director, directress, or guide) is therefore to watch over the environment to remove any obstacles that would interfere with this natural development. The teacher's role of observation sometimes includes experimental interactions with children, commonly referred to as "lessons," to resolve misbehavior or to show how to use the various self-teaching materials that are provided in the environment for the children's free use.^[5]

The method is primarily applied with young children (2–6), due to the young child's unique instincts and sensitivity to conditions in the environment.^[6] However, it is sometimes conducted with elementary age (6–12) children and occasionally with infants and toddlers, as well as at the middle and high school level.^[7][8]

Although the Montessori name is recognized by many, it is not a trademark, and it is associated with more than one organization. Schools differ in their interpretation, practical application, and philosophy in using this method with children.^[9] This article is about Dr. Maria Montessori’s research and discoveries and their practical application by adherents and practitioners with children.

Contents 1 History 2 Philosophy 2.1 Concepts 3 Montessori materials and curriculum 3.1 Practical life 3.2 Sensorial 3.3 Mathematics 3.4 Language 3.5 Cultural subjects 3.6 Elementary (6–12) curriculum 3.7 Lessons 3.8 Homeschooling 3.9 Music in Montessori environment 4 Criticism of Montessori 5 Benefits 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

History

The "Montessori method" developed from experimental research that Dr. Maria Montessori conducted with disabled and mentally challenged children in the early 1900s.^[10] She began this research using the basic idea of scientific education that was developed and employed in the 1800s with special needs children by French physicians Jean Itard and Edouard Seguin.^[11] A student and associate of Itard, Seguin extended Itard's initial idea of observing children in their natural, free activity by adding a series of exercises with specially designed self-teaching materials. Based on Dr. Montessori's success using this same approach in her initial research with disabled and physically challenged children, she began to look for an opportunity to study how it might be applied to benefit the education of typically developing children as well.^[12]

In 1906, the opportunity presented itself when Montessori was asked to establish a day-care center for young children (2–6) in a low-income housing area of Rome's San Lorenzo district.^[13] She opened the center in 1907, calling it a Children's House,and began observing the children in the scientific manner indicated before by Seguin.^[14] In this process, Dr. Montessori soon discovered that the children responded to the materials with a deep concentration that resulted in a fundamental shift in their way of being, changing from the ordinary behavior of fantasy, inattention, and disorder, to a state of profound peace, calm and order within their environment. Observing this change occurring with all the children in her environment, she concluded that she had discovered the child's true normal nature. Later, Dr. Montessori referred to this change as normalization and the new emerging children as normalized.^[15]

After 1907, Dr. Montessori reported her discovery and experiences to educators and others who became increasingly interested in learning how these changes came about in children. This interest soon led her to write various books on the subject and conduct training programs to explain her approach, which eventually came to be known as the "Montessori method." ^[16]

Following her initial experiments with young children, Montessori extended her research by introducing new materials and studying the effects of her approach with children of different ages. For example, near the end of her life, in her book De l'Enfant à l'Adolescent,^[17] (From Childhood to Adolescence), Montessori contributed to the work of the International Bureau of Education and UNESCO, by relating how her method would apply to the secondary-school and university settings. Her writings, lectures, and research during some 40 years until her death in 1952 constituted the basic foundation of knowledge about the method, which is currently conducted according to various philosophies in schools and other institutions associated with the name Montessori throughout the world.^[18]

Since Dr. Montessori's death in 1952, the method has developed along several different philosophical tracks. Each track has evolved its own distinctive organizational affiliations, training and presentation of the method to the general public.^[19]

Philosophy

The philosophy of the Montessori method has remained somewhat obscure and confused because Dr. Montessori's 1907 discovery of her method's effect on children was entirely accidental. Throughout her life, Dr. Montessori never described the method that evolved from her discovery in great detail; speaking and writing instead more about the effects of the method on children, rather than the method itself.^[20] The question of its underlying philosophy was therefore left to others, which eventually led in several different directions. For some, the method was closely linked to Dr. Montessori's personality, so that when practiced outside her direct control and presence, it was diluted and misapplied, such as to conform to the needs and interests of the particular cultural context.^[21]

Confusion and conflict about the method's philosophy emerged with particular intensity in the modern development of Montessori in the United States^[22] where, in 1967, the name "Montessori" was held to be a "generic term" that no organization could claim for its own exclusive use.^[23] Since then, the number and diversity of Montessori organizations and philosophies have expanded considerably.

• One main philosophy of the Montessori method is attached to the personality of Dr. Montessori herself. This philosophy defines the Montessori method according to the pronouncements of Dr. Montessori's colleagues and successors who claim authority from Dr. Montessori herself or her biological son and heir, Mario Montessori.^[24]
• A second major philosophy developed around the idea that the method is controlled by the surrounding culture within which it is operating at the time. This culture-type philosophy defines the method to fit within the popular theories and ideas of conventional thinking of the day. For example, in this philosophy, the particular effects of the method as described by Dr. Montessori in 1907 would be explained as due to the unique Italian context of that day, which is not possible to replicate with children in a different place and time.^[25]
• A third main philosophy holds that the Montessori method reflects a way of being committed to infinite and eternal laws of nature, which is outside the context of either personality or culture. This philosophy has been described as a scientific way of following laws of nature to bring about true normal being.^[26] In 2003, a new, comprehensive technology was announced for practicing this particular philosophy.^[27]

In practice, the Montessori method is applied with varying degrees of adherence to these three main philosophies, although they all usually subscribe to at least part of the writings of Dr. Montessori on the subject. While some strictly adhere to one philosophy or another, others develop their own unique blend of philosophies and interpretation of her writings. Despite these differences, there are several concepts that are widely shared by many adherents and practitioners as consistent with the Montessori method.

Concepts

• Inner guidance of nature. All children have inherent inner directives from nature that guides their true normal development.^[28]
• Freedom for self-directed learning. The Montessori method respects individual liberty of children to choose their own activities. This freedom allows children to follow their inner guidance for self-directed learning.^[29]
• Planes of development. The natural development of children proceeds through several distinct planes of development, each one having its own unique conditions and sensitive periods for acquiring basic faculties in the developmental process. The first plane (ages 0–6) involves basic personality formation and learning through physical senses. During this plane, children experience sensitive periods for acquiring language and developing basic mental order.^[30] The second plane of development (6–12) involves learning through abstract reasoning, developing through a sensitivity for imagination and social interaction with others. The third plane (12–18) is the period of adolescent growth, involving the significant biological changes of puberty, moving towards learning a valuation of the human personality, especially as related to experiences in the surrounding community. The fourth plane (18+), involves a completion of all remaining development in the process of maturing in adult society.^[31]
• Prepared environment. The right precise conditions around children allow for and support their true natural development. For young children, the environment must be prepared in this way by providing a range of physical objects that are organized and made available for free, independent use, to stimulate their natural instincts and interests for self-directed learning.^[32]
• Observation and indirect teaching. The teacher's role is to observe children engaged in activities that follow their own natural interests. This indirect teaching to control the environment, not the child, contrasts sharply with the ordinary teacher's role of implementing a pre-determined curriculum. For example, a Montessori method class has the teacher resolving misbehavior by refocusing the child to some positive activity, rather than engaging in the ordinary system of rewards and punishments.^[33]
• Normalization. During the 0–6 plane of development, children have the ability to shift their fundamental being from the ordinary condition of disorder, inattention, and attachment to fantasy to a state of perfect normal being, showing such external behavior as spontaneous self-discipline, independence, love of order, and complete harmony and peace with others in the social situation. This psychological shift to normal being occurs through deep concentration on some physical activity of the child's own free choice.^[34]
• Absorbent mind. The young child (0–6) has an absorbent mind which naturally incorporates experiences in the environment directly into its whole basic character and personality for life. This mental faculty, which is unique to young children, allows them to learn many concepts in an effortless, spontaneous manner. It also allows them to undergo the key phenomenon of normalization to return to their true natural development. After the age of about six, this absorbent mental faculty disappears.^[35]
• Work, not play. Children have an instinctive tendency to develop through spontaneous experiences on the environment, which Dr. Montessori referred to as 'work'.^[36] In this sense, the children's normal activity is attached to reality in the present moment, rather than idle play through such means as toys and fantasy.^[37][38]
• Multi-age grouping. Children learn from each other in a spontaneous manner that supports their independent self-directed activity. The ordinary Montessori classroom therefore consists of a mixed-aged group, such as 2–6 (primary level) or 6–12 (elementary level).^[39]

Montessori materials and curriculum

The Montessori method involves a curriculum of learning that comes from the child's own natural inner guidance and expresses itself in outward behavior as the child's various individual interests are at work. Supporting this inner plan of nature, the method provides a range of materials to stimulate the child's interest through self-directed activity. In the first plane of development (0–6), these materials are generally organized into five basic categories: practical life, sensorial, math, language, and culture. Other categories include geography ( a child's perception of herself in space), history (a child's perception of herself in time), and science (interactions with the natural world).

Practical life

Practical life materials and exercises respond to the young child's natural interests to develop physical coordination, care of self and care of the environment. Specific materials, for example, provide opportunities for self-help dressing activities, using various devices to practice buttoning, bow tying, and lacing. Other practical life materials include pouring, scooping and sorting activities, as well as washing a table and food preparation to develop hand-eye coordination. These activities also provide a useful opportunity for children to concentrate bringing about their normalization. Other practical life activities include lessons in polite manners, such as folding hands, sitting in a chair, walking in line.^[40]

Sensorial

The sensorial materials provide a range of activities and exercises for children to experience the natural order of the physical environment, including such attributes as size, color, shape and dimension.^[41] Many of these materials were originally suggested and developed by Seguin in his prior research with scientific education.^[42]

Examples of these materials are pink tower (series of ten sequential cubes, varying in volume); knobbed cylinders (wooden blocks with 10 depressions to fit variable sized cylinders); broad stairs (ten wooden blocks, sequentially varying in two dimensions); color tablets (colored objects for matching pairs or grading shapes of color).^[43]

Mathematics

In this area, materials are provided to show such basic concepts as numeration, place value, addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. For numeration, there is a set of ten rods, with segments colored red and blue and “spindle boxes”, which consist of placing sets of objects in groups, 1–10, into separate compartments. For learning the numeral symbols, there is a set of sandpaper numerals, 1–9. For learning addition, subtraction, and place value, materials provide decimal representation of 1, 10, 100, etc., in various shapes made of beads, plastic, or wood. Beyond the basic math materials, there are materials to show the concept of fraction, geometrical relationships and algebra, such as the binomial and trinomial theorems.^[44]

Language

In the first plane of development (0–6), the Montessori language materials provide experiences to develop use of a writing instrument and the basic skills of reading a written language. For writing skill development, the metal insets provide essential exercises to guide the child's hand in following different outline shapes while using a pencil or pen. For reading, a set of individual letters, commonly known as sandpaper letters, provide the basic means for associating the individual letter symbols with their corresponding phonetic sounds.^[45] Displaying several letters, a lesson, known as the Seguin three-period lesson (see below), guides children to learn the letter sounds, which finally blend together to make certain simple phonetic words like “up” and “cat”. The aim of these nomenclature lessons is to show the child that letters make sounds, which can be blended together to make words. For children over six, Montessori language materials have been developed to help children learn grammar, including parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and interjections.^[46]

Cultural subjects

The Montessori classroom may also include other materials and resources to learn cultural subjects, such as geography (map puzzles, globes, cultural suitcases containing country-specific materials), and science, such as biology in naming and organizing plants and animals. Music and art are also commonly involved with children in various ways. After the age of approximately six, learning resources include reading books and more abstract materials for learning a broad range of advanced subject matter.^[47]

Elementary (6–12) curriculum

During the second plane (6–12) of development, the curriculum takes on a more conventional appearance of books and writing activities, since children now function more through abstract reasoning and are no longer as sensitive to the physical environment.^[48] The contextual format for this more advanced curriculum is described as cosmic education, a concept that was first explained in England in 1935.^[49] Cosmic education is the total interrelated functioning of the whole universe, which allows elementary children to store and organize a great amount of knowledge from among a wide range of different subject matter areas and disciplines.^[50]

Lessons

In the Montessori method, a lesson is an experimental interaction with children to support their true normal development.^[51] With materials, these lessons primarily aim to present their basic use to children according to their own individual interests. These lessons are therefore given in such a way that the teacher's personal involvement is reduced to the least amount possible, so as not to interfere with the child's own free learning directly through the materials themselves.^[52]

For many presentations, a three-step process, described originally by Seguin, is used in the Montessori method for showing the relationship between objects and names. This is called the "three-period lesson."^[53] With this nomenclature lesson, two or three materials are selected from what the children are working with.

• Period 1 consists of providing the child with the name of the material. In the case of letter sounds, the teacher will have the child trace the letter and say, "This is /u/. This is /p/." This provides the children with the name of what they are learning.
• Period 2 is to help the child recognize the different objects. Most of the time with the three-period lesson is in period 2. Some things the teacher might say are, "Show me the /u/. Show me the /p/” or "Point to the /u/. Point to the /p/.” After spending some time in the second period, the child may move on to period 3.
• Period 3 involves checking to see if the child not only recognizes the name of the material, but is able to tell you what it is. The teacher will point to the "u" sandpaper letter and ask the student, "What is this?" If the child replies with, "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu", the child fully understands it. With letters, the lesson finally ends with the child blending the letters to make a simple word, such as “up.”^[54]

Homeschooling

The Montessori method is readily employed with children at home. With young children, the practical life materials and exercises are provided through everyday household activities and chores, such as setting the table for meals, food preparation, and folding clothes for laundry. Parents follow the method by using slow, simple movements in showing how to do these chores, as well as by establishing routines for children to conduct their own activities with as much independence and self-direction as possible.^[55]

Music in Montessori environment

Maria Montessori discovered that musical education greatly benefits children during their developmental years. As it is reinforced by Diana Deutsch, a professor at the University of San Diego in an interview on WNYC radio,^[56] infant brains are sensitive and responsive to musical sounds, preferring them over other types of sounds. A child’s musical receptiveness remains especially strong through the preschool years until about the age of six. That is why parents speak to their infants in a high-pitched, “sing-song” type of voice. Educators, scientist, researchers and doctors are confirming that musical training can significantly enhance child development. Several studies indicate that exposure to music (listening, learning and playing) does have beneficial effects for preschoolers. Active musical training can improve their problem-solving skills, physical coordination, poise, concentration, memory, visual, aural and language skills, self discipline. It fosters self confidence and improves the ability to learn.^[57] The Montessori environment provides experiential learning with a set of bells, tone blocks and movable note blocks.

Criticism of Montessori

Some critics claim that a flaw in the Montessori method is its close association with Dr. Montessori herself. In Maria Montessori: a Biography, Rita Kramer^[58] reports that a New York Times writer interviewing Montessori in 1913 stated:

...the method is Montessori and Montessori is the method and one may well have grave doubts about how it will go with 'auto-education' when Maria Montessori's personality is removed.” (p. 188)

This close association between the method and Dr. Montessori led to many conflicts and lack of collaboration to extend research into the method itself.^[59] For example, despite new insight and greater knowledge available for applying the method in a scientific manner, the philosophical differences of personality and culture still exist to cloud and confuse its representation to the general public.^[60]

Benefits

Angeline Stoll Lillard's award-winning 2005 book Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius (Oxford University Press) presents a recent overview evaluating Montessori versus conventional education in terms of research relevant to their underlying principles. Lillard cites research indicating that Montessori's basic methods are more suited to what psychology research reveals about human development, and argues the need for more research.

A 2006 study published in the journal "Science" concluded that Montessori students (at ages 5 and 12) performed better than control students who had lost a random computerized lottery to attend a Montessori school and instead went to a variety of different conventional schools. This improved performance was achieved in a variety of areas, including not only traditional academic areas such as language and math, but in social skills as well (though by age 12 academic benefits had largely disappeared).^[61]

On several dimensions, children at a public inner city Montessori school had superior outcomes relative to a sample of Montessori applicants who, because of a random lottery, attended other schools. By the end of kindergarten, the Montessori children performed better on standardized tests of reading and math, engaged in positive interaction on the playground more, and showed advanced social cognition and executive control more. They also showed more concern for fairness and justice. At the end of elementary school, Montessori children wrote more creative essays with more complex sentence structures, selected more positive responses to social dilemmas, and reported feeling more of a sense of community at their school.

The authors concluded that, "when strictly implemented, Montessori education fosters social and academic skills that are equal or superior to those fostered by a pool of other types of schools." Research by K. Dohrmann and colleagues ^[62] supplements this by showing superior math and science performance in high school by children who previously attended public Montessori (as compared to high school classmates, over half of whom were at the most selective city public high schools); and two studies by Rathunde and Csikszentmihalyi^[63][64] showing a higher level of interest and motivation while doing school work as well as more positive social relations among Montessori middle-schoolers as opposed to matched controls.

See also

• Montessori sensorial materials
• Maria Montessori
• Dorothy Canfield Fisher
• Inclusive classroom
• Gifted education
• Edouard Seguin
• Friedrich Fröbel
• Montessori-Based Dementia Programming
• Montessori in the United States
• Teachable moment

References

• Beineke, J. (1998). And There Were Giants in the Land: The life of William Heard Kilpatrick. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
• Kilpatrick, W. H. (1914). The Montessori System Examined. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company
• Rand, Ayn. (1982). Philosophy: Who Needs It.

Further reading

• Lillard, Angeline: Montessori: The Science behind the Genius ISBN 0-19-516868-2
• Loeffler, Margaret Howard: Montessori in Contemporary American Culture ISBN 0-435-08709-6
• Montessori, Maria: The Discovery of the Child ISBN 0-345-33656-9
• Montessori, Maria: The Montessori Method ISBN 0-8052-0922-0
• Montessori, Maria: The Secret of Childhood ISBN 0-345-30583-3
• Montessori Programs in Public Schools. ERIC Digest.
• A Montessori Mother by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
• Montessori Madness! A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori Education by Trevor Eissler ISBN 978-0-9822833-0-1
• (fr) Victoria Kayser, Autisme et Montessori, Centre de recherche et de développement de matériel didactique pour enfants autistes, Montréal, 2010. ISBN 978-0557393329.
• (fr) Victoria Kayser, Inclusion et intégration scolaire. Recension : Les enfants victimes des conflits armés en Afrique, pp. 13-16, pp. 22, pp. 24. Centre de recherche et de développement de matériel didactique pour enfants autistes, Montréal, 2010. ISBN 978-0557496099.

External links

• The International Montessori Index
• Association Montessori Internationale (AMI)
• American Montessori Society (AMS)
• American Montessori Consulting
• Montessori Community (Forum)
• The Montessori Foundation
• International Montessori Society (IMS)
• Association Montessori – teacher Russia (AMPR)
• Maria Montessori Web Site