Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was by any measure an extraordinary individual. She initially resisted going into teaching—one of the few professions available to women in the late 19th century—and instead became one of the very first women to qualify as a medical doctor in Italy. As a doctor she specialized in psychiatry and paediatrics. While working with children with intellectual disabilities she gained the important insight that in order to learn, they required not medical treatment but rather an appropriate pedagogy. In 1900, she was given the opportunity to begin developing her pedagogy when she was appointed director of an Orthophrenic school for developmentally disabled children in Rome. When her pupils did as well in their exams as typically developing pupils and praise was lavished upon her for this achievement, she did not lap up that praise; rather, she wondered what it was about the education system in Italy that was failing children without disabilities. What was holding them back and preventing them from reaching their potential? In 1907 she had the opportunity to start working with non-disabled children in a housing project located in a slum district of Rome. There, she set up her first 'Casa dei Bambini' ('children’s house') for 3–7-year olds. She continued to develop her distinctive pedagogy based on a scientific approach of experimentation and observation. On the basis of this work, she argued that children pass through sensitive periods for learning and several stages of development, and that children’s self- construction can be fostered through engaging with self-directed activities in a specially prepared environment. There was international interest in this new way of teaching, and there are now thousands of Montessori schools (predominantly for children aged 3–6 and 6–12) throughout the world. Central to Montessori’s method of education is the dynamic triad of child, teacher and environment. One of the teacher’s roles is to guide the child through what Montessori termed the 'prepared environment, i.e., a classroom and a way of learning that are designed to support the child’s intellectual, physical, emotional and social development through active exploration, choice and independent learning. With respect to the learning materials, Montessori developed a set of manipulable objects designed to support children’s learning of sensorial concepts such as dimension, colour, shape and texture, and academic concepts of mathematics, literacy, science, geography and history. With respect to engagement, children learn by engaging hands-on with the materials most often individually, but also in pairs or small groups, during a 3-hour 'work cycle' in which they are guided by the teacher to choose their own activities. They are given the freedom to choose what they work on, where they work, with whom they work, and for how long they work on any particular activity, all within the limits of the class rules. No competition is set up between children, and there is no system of extrinsic rewards or punishments. These two aspects—the learning materials themselves, and the nature of the learning—make Montessori classrooms look strikingly different from conventional classrooms. It should be noted that for Montessori the goal of education is to allow the child’s optimal development (intellectual, physical, emotional and social) to unfold. This is a very different goal to that of most education systems today. The learning materials The first learning materials that the child is likely to encounter in the Montessori classroom are those that make up the practical life curriculum. These are activities that involve pouring different materials, using utensils such as scissors, tongs and tweezers, cleaning and polishing, preparing snacks, laying the table and washing dishes, arranging flowers, gardening, doing up and undoing clothes fastenings, and so on. Their aims, in addition to developing the child’s skills for independent living, are to build up the child’s gross and fine motor control and eye-hand co-ordination, to introduce them to the cycle of selecting, initiating, completing and tidying up an activity, and to introduce the rules for functioning in the social setting of the classroom. As the child settles into the cycle of work and shows the ability to focus on self-selected activities, the teacher will introduce the sensorial materials. The key feature of the sensorial materials is that each isolates just one concept for the child to focus on. The pink tower, for example, consists of ten cubes which differ only in their dimensions, the smallest being 1 cm, the largest 10 cm. In building the tower the child’s attention is being focused solely on the regular decrease in volume of successive cubes. There are no additional cues—different colours for example, or numbers written onto the faces of the cube—which might help the child to sequence the cubes accurately. Another piece of sensorial material, the sound boxes, contains six pairs of closed cylinders that vary in sound from soft to loud when shaken, and the task for the

child is to find the matching pairs. Again, there is only one cue that the child can use to do this task: sound. The aim of the sensorial materials is not to bombard the child’s senses with stimuli; on the contrary, they are tools designed for enabling the child to classify and put names to the stimuli that he or she will encounter on an everyday basis. The sensorial materials are designed as preparation for academic subjects. The long rods, which comprise ten red rods varying solely in length in 10 cm increments from 10 cm to 1 m, have an equivalent in the mathematics materials: the number rods, where the rods are divided into alternating 10 cm sections of red and blue so that they take on the numerical values 1–10. The touchboards, which consist of alternate strips of sandpaper and smooth paper for the child to feel, are preparation for the sandpaper globe in geography—a globe where the land masses are made of rough sandpaper but the oceans and seas are smooth. The touchboards are also preparation for the sandpaper letters in literacy and sandpaper numerals in mathematics, which the child learns to trace with his index and middle fingers. Key elements of the literacy curriculum include the introduction of writing before reading, the breaking down of the constituent skills of writing (pencil control, letter formation, spelling) before the child actually writes words on paper, and the use of phonics for teaching sound-letter correspondences. Grammar—parts of speech, morphology, sentence structure—are taught systematically through teacher and child-made materials. In the mathematics curriculum, quantities 0–10 and their symbols are introduced separately before being combined, and large quantities and symbols (tens, hundreds and thousands) and fractions are introduced soon after, all through concrete materials. Operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, the calculation of square roots) are again introduced using concrete materials, which the child can choose to stop using when he is able to succeed without that concrete support. Principles running throughout the design of these learning materials are that the child learns through movement and gains a concrete foundation with the aim of preparing him for learning more abstract concepts. A further design principle is that each piece of learning material has a 'control of error' which alerts the child to any mistakes, thereby allowing self- correction with minimal teacher support. Self-directed engagement with the materials Important though the learning materials are,8 they do not, in isolation, constitute the Montessori method because they need to be engaged with in a particular way. Montessori observed that the young child is capable of concentrating for long periods of time on activities that capture his spontaneous interest.2,3,4 There are two features of the way that children engage with the learning materials that Montessori claimed promoted this concentration. The first is that there is a cycle of activity surrounding the use of each piece of material (termed the 'internal work cycle'). If a child wishes to use the pink tower, for example, he will have to find a space on the floor large enough to unroll the mat that will delineate his work area, carry the ten cubes of the pink tower individually to the mat from where they are stored, then build the tower. Once he has built the tower he is free to repeat this activity as many times as he likes. Other children may come and watch, and if he wishes they can join in with him, but he will be able to continue on his own if he prefers and for as long as he likes. When he has had enough, he will dismantle the pink tower and reassemble it in its original location, ready for another child to use. This repeated and self-chosen engagement with the material, the lack of interruption, and the requirement to set up the material and put it away afterwards, are key elements aimed at developing the child’s concentration. The second feature which aims to promote concentration is that these cycles of activity take place during a 3-hour period of time (termed the 'external work cycle'). During those 3 hours, children are mostly free to select activities on their own and with others, and to find their own rhythm of activity, moving freely around the classroom as they do so. One might wonder what the role of the teacher is during this period. Although the children have a great deal of freedom in what they do, their freedom is not unlimited. The teacher’s role is to guide children who are finding it hard to select materials or who are disturbing others, to introduce new materials to children who are ready for a new challenge, and to conduct small-group lessons. Her decisions about what to teach are made on the basis of careful observations of the children. Although she might start the day with plans of what she will do during the work cycle, she will be led by her students and their needs, and there is no formal timetable. Hence the Montessori classroom is very different to the teacher-led conventional classroom with its highly structured day where short time slots are devoted to each activity, the whole class is engaged in the same activities at the same time, and the teacher instructs at the front of the class.

What Is the Montessori Teaching Method

River Room Montessori 4524 Wishart Rd., Virginia Beach, VA 23455

Copyright 2023 River Room Montessori, Inc.