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Beauty Within

Jennifer Rogers by | Montessori Blog

Mary memorized Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem The Swing effortlessly, through the natural absorption of story and song that is one of the gifts of childhood. Stevenson’s timeless collection of poetry for children, A Child’s Garden of Verses, has always been on the bookshelf beside Mary’s bed. It is also present in her classroom library. Mary’s mother and her teacher read poetry to her often, sometimes singing as they read.

©Bergamo Schools
©Bergamo Schools

When Mary was five, she was able to read some poetry independently. By the time she was six, she enjoyed writing favorite poems like The Swing in her own cursive handwriting. She often added illustration to her poetry, using the watercolor or pastels she found on the shelves of her Montessori classroom.

The day Mary recited The Swing for the first time at school, her voice rose and fell following the poem’s cadence. She smiled as she spoke, held her body still with poise, ease, grace, and confidence.

“How do you like to go up in a swing?” the poem asks. As if the words of the poem lifted her upward, Lucy swayed gently forward and back. She stood before an audience of her friends and teachers, but she was in Stevenson’s swing, radiant, joyful, fully alive and engaged in the world of poetry.

For the adults watching it was an event, a real performance, and a celebration of all that is possible when parents and teachers read to children.

Mary’s four-year-old classmate Jon was amazed. It had not occurred to him that a poem could exist apart from a book, or that song and poetry could be shared so wonderfully with friends. Sitting in the front row of Mary’s audience, Jon was mesmerized.

The same day Mary recited The Swing, Jon whispered in his teacher’s ear, “I want to recite my poem for you. Just you.”

His teacher tilted her head closer to Jon’s mouth, smiling as she listened. “I’ve never heard that poem before,” she said.

“I wrote it in my head,” Jon said, “for a long time.” He was sincere, earnest, as honest as a four year old can be with his teacher.

Jon was an unlikely poet. He was not yet writing independently. His weak fine motor skills and short attention span were, in fact, an area of some concern. “May I write the words of your poem on paper?” his teacher asked, “so you can share your poem with your family and other people who are not with us.”

Jon was elated. His eyes sparkled. His smile was immediate, and radiant. He sat in his wooden chair with his pudgy hands clasped studiously on the table in front of him. His teacher sat beside him, listened again, and wrote. Even when she asked him to repeat, the words of Jon’s poem never varied. A poem clearly existed, complete, in Jon’s mind.

I love the sun.

How it shines on me

     And it’s so bright

So children can play

     All day.

Jon’s delight was, for his parents and teacher, as refreshing as a spring breeze at the end of a long, cold winter. At four, Jon was impish, disorganized, easily distracted, and sometimes disruptive. His favorite things about his Montessori classroom were his buddies, lunch, and the playground.

“I’m always thinking,” he once said of himself, smiling but serious. “I forget a lot of stuff, though. The stuff I forget always comes back to get me in trouble.”

The day Mary recited her poem so beautifully, Jon could imagine what a poem looks like when it lives within a person. For a moment, Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem became real, incarnate in one of Jon’s best friends.

Mary’s performance and Jon’s composition offered windows into the inner worlds of two children. That day and those that followed also reminded their teacher that poetry can help organize a cluttered mind. Montessori children continually absorb the order and beauty present in their classroom environments. One special day of poetry made it abundantly clear that children will also absorb the abstract order and beauty present in fine language. Both children had been read to; both children felt encouraged, confident, and inspired; both children could re-create concepts of tone, meter, intonation, and structure ordinarily observed in mature artists.

The beauty Jon and Mary absorbed in their classroom exists within them. The simple forms of poetry held meaning for them that reflected and transcended both their classroom environment and the pages of the books they had enjoyed. Jon, Mary, and their many friends at school derive strength and joy from the language they have absorbed.

Soft Skills

Peter Davidson by | Montessori Blog

I had an interesting conversation with a prospective parent recently who teaches at a local college. She shared that she and her colleagues are constantly discussing “how underprepared kids are for college in terms of ‘soft skills.’” By soft skills she meant skills other than the purely academic — the personal qualities, habits and attitudes that make someone a successful college student and, by extension, a good boss or employee later in life. She had just come from an observation in toddlers and primary and was surprised to have seen that in Montessori, “starting in toddlers students develop the self-motivation, independence, and follow-through that many college students lack!” In other words, beginning at these very young ages, Montessori children are already developing the soft skills that will benefit them so greatly later in life.

DSC_5618-mediumIt was a pretty astute observation for a prospective parent seeing Montessori for the first time, and it got me thinking. When I talk to parents, I often describe a Montessori learning material, like the binomial cube, detective adjective game, or golden beads, that leads to the acquisition of academic or “hard skills.” Obviously, hard skills are important, but soft skills are equally so.

One of the most important is self-motivation. In my experience children are born self-motivated. Any parent reflecting upon their own child’s acquisition of the skill of walking is bound to agree. At no point did you need to motivate your child to learn how to walk, did you? Instead, he did it all on his own, through arduous repetition and gradual improvement. And what did he do after he taught himself this difficult skill? He added the next movement challenges — running, climbing stairs and carrying objects – entirely on his own initiative! So perhaps our job is often just to get out of his way, to remove obstacles from his path, and give him the time he needs to do his work. In other words, our job is not to motivate him but rather to be sure that we don’t inadvertently blunt his own internal motivation.

One way we can avoid that is by not doing things for her that she can learn to do them for herself. We can also allow her the time she needs by slowing ourselves down to match her pace, rather than forcing her to conform to ours. Of equal importance is allowing her to choose her own activities. When are you more likely to be self-motivated – when doing something someone else has chosen for you? Or, when doing an activity you have chosen for yourself?

DSC_8299-mediumDoesn’t this perfectly describe the atmosphere of a Montessori classroom? From their earliest days in Montessori, children are shown how to do a thousand and one activities for themselves, and then given time and choice. They are shown how to care for their own needs, as well as to care for their friends and their environment. We train ourselves as Montessori adults to get out of the way, let them do for themselves, and never to give more help than they need.

And what will you acquire if you are choosing things to do without undue help and without external motivation? Independence, the second of the soft skills to which our college professor referred. And if you have chosen it for yourself, you will have the self-motivation to follow-through and persevere through whatever challenges or difficulties may arise.

Obviously, the hard skills are important, but they don’t do you much good without the personal qualities, skills and attitudes that allow you to use the hard skills effectively. That’s why in Montessori we are working with children to develop the whole range of skills, hard and soft, that he or she will need as they take their place as an adult in society many years from now.

A Quest for Reality

Paul Gutting by | Montessori Blog

“[It] may be said that in order to develop the imagination it is necessary for everyone first of all to put himself in contact with reality.” -Dr. Maria Montessori

When Dr. Montessori opened her first classroom in 1907 in the San Lorenzo tenement housing in Rome, she had two cabinets of materials for the children’s use. One was filled with the materials she had designed and made for the children based on her earlier work in hospitals, and the other was filled with toys that had been donated to her by her friends.

DSC_7932-mediumDr. Montessori found very quickly that the children in the classroom exclusively chose the materials over the toys. She was surprised, and went so far as to sit down with the children and show them how to use the toys. After sitting with the dolls and so on for a short time, the children returned to the materials and remained with them. This observation brought Montessori to the conclusion that the children preferred reality and real work to toys and fantasy. Her conclusion has since been supported both by Montessori’s own work and that of many educators the world over.

I have found myself wondering on occasion if such a scenario could still take place. Surely contemporary battery-powered toys with flashing lights and a different song for every button would attract attention away from our simple, orderly materials. But I have seen that it is not so.

A year or so ago, my school hosted a fundraising garage sale. We filled part of a classroom not being used for the summer with donations. We had all kinds of things – plastic play kitchen sets, a cat-shaped keyboard, toy cars, dolls, a bin of dress-up clothes, bikes, and the list goes on. The other half of the classroom still had Montessori materials neatly arranged on shelves.

I watched as a two-and-a-half year old girl walked into the room, looked at all the toys, even touching some of them, and went straight to the shelves of materials and took great delight in working with a cylinder block (one of the Montessori sensorial materials). She was not prompted in any way, nor did I put her in the room as a test or experiment. She was not a student at our school returning to the familiar joys of the classroom. She was a child entering into a room filled with choices and after seeing what was available, she chose what she wanted (or needed) most.

Often in Montessori, we speak of the materials calling out to the children, and we do our best to make sure that call is clear. That is why our classrooms tend to be simple and uncluttered, decorated to the point of orderly beauty, not to the point of distraction. The children want to engage in the classroom. They want the experience that the materials will give them because they will get more learning from that experience than from flashy toys or reasoned rhetoric from an adult.

I think this story supports several truths about children, but the thought I want to land on today is that children crave reality. They want to do real work with real things. Nearly every parent of a two or three-year-old child sympathizes with the image of sweeping the floor and having to drag the child along on the end of the broom. The children want to help, they want to understand their own power to do work, and they will be best satisfied in that quest when they have real things to do.

When Reading Is Magic

Peter Davidson by | Montessori Blog

If you saw me walking across campus with a clipboard in my hand, I would probably be on my way to substitute in a primary (3- to 6-year-old) classroom. I keep a stack of blank slips of paper and a pencil on the clipboard, because I know how much new readers simply love reading handwritten words and phrases. It is simply magic to them that I can have an idea in my head and make it manifest on a piece of paper and that they can decode it! It’s an excitement that all of the Bob Books and other primers in the world can never match.

DSC_5188-mediumRecently, for instance, I was subbing for the afternoon. Two of the 5-year-olds had just put a project away and were looking around for their next choice of work. One was slightly older and, as I happened to know, a more advanced reader. I pulled out my trusty clipboard and wrote a single phonetic word “rug” for the younger of the two. She sounded it out, “errrr-uhhhh-gggg, err-uh-gg, rug!” and looked at me expectantly. “Well,” I said, “can you place that label with the item it names?” With a giggle, she placed the label on the gray carpet beneath our feet.

Next, I wrote the word cup, and again she sounded it out before zipping off across the classroom to place it next to a cup on the counter. I would go on to write word after word with her reading and matching each label with joy and enthusiasm every time. Why? Because there is something magical about reading something hot off the press as it were, directly from my pencil to her mind.

I was already thinking ahead to the other phonetic labels I would write for her, words like “clock” and “map” and “cactus” when I noticed the older girl was watching and waiting impatiently for a turn. “Oh, I have something a little different in mind for you,” I said, and wrote a phrase ‘the pencil.’ “I’d like you to bring me that.”

When she brought me a standard #2 writing pencil I exclaimed, “That is indeed a pencil! Thank you, but that’s not exactly the pencil I was thinking of,” and proceeded to add the word ‘red’ to the phrase. This time when she returned I let her know that, “That is a red pencil, but it is still not exactly the pencil I was thinking of,” and added the word ‘shortest’ to the phrase. This time when she returned I was finally able to reassure her that, “Yes, that is exactly the pencil I was thinking of!”

“But, let’s read the phrase together, ‘the pencil red shortest’. Is that the way we usually would say it?” With a smile she said “No way!” I used scissors to cut the phrase into pieces and, to her delight, rearranged it several ways, ‘pencil the red shortest’ and ‘shortest the pencil red’, eliciting a smile and a chuckle at each mistaken effort. “How would you arrange it then?” I asked. “The shortest red pencil!” she responded, and arranged the words in their proper order.

I went on to play this game with her for the next half hour. She didn’t realize it, because I never actually used the word, but in addition to reading practice she was getting an experience of the function of the adjective. At the same time I continued to write single word phonetic labels for the younger girl. Both girls were engaged with reading work, and one with grammar work, but with a joy and enthusiasm that I surely don’t remember experiencing with either reading or grammar. That’s the power of a pencil and some slips of paper. It’s magic.

Building a Foundation of Trust

Dawn Cowan by | Montessori Blog

“What do you think?”
“I’m sure you will do the right thing.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“How might that work?”

Building statements like the above into our repertoire is one small way that parents and teachers build partnership with children. Whether it’s rearranging the garage, working through an argument with a sibling, or figuring out when the best time of day to practice piano, the habit of soliciting children’s thoughts and ideas communicates our respect for their perspective and our trust that they are able to find creative solutions.

DSC_1918-largeIt can require patience, suspension of judgment, and a spirit of exploration. Often we have to stop ourselves from jumping in and offering solutions or direction. However, the doors that open can be remarkable and rewarding. Last weekend at a potluck, my daughter asked if she could have a cookie. My response was, “I think you know what my concerns might be and I trust you make a good decision.” To which she replied, “I should make sure to eat some real food first and then not have too many sweets, right?” Of course, this is a point of arrival after many family conversations about nutrition but now we can both move on; me from monitoring her choices at such gatherings and she from feeling the need to run these small decisions by me. Our trust in one another means we both have a little more freedom to enjoy the event. Had I just launched into a directive or negotiation, we would have lost this moment.

When two students argued about use of a certain material, one of my standard responses was to set it aside and send them off to create a plan with which they could both agree. During our Upper Elementary parent orientations, one piece of advice for parents of 9-12 year old children is when they bring a complaint or concern home, the parents best first question is “What did Greg/Stephanie say when you discussed it with them?” While we don’t leave the children adrift, the message comes through clearly: You have good ideas. You have the power to solve your problems. We trust you.

Trust, in this context, is the fundamental belief that we all desire to bring our best selves to each moment. This is not the same as the expectations of perfection which often lead to feelings of disappointment, mistrust and that great demoralizer, comparison. When trust is present, we see the great good in one another and all that is possible rather than looking for what is missing. The child’s idea of how to clean up spilled water may not be our idea of efficient, but they, invested in creating the solution, will likely give their best self to the effort and will likely be willing to offer help again. I’ve often seen children’s ideas about how to resolve social issues work better than the adult suggestions!

Trust allows the children to rise to their own potential and develop skills of self-management. Equipped with lessons and guidance, their confidence builds as they begin to believe in their own powers of judgment and autonomy. Creating space for collaboration and independence: this is the joyful challenge of parents and educators with the benefit that the result is that our work together is eased when all parties feel autonomous and respected, cutting out the need for willful opposition. There are plenty of educational programs and parenting approaches that script every part of the day, from morning circle to craft time to sing-along to reading hour. In this case, standardizing the experience solves many variables. Micromanagement offers an illusion of control and peacefulness, but ultimately undermines the opportunities for spontaneous, creative problem solving. Supporting independence and self-management is a messier proposition requiring friendliness with error and, sometimes more challenging, friendliness with one another’s error but leading us toward peaceful collaboration and interdependence in the work of living and learning together.

Nurture and Nature

Charlotte Kroger by | Montessori Blog

Outside my bedroom windows, along the back property line where my neighbor’s yard begins, I can see the four cherry laurel trees we planted a few years ago. Three of them are flourishing – getting tall and treelike – while the fourth is not doing so well. It is not as tall as the others and is skimpy in canopy. It’s not its fault. When we planted these trees we were not terribly discerning about the location. The gardener helping us said that the laurels should do well whether in sun or shade. So we planted them in an offset row across the back of our yard to serve as screening. We hadn’t taken into account the future growth of all the surrounding trees that now cast that part of the yard into deep shade, where the fourth laurel lives.

DSC_0896-medium The trees came with ‘instructions’ – hidden potential with everything needed to become cherry laurels we could one day count on to screen the back of our property. But the environment in which they grow varied enough that one of four has not lived up to its potential of tree shading.

Nurture and Nature

The environment is nurture; the child in his raw form is nature. There is little or perhaps anything we can do to alter the child’s nature but there is everything we can do to provide the appropriate nurture that nature needs to reach potential and beyond through the environment we provide.

Maria Montessori was very clear about the importance of the environment young children need during the years of their Absorbent Minds and Sensitive Periods. She presented a clear blueprint for the role of the Prepared Environment and the role of the adult in that environment. According to Standing (“Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work”):

“If there is one feature more than another which should characterize the prepared environment it is order.”

“It is hardly too much to say that on the way in which the directress (adult) preserves the order in the prepared environment – or not – will largely depend the success or failure of her class.”

“What Montessori has done is this: realizing the peculiarly absorbent nature of the child’s mind, she has prepared for him a special environment; and, then, placing the child within it, has given him freedom to live in it, absorbing what he finds there.”

“If the teacher (adult) and the children all migrated to another room – leaving the prepared environment – these new relationships would vanish, and with them the inter-related function of the absorbent mind in the prepared environment.” (the Guide/Adult – Children- Environment triangle)

“In this environment only those things are allowed to be present which will assist development. Out of it must be kept anything that would act as an obstacle – not least a too interfering adult. Even such things as are neutral or irrelevant should be rigorously excluded. The constructive psychic energy granted by nature to the child for building up his personality is limited; therefore we must do everything we can to see that it is not scattered in activities of the wrong kind.”

It is clear – we work with the child nature through the nurturing environment – tirelessly and consistently through its upkeep and preparation. This is our role of love, and the environment reflects this love in its readiness (preparedness) to support the child nature. It is through the environment that the adult has any influence on the developing child nature.

Standing further states
“Practical Rules for the Teacher (or adult) in Relation to the Environment”:

  1. Scrupulous care of the environment: keep it clean, tidy, spick and span.
  2. Paint again, sew again, when necessary: beautify the house.
  3. Teach the use of objects; and show the way to do the exercises of practical life (this must be done calmly and graciously and exactly, so that all the children will do the same).
  4. Put the child in touch with the environment (active) and when this is achieved she becomes passive.
  5. Observe the children continuously so that she may not fail to see who needs support.
  6. Hasten when called.
  7. Listen and respond to the child’s appeals.
  8. Respect and not interrupt the worker.
  9. Respect and never correct one who is making a mistake (“teach, teaching, not teach correcting”).
  10. Respect one who is resting and watching the others work without disturbing him or obliging him to work . . .
  11. But she must be tireless in offering subjects again to those who have already refused them; and in teaching those who have not yet learnt, and still make mistakes.
  12. By her care and intent silence she must animate the environment: also by her gentle speech and presence – as one who loves.
  13. She must make her presence felt by those who are seeking; and hide from those who have already found.
  14. She becomes invisible to those who – having finished their work carried out by their own effort – are offering up their work as a spiritual thing.

Ours is one of service to the child nature through loving care of the environment in which he spends his day of development, day after day, be it in the home or in the school. This is the love we show the child – the respect and honor we afford the developing, creative nature and raw potential of the child. It is our partnership with him in this creative endeavor.

Montessori is Developmental

Peter Davidson by | Montessori Blog

“Your children go to Montessori school? I heard that’s fine for preschoolers, but when they are older, won’t they need something different?”

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I would guess that many of you have been asked questions similar to this on more than one occasion. It is an indication of the positive reputation Montessori enjoys as a preschool program, but also the relative lack of understanding of its relevance for older ages. It also asserts that older children need a different environment from the little ones. And indeed they do, which is why the Montessori elementary environment is designed so differently from that for the younger ages. What most of these people mean by “something different,” however, is the teacher-centered, one-size-fits-all conventional model of education in which they themselves grew up.

Conventional education is an outgrowth of the industrial revolution, and some psychologists and educators even refer to it as a “factory model.” At its core it is an artificial construct based upon efficiency, like the assembly line. Everyone doing the same thing at the same time on an adult-devised schedule would seem efficient, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, children are not widgets to be assembled, and that system fails to take into account the changing needs and characteristics of children’s developmental stages, much less the needs of individuals. Therefore it not only leaves some children behind, but it doesn’t do a good job of matching up with the developmental needs and characteristics of any. For generations, students have struggled conform to it, like so many round pegs forced into square holes.

Dr. Montessori, on the other hand, flipped this model on its head. She didn’t begin with an efficiency model or any other model or mental construct for that matter. Instead she began by observing how children develop and asking herself the question, “What kind of learning environment would respond best to the changing needs and characteristics at each stage?” Instead of making children conform to an environment, she made the environment conform to the child!

Like many scientists since, she observed common developmental characteristics within roughly six-year increments, which she referred to as the planes of development including early childhood (birth to six), elementary (6-12) and adolescence (12-18). For each plane of development, then, there should be a unique learning environment, reflecting the requirements of that plane.

For example, she noticed that children at the age of 2 or 3 or 4 are very independent and individualistic and learn best through the use of their own hands on their own activity. “Individual activity is the one factor that stimulates and produces development and independence,” she said, referring to this age. Therefore, each child in a Montessori toddler or primary (3 to 6-year-old) environment has the opportunity to identify a workspace on a rug or table, free from interference or interruption. Contrast this to the conventional preschool, where children are constantly asked to share, which goes against children’s very nature at this age, and gives rise to struggles for possession so common in those environments.

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That nature changes during the next plane of development as the elementary child becomes intensely social. Oddly enough, this is when children in conventional schools are confined to desks and told to neither talk nor share! Any observer in a Montessori school will notice the difference: in primary, children are largely engaged in independent or parallel activities, whereas rarely is an elementary child working alone. In primary, lessons are given one-on-one for the most part, whereas in elementary the lessons are nearly always given to a group. And in elementary it is groups of children you see working as teams on projects, conducting research, or using materials. Once again it is clearly the case that in traditional elementary schools children forced to conform to environments that are counter to their nature, while in Montessori it is the environment that conforms to them.

I could give many, many more examples, but there simply isn’t room here for a full explication of the characteristics of each plane of development and the way the Montessori environments change in response to them while other forms of education do not. Fortunately, you can visit a Montessori school close to you and experience the changing environments first hand. The more you learn about Montessori and child development, the better you’ll be able answer that question: “when they are older, won’t they need something different?” “You’re right,” you can say, “they need something different, because they are different. But, the different thing they need is still Montessori!”