The Australian Montessori Society (inc)

Philosophy

The Montessori philosophy is built upon the idea that children develop and think differently than adults, that they are not merely "adults in small bodies." Dr. Montessori believed in children's rights, children working to develop themselves into adults, and that this development would lead to world peace.

The Montessori Method discourages traditional measurements of achievement (grades, tests) as negative competition that is damaging to the inner growth of children (and adults). Feedback and qualitative analysis of a child's performance does exist but is generally provided in the form of a list of skills, activities and critical points, and sometimes a narrative of the child's achievements, strengths and weaknesses, with emphasis on the improvement of those weaknesses.

The method was developed from observations of young children from which a set of universal characteristics of children was created for each level of development. The Montessori Method has two primary development levels: the first is birth through 6, the second is ages 6-12. A Montessori classroom for the first level is called the Casa dei Bambini, or "Children's House," with focus on individually-paced learning and development. In the second level, collaboration with others is encouraged, and "cosmic education" is introduced.

As an educational approach, the Montessori Method’s focus is on the individuality of each child in respect of their needs or talents, as opposed to the needs of the class as a whole. A goal is to help the child maintain their natural joy of learning.

The Montessori Method encourages independence and freedom with limits and responsibility. The youngest children are guided in "practical life" skills: daily life skills and manners. These skills are emphasized with the goal of increasing attention spans, hand-eye coordination, and tenacity. The Montessori Method enables satisfaction, contentment, and joy resulting from the child feeling like a respected participant in daily activities. Montessori education carried through the from pre-primary and high school years follows the child's emerging tendency for peer interactions and emphasizes each student as a guardian of his or her own intellectual development.

Premises

The premises of a Montessori approach to teaching and learning include the following:
A view of children as competent beings capable of self-directed learning.
That children learn in a distinctly different way from adults.
The ultimate importance of observation of the child interacting with her or his environment as the basis for ongoing curriculum development. Presentation of subsequent exercises for skill development and information accumulation are based on the teacher's observation that the child has mastered the current exercise(s).
Delineation of sensitive periods of development, during which a child's mind is particularly open to learning specific skills or knowledge, including language development, sensorial experimentation and refinement, and various levels of social interaction.
A belief in the "absorbent mind", that children from birth to around age 6 possess limitless motivation to achieve competence within their environment and to perfect skills and understandings. This phenomenon is characterized by the young child's capacity for repetition of activities within sensitive period categories, such as exhaustive babbling as language practice leading to language competence.
That children are masters of their environment, which has been specifically prepared for them to be academic, comfortable, and allow a maximum amount of independence.
That children learn through discovery, so didactic materials that are self-correcting are used as much as possible.
Independent problem solving is encouraged.

Objectives

The objective of Montessori Method is to provide a stimulating, child-centred environment in which children can explore, touch, and learn without fear, thus engendering a lifelong love of learning as well as providing the child the self-control necessary to fulfil that love.

Implementation of Objectives

Montessori is a highly hands-on approach to learning. It encourages children to develop their observation skills by doing many types of activities. These activities include use of the five senses, kinetic movement, spatial refinement, small and large motor skill coordination, and concrete knowledge that leads to abstraction.
The Montessori Classroom Environment (The prepared environment) Montessori classrooms are child-centred and ergonomic. Furniture is child-sized, and there is no teacher's desk. The typical classroom consists of five areas: Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Mathematics and Cosmic/Cultural. Practical Life includes activities such as buttoning, sweeping, pouring, slicing, tying, etc. Sensorial includes activities to stimulate and train hearing, touch (tactile and kinaesthetic), smell, vision and taste. Most Montessori classrooms try to include ways for the children to interact with the natural world, perhaps through a classroom pet (rabbits, fish, etc.), or a small garden where the children can plant vegetables or flowers.

In schools that extend to the upper grades, each Montessori classroom still includes an approximately three-year age range. This system allows flexibility in learning pace and allowing older children to become teachers by sharing what they have learned. The intent is to establish a non-competitive atmosphere in the classroom. The belief is that class work which is different for each child results in students who are less likely to try to keep track of where other children are academically.

Pedagogical Materials

Every activity has its place in the classroom and is self-contained and self-correcting. The original didactic materials are specific in design, conforming to exact dimensions, and each activity is designed to focus on a single skill, concept or exercise. All of the material is based on SI units of measurement (i.e., the Pink Tower is based on the 1cm cube) which allows all the materials to work together and complement each other, as well as introduce the SI units through concrete example. The International System of Units (abbreviated SI from the French Système international d'unités) is the modern form of the metric system. It is the world's most widely used system of units, both in everyday commerce and in science.
In addition to this, material is intended for multiple uses at the primary level. A perfect example of this is the "Knobbed Cylinder" materials: not only do they directly offer a sensorial lesson, but indirectly the child's grip on the cylinders paves the way for holding a pencil, and the grades of cylinders allow for an introduction to mathematics.
Other materials are often constructed by the teacher: felt storyboard characters, letter boxes (small containers of objects that all start with the same letter) for the language area, science materials (e.g. dinosaurs for tracing, etc.), scent or taste activities, and so on. The practical life area materials are almost always put together by the teacher. All activities, however, must be neat, clean, attractive and preferably made of natural materials such as glass or wood, rather than plastic. Sponges, brooms and dustpans are provided and any mishaps (including broken glassware) are not punished but rather treated simply as an opportunity for the children to demonstrate responsibility by cleaning up after themselves.
At higher grade levels, the teacher becomes more involved in creating materials since not only the students but also the potential subject matter widens so much. However, many of the earlier materials can be revisited with a new explanation, emphasis or use; for example, the cube that a five-year-old used as an exercise in colour matching is revealed to the elementary level student to physically embody the mathematical relationship (a+b)3=a3 + 3a2b + 3ab2 +b3.

Lessons & Activities

A child doesn't work with an activity until the teacher or another student has demonstrated its proper use to him or her, and then s/he may work with it as s/he wishes. Each activity leads directly to a new level of learning or concept. When a child "works," s/he is acquiring the basis for later concepts. Repetition of activities is considered an integral part of this learning process and children are allowed to repeat activities as often as they wish. A child becoming tired of the repetition is thought to be a sign that s/he is ready for the next level of learning.
The child proceeds at his or her own pace from concrete objects and tactile experiences to abstract thinking, writing, reading, science, and mathematics. For example, in the language area, the child begins with the sandpaper letters (26 flat wooden panels, each with a single letter of the alphabet cut from sandpaper and affixed to it). The child's first lesson is to trace the shape of the letter with their fingers while saying the phonic sound of the letter. A next level activity might be the letter boxes (small containers each with a letter on the top, filled with objects that begin with that letter). Having mastered these, the child may move on to the word boxes (small containers each with a short three-letter word on the top, for example CAT, containing a small wooden cat and the letters C, A, T). One child might move through all three levels of lessons in a few weeks while another might take several months; although there is a prescribed sequence of activities there is no prescribed timetable. A Montessori teacher or director (as Maria Montessori called teachers) observes each child like a scientist, providing her or him with appropriate lessons as s/he is ready for them.

Sensitive Periods

Dr. Maria Montessori believed that every human being goes through a series of quantum leaps in learning during the preschool years. Drawing on the work of the Dutch geneticist Hugo de Vries, she attributed these behaviours to the development of specific areas of the human brain, which she called nebulae (Montessori, 1949, p. 100). She felt this was especially true through the first few years of life, from birth (or before) to the time of essentially complete development of the brain, about age 6 or 7. Montessori observed several overlapping periods during which the child is particularly sensitive to certain types of stimuli or interactions. She used the term sensitive periods which de Vries coined during his studies on animals. According to Dr. Montessori, during a sensitive period it is very easy for children to acquire certain abilities, such as language, discrimination of sensory stimuli, and mental modelling of the environment (Montessori, 1966, p. 38). Once the sensitive period for a particular ability is past, the development of the brain has progressed past the point at which information can be simply absorbed.

The child must then be taught the ability, resulting in expenditure of conscious effort, and not producing results as great as could be produced if the sensitive period had been taken advantage of. Dr. Montessori was not very specific in her published works about the precise number, description, or timing of these sensitive periods. However, in her lectures to teacher trainees she set out several periods with the approximate ages to which they applied. More importantly, she believed, adults should observe the behaviour and activities of children to discover what sensitive periods they are in.

Language

This period runs from birth through approximately age 6. During this period the child is extremely sensitive to vocal sounds and to movements of the vocal apparatus. Deprivation of language stimuli during this period can lead to severe language defects. Without stimulation, the synapses (specialised junctions through which cells of the nervous system signal to one another and to non-neuronal cells such as muscles or glands) of Broca's area (section of the human brain that is involved in language processing, speech production and comprehension) and related language-processing areas of the brain will literally waste away.

Order

The sensitive period for order operates most actively between roughly the ages of one and three years. In this period, the child is organizing a mental schema for the world. In order for firm conclusions to be drawn about the world, the child must be able to impose an order on it - one which can be relied on as constant to observation. If this need is not met, the child's ability to reason and learn will be precarious, since she may not be able to consider her conclusions reliable.

Sensory Refinement

This period lasts from birth to about age 4. A child takes in information about the world through his senses. As the brain develops, it becomes able to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant sensory stimuli. The most efficient way to accomplish this is for the brain to pay attention to all sensory stimuli. The most repetitive (and therefore most important) of these will strengthen neural pathways, while the less common, although initially detected, will not provide enough brain activity to develop sensitivity to them. By the age of around 4, the brain has finished its "decision-making" about which stimuli are relevant, and worth attending to. Other stimuli will be ignored. This period, then, is important for helping the child attend to differences in sensory stimuli, which in turn can lead to a greater ability to impose a mental order on his environment.

Refinement of Motor Skills

This period encompasses the time between roughly 18 months and 4 years of age. By the beginning of this period, the child's gross motor skills are generally rather well developed. At this point, the continuing development of the cerebellum ((Latin: "little brain") is a region of the brain that plays an important role in the integration of sensory perception and motor output.) and motor cortex allow the child to increase her fine motor skills. Activity on the part of the child which focuses on fine muscle control (writing with a pencil, picking up and setting down small objects, and so on) will allow the child's muscular skills to develop to a quite advanced level. After this period, the neural control of the muscles is relatively fixed, and improvement in fine motor skills comes only with considerable effort.

Sensitivity to Small Objects

This period, between roughly 18 and 30 months, might be viewed as a consequence of the overlapping of the previous two sensitive periods. As a consequence of the child's attention to sensory stimuli, combined with an interest in activities requiring fine motor coordination, the child takes an interest in observing and manipulating very small objects, which present a greater challenge to the senses and coordination than large ones.

Social Behaviour

From about 2½ through to 6 years, the child, having become relatively stable in his or her physical and emotional environment, begins to attend to the social environment. During this time, in an attempt to order this aspect of her surroundings, the child attends closely to the observed and expected behaviour of individuals in a group. This attention and ordering will allow him or her to move through the social environment in a safe and acceptable way. Children who are, for whatever reason, largely or entirely deprived of social interaction during this period will be less socially confident and perhaps more uncomfortable around others; a feeling which may take quite a bit of effort to overcome.

References:

Montessori, M., The Absorbent Mind. Madras, Kalakshetra Press, 1949. ISBN 0-8050-4156-7
Montessori, M., The Secret Of Childhood. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. ISBN 0-345-30583-3