Discover why a Montessori education is so different from traditional. Course Information. Choosing a Montessori Program. Thousands of families all over the nation are opting out of traditional public schools.
Even more are choosing not to out their young children into preschools. Due to health concerns, political activi Normalization is the term Maria Normalization is the term Maria Montessori used for the process of internalizing multiple skills through coordination and organization.
It is something that spontaneous Mary Ellen Maunz, Founder of Age of Montessori, talks about her experience during the first virtual residency for Certification Students in She shares her own insights together with testimonials Despite the challenges we all face, spring is here and it is beautiful! We want our children to stay in touch with nature, and to continue their observation and awe of the cycles of life. I saw on the In this webinar you will learn how you can help your child stay on the pathway to reading even when school is out.
Learn techniques and easy to use materials to help your children learn to read and lo Erin Lanigan shares her Montessori experience as a mom of a pre-teen and two teenagers, we have been doing our best along with the rest of the world to navigate the ever-changing situations during t Mary Ellen Maunz gives us tips on how to keep babies and toddlers happy, occupied and learning at home while schools are closed.
Here is our list of Montessori fun and captivating activities to keep Maria Montessori If a child is able to use their hands to discover, their discoveries become more meaningful to them. The concepts they learn are much I know that many of our adult learners and parent readers want to know more about learning differences. Thus when we ask the question, as this review paper does, whether children benefit more from a Montessori education than from a non-Montessori education, we need to bear in mind that the outcome measures used to capture effectiveness do not necessarily measure the things that Montessori deemed most important in education.
Teachers and parents who choose the Montessori method may choose it for reasons that are not so amenable to evaluation. Despite its existence for over years, peer-reviewed evaluations of Montessori education are few and they suffer from a number of methodological limitations, as will be discussed in Section 3. This review has three aims, namely to 1 identify some key elements of the Montessori educational method, 2 review existing evaluations of Montessori education, and 3 review studies that do not explicitly evaluate Montessori education but which evaluate the key elements identified in 1.
My goal is to provide a review of the scientific evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective. The goal of this section is to isolate some key elements of the Montessori method, in order to better understand why, if Montessori education is effective, this might be, and what elements of it might usefully be evaluated by researchers. These are important considerations because there is considerable variability in how the Montessori method is implemented in different schools, and the name, which is not copyrighted, is frequently used without full adherence.
Pinpointing more precisely what—if anything—about the Montessori method is effective will enable a better understanding of why it works. Some key elements of each of these aspects will now be considered in turn. 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. 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.
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 sensorial materials, are, furthermore, designed as preparation for academic subjects. 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. 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. The first is that there is a cycle of activity surrounding the use of each piece of material termed the 'internal work cycle ' 9. 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.
The second feature which aims to promote concentration is that these cycles of activity take place during a 3-h period of time termed the 'external work cycle' 9. 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. 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 timeslots 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.
All the elements described here—the features of the learning materials themselves e. We will return to many of the elements discussed here in the following two sections. This has necessarily been only a brief survey of some of the most important elements of the Montessori method. Readers wanting to find out more are again directed to refs. There are few peer-reviewed evaluations of Montessori education, and the majority have been carried out in the USA.
As a whole this body of research suffers from several methodological limitations. Firstly, few studies are longitudinal in design. Secondly, there are no good quality randomised control trials; most researchers have instead tried to match participants in Montessori and comparison groups on as many likely confounding variables as possible. Thirdly, if children in the Montessori group do score higher than those in the non-Montessori group on a particular outcome measure, then assuming that that effect can be attributed to being in a Montessori classroom, what exactly is it about Montessori education that has caused the effect?
Montessori education is a complex package—how can the specific elements which might be causing the effect be isolated? At a very basic level—and drawing on two of the main aspects of Montessori education outlined above—is the effect due to the learning materials or to the self-directed way in which children engage with them and can the two be separated? Fifthly, and relatedly, there is the issue of 'treatment fidelity'—what counts as a Montessori classroom?
Not all schools that call themselves 'Montessori' adhere strictly to Montessori principles, have trained Montessori teachers, or are accredited by a professional organisation. Finally, the numbers of children participating in studies are usually small and quite narrow in terms of their demographics, making generalisation of any results problematic.
These methodological issues are not limited to evaluations of Montessori education, of course—they are relevant to much of educational research. Of these, the lack of randomised control trials is particularly notable given the recognition of their importance in education. This means that if a study finds a benefit for Montessori education over conventional education this might reflect a parent effect rather than a school effect. Furthermore, randomisation also controls for socio-economic status SES.
Montessori schools are often fee-paying, which means that pupils are likely to come from higher SES families; children from higher SES families are likely to do better in a variety of educational contexts. Arguably the most robust evaluation of the Montessori method to date is that by Lillard and Else-Quest. Careful thought was given to how to overcome the lack of random assignment to the Montessori and non-Montessori groups. All children had entered the Montessori school lottery; those who were accepted were assigned to the Montessori group, and those who were not accepted were assigned to the comparison other education systems group.
Post-hoc comparisons showed similar income levels in both sets of families. Although group differences were not found for all outcome measures, where they were found they favoured the Montessori group.
For 5-year olds, significant group differences were found for certain academic skills namely letter-word identification, phonological decoding ability, and math skills , a measure of executive function the card sort task , social skills as measured by social reasoning and positive shared play and theory of mind as measured by a false-belief task.
For year olds, significant group differences were found on measures of story writing and social skills. Furthermore, in a questionnaire that asked about how they felt about school, responses of children in the Montessori group indicated that they felt a greater sense of community. The authors concluded that 'at least 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'.
Children in these classes were 3—6 years old, and they were tested at two time-points: towards the beginning and towards the end of the school year. Although the study lacked random assignment of children to groups, the groups were matched with respect to key parent variables such as parental education.
Children in the high-fidelity Montessori school, as compared with children in the other two types of school, showed significantly greater gains on measures of executive function, reading, math, vocabulary, and social problem-solving. Furthermore, the degree to which children were engaged with Montessori materials significantly predicted gains in executive function, reading and vocabulary. In other words, treatment fidelity mattered: children gained fewer benefits from being in a Montessori school when they were engaged in non-Montessori activities.
Over a period of 4 months children in the classrooms from which supplementary materials were removed made significantly greater gains than children from the unchanged classroom on tests of letter-word identification and executive function, although not on measures of vocabulary, theory of mind, maths, or social problem-solving.
The authors acknowledge weaknesses in the study design, including the small number of participants just 52 across the three classrooms and the short duration. Nevertheless, the study does provide a template for how future experimental manipulations of fidelity to the Montessori method could be carried out.
Fidelity is important because variation in how faithful Montessori schools are to the 'ideal' is likely to be an important factor in explaining why such mixed findings have been found in evaluations of the Montessori method. These same limitations then make it difficult to interpret studies that have found 'later' benefits for children who have been followed up after a subsequent period of conventional education. In one of the studies discussed earlier, 23 social and cognitive benefits did emerge for children who had previously attended Montessori preschools and then moved to conventional schools, but these benefits did not emerge until adolescence, while a follow-up study 26 found cognitive benefits in Montessori males only, again in adolescence.
Although such 'sleeper effects' have been widely reported in evaluations of early years interventions, they may be artefacts of simple measurement error and random fluctuations.
Some studies report positive outcomes for certain curricular areas but not others. One, for example, investigated scores on maths, science, English and social studies tests in the final years of compulsory education, several years after children had left their Montessori classrooms. What might explain this differential effect? The authors suggested that the advantages for maths might be driven by the materials themselves, compared to how maths is taught in conventional classes. However, the authors were unable, within the design of their study, to provide details of exactly how much time children in the Montessori school had spent doing maths, science, English and social studies, in comparison to the time that children in conventional classes were spending on those subjects.
Just as knowing what is going on in the Montessori classroom is vital to being able to interpret the findings of evaluations, so is knowing what is going on in the comparison classrooms.
In some evaluations, the differences between Montessori and conventional classrooms might not actually be so great, which might explain why benefits of being educated in a Montessori classroom are not found. And even if the Montessori approach to teaching a particular curriculum area is different to those used in conventional classrooms, there are likely to be different, equally-effective approaches to teaching the same concepts.
This is a suggested explanation for the finding that although children in Montessori kindergartens had an advantage relative to their conventionally-educated peers for base understanding in mathematics, they did not maintain this advantage when tested 2 years later. While most evaluations are interested in traditional academic outcomes or factors related to academic success such as executive functions, a small number have investigated creativity. For example, an old study 31 compared just 14 four and five-year-old children who attended a Montessori nursery school with 14 four and five-year olds who attended a conventional nursery school matched for a range of parental variables, including attitudes and parental control.
In a non-verbal creativity task, involving picture construction, they were given a blank sheet of paper, a piece of red gummed paper in the shape of a curved jellybean, and a pencil. They were then asked to think of and draw a picture in which the red paper would form an integral part.
The group of conventionally-schooled children scored almost twice as high as the Montessori group. A second task involved the child giving verbal descriptions of seven objects: a red rubber ball, a green wooden cube, a short length of rope, a steel mirror, a piece of rectangular clear plastic, a piece of chalk, and a short length of plastic tubing.
Each description was scored as to whether it was functional i. Like the non-verbal creativity task, this task differentiated the two groups: whereas the conventionally educated children gave more functional descriptions e. A third task, the Embedded Figure Test, involved the child first being presented with a stimulus figure and then locating a similar figure located in an embedding context.
Both accuracy and speed were measured. Montessori classrooms are somewhat famous for their beauty. Lots of natural light and space are common priorities in the classroom design. This is all done for a reason. What does this look like? Well, something like a giant playroom-meets-workshop. Have you ever noticed the way children become fascinated by what other children are doing? Montessori capitalizes on that by grouping children of different ages together in the same learning environments.
Stepien says most Montessori classrooms are mixed-age and intended to foster peer-to-peer learning. This arrangement can naturally lead to growth that might not occur in a more uniformly-aged classroom. This educational philosophy strives to encourage a love for learning. This particular benefit can stay with children their entire lives and become a propelling force through secondary education, a career, job training—or even just in the experiences they have and the people they encounter.
Not only did she study intellectual and developmental disabilities, but she was the co-director of an institute for special education teachers. Many of the tenets of Montessori education serve students with special needs well. Because children are grouped with others of different ages and have the same teacher for three years at a time, students with special needs tend to have less pressure to keep up with their peers and more freedom to learn and grow at their own pace.
The classroom continuity can also help students with special needs form close connections within their classroom, making for a safe and stable environment in which to learn. This especially helps students with special needs to learn at their own pace. Of course, this is not to say that every experience in Montessori will be a good one. On one side, teachers, classmates and school administration can seriously impact your experience for the better.
And on the other side, there are some aspects of the Montessori culture that can cause issues for some. It is hard for Montessori schools to keep their prices low. For some, Montessori education has gone hand in hand with being white and privileged. Because this education philosophy flips traditional public-school curriculum on its head, most Montessori programs are private, tuition-charging and admissions-regulating.
This makes it disproportionably difficult for low-income, inner-city students of color to attend such schools. There are, however, some Montessori charter schools that are more accessible. It is up to the teacher and assistant to make sure children progress on pace. Parents and teachers can help guide children toward tasks that foster skills such as concentration and self-discipline. Many people are under the impression that Montessori schools are only for preschool-aged children.
While it is true that the very first Montessori school, Casa dei Bambini, was established for children under the age of seven, Dr.
Maria Montessori continued throughout her life to develop her teaching method for children of all ages. Can This Be True? It is true that Montessori classrooms do not emphasize the use of textbooks, grades, or homework. This is because Montessori students are encouraged to take ownership of their own learning. Why take this approach, you ask? Because children who are internally-motivated are far more likely to become responsible, self-disciplined, confident, initiative-takers, with strong academic skills and a lifelong love for learning.
This is the key to education as it should be: to teach the way children really learn. With this understanding, you will have a greater awareness of what children need to thrive academically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Or consider our 6-week, online child development course. We are offering our Child Development Course to both parents for the price of one registration. After purchasing, you will receive a confirmation email containing the information you need to access the Child Development Course, materials and forum.
Age of Montessori admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and other school-administered programs.
Thousands of families all over the nation are opting out of traditional public schools. Even more are choosing not to out their young children into preschools. Due to health concerns, political activi Normalization is the term Maria Normalization is the term Maria Montessori used for the process of internalizing multiple skills through coordination and organization.
It is something that spontaneous Mary Ellen Maunz, Founder of Age of Montessori, talks about her experience during the first virtual residency for Certification Students in She shares her own insights together with testimonials Despite the challenges we all face, spring is here and it is beautiful!
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