The Montessori Approach

Once considered an educational experiment, Montessori is increasingly becoming the blueprint for a new approach to learning—one that’s demonstrating long-term success in both private and public U.S. schools. Montessori’s core tenets, that effective learning is self-directed and that education calls for development of the “whole person”, are shaping a generation uniquely prepared for the demands of the 21st century.

Time Magazine, covering an influential 2007 report on the American workforce, puts it bluntly:
"As Americans worry about whether some fraction of our children get ‘left behind’... an entire generation of kids [is failing] to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad, or speak a language other than English."

And why? According to the report, our educational system is still focused on teaching skills in a world where skills quickly become outdated, automated or offshored-for-less. Value now lies in creativity and innovation, life literacy, global orientation and cross-cultural abilities. The study concludes, "The core problem is that our education and training systems were built for another era. ...It is not possible to get where we have to go by patching that system."

And so it is not.

Montessori is not an adaptation of traditional methods, it’s a completely different way of teaching and learning. Many of its core ideas correspond directly to recommendations in this and other studies. It’s an approach that acknowledges it is how—and not what—we learn that most shapes the developing personality. While independent studies show that Montessori students perform academically as well or better than more traditionally educated peers, we believe it’s their demonstrably better life skills that best prepare our young people for a complex and fast-changing world.

The Montessori Method provides:

Freedom

• the child is free to develop the potential within him
• he is free to learn, explore, to discover
• he is free to be creative
• the child has the freedom of choice
• the child has the freedom to develop his individual interests

Understanding

• the needs of the child must be met
• a basic understanding of the problems of childhood is necessary
• respect the individuality and ability of the child and promote it
• the experience of success before failure
• the teacher must understand herself if she is to discover the child

Indirect Teaching

• create external order to facilitate internal order
• she must be open, flexible and sensitive to the child; by following the child she will become more creative
• She must reinforce only that behavior which she approves of
• She must accept self before she will be able to create independence in the child

Protection of the rights of the child:

• to work undisturbed
• to have freedom of movement
• right to your attention
• right to orientation
• right to independence
• right to development

Didactic Materials

• easily accessible to the child
• conviction that a didactic environment is essential to the development of the child
• multi-sensory approach to concept learning with the isolation of one sense at a time
• from the concrete to abstract, progression of the materials
• the materials include the sensory, mathematics, language, science and music

Prepared Environment

• structured to meet the needs of the child
• orderly, neat, clean and beautiful
• the room should be child-size in architecture and materials
• access to the outdoors
• liberty within limits
• simplicity, cheerful atmosphere and bright
• supply the needs of the child

Sensitive or Critical Period
Critical periods exist in behavioral development during which a wide range of stimuli is effective in altering development. As an embryological development, behavior development is characterized by critical periods during which crucial maturation processes can be adversely affected by a wide range of abnormal stimuli. If we don't capture these periods of development there is an arrestment of growth with some.