I would really like to see an extension of this learning method up through high school --- the closest thing I'm aware of was a school I attended in Mississippi for a couple of years --- classes were divided between academic and social, social classes (homeroom, phys ed, social studies, &c.) were attended at one's age, while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes.
Some of the faculty were accredited as faculty at a local college, and where warranted, either professors travelled from there to the school, or students travelled to the college for classes --- it wasn't uncommon for students to graduate high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
Apparently, the system was deemed unfair because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not, so the Miss. State Supreme Court dismantled it.
I would say the same of the public high school that I attended. The attitude of the teachers and the other students was fantastic, and it really helped propel me forward in life, gave me a ton of lessons that I don't think most people were able to take from their own public high schools.
In both cases, my parents (Mom especially) were so incredibly stubborn about finding the best school for their kids. We literally moved the whole family to the town that had the best public school where my parents could afford a single family home. Love you Mom, thank you for caring, and to all other parents I would strongly advise against picking a school based on its philosophy. The quality of teacher matters much more than anything else.
We enrolled her at the local Montessori and she rushed to the map section but was told she is forbidden from using it until she takes the lesson on that or whatever is called. That lesson was 2-3 months away, and meanwhile all other kids were able to play with the maps.
This, combined with other rigidities and a crazy schedule totally unsuited for working parents (9-1pm wtf) made it impossible. After struggling a lot for two months, she went back to her old daycare and was very happy there, and is now at her elementary school now
But in hindsight I could tell it depends heavily on the teachers as well as the students you are saddled with because of how much group stuff there is. There was clear divisions between the kids who would reliably do their work and the kids who procrastinated and played around flicking pencils at eachother all day. This was generally possible while the main classroom teacher was busy with some subset of students for a lesson or some other work.
Once we got access to desktop computers we replaced the pencil flicking all day with games. They'd be in the main classroom but we'd just turn the crt monitors to the side to hide it. This was long before IT surveillance tools, we had full internet access too. Gameboys a plenty.
There was a lot of fluid experimentation however. At one point we took all the shelving in the room and turned it in such a way to create sort of cubicles. I think the idea was to get the kids who probably had ADHD to lock in and do their work more vs being tempted to socialize and screw around all day with their friends. Eventually they banned us from turning the CRT monitors as well.
Would a more rigid school structure help other kids? Sure, probably, but I don't think what public school was doing would have helped those kids much. Honestly montessori is a lot like the adult working world now that I am in that and see the parallels. A lot less handholding and you needing to not give into procrastination and ask mentors for individual direction from time to time. Group work and discussion coupled with independent work. Project based education that is more like actual real life work projects vs the dry lecture/memorize/exam patterns. That being said it was more "traditional" and less montessori towards the end as they had to prepare you for a proper highschool setup, so more formally scheduled classes and a lot less free time in the main classroom.
There exist various implementations of Montessori. AMI was founded by Dr. Montessori [0] and certifies schools so that parents can have some assurance of adherence to a standard. The many materials in a Montessori classroom, including things that look like a dollhouse, don't exist for unstructured play but are learning tools for the guide and student to use in their work. Once the student gets a lesson using a material, then they can choose to practice using the material in their self-directed work periods, which can be in groups.
My kids had a mostly positive mixed experience in Montessori. In addition to evaluating how a child comes to grip with the method, there is also how they work with their guide. My observation is that even skilled practitioners don't always achieve a strong rapport with every student. In those situations the Montessori classroom's weakness is that there is only one guide for all subjects as opposed to a traditional school's subject-specific teachers.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_Montessori_Interna...
Oh man… survivorship bias thinking is dangerous.
The rest of the time had loose guidelines on what to do (like you should read X pages of any book in the library) or you were free to do/play with what you wanted once that stuff was done.
We were largely encouraged to do things in a group. I think the only place to even sit alone if you wanted was the book nook, everything else was communal tables.
I really enjoyed it, and was ahead to the point of being bored when I switched to public schools. I tried for like a week in 5th grade and they were covering geographic features I'd already done back in 2nd or 3rd grade (archipelagos and islets and what not).
We read a lot with our son who is almost 3 now. In the book it is recommended not to introduce fantasy in books until 6 (when apparently children suddenly understand the difference between fantasy and reality). I assume this is an original Montessori teaching.
Anyone who knows childrens books knows they are around 95% fantasy stories containing anthropomorphized animals (and some cars/trains/planes).
As far as i can tell our son knows the difference between what we read in books and the real world, and has done for a while. The things we read in books we discuss while reading. In the real world we discuss real world things. He has never shown behavior that would suggest these are mixed up in his head.
Maybe I misunderstand their point around fantasy/reality. But the seems so obviously wrong to me that I would be cautious about the rest of their teachings. Which does seem to contain some good advice.
I see a lot of sentiment along the line of "quality over philosophy" -- how can we evaluate quality? There is limited data available[1]. What do we ask the school when we visit them?[2]
[1]: Unsure if standardised test scores really matter at a young age, so we're grasping for straws with "fraction of parents with tertiary education" (higher means children have more progressive views?) and "fraction of girls in each class" (higher means calmer classrooms?).
[2]: I don't know how to evaluate schools so my best ideas are to ask about staff retention (is it a tolerable environment?), how they evaluate that they get the desired effects out of efforts (do they do things purposefully?), etc.
If an 8 year old can do algebra, let them cook.
He also obviously doesn’t believe it’s wrong to adjust learning to capacity. He just has the less popular view that this can be done without tagging kids at four years old and changing their lives. (He probably also understands that there’s plenty a brilliant math kid who belongs in a standard English class, or even in remedial classes to deal with a concurrent learning disability).
At the elementary level, up until about 3rd or 4th grade it always made more sense to me to have lots of smaller “neighborhood” level Montessori schools rather than a few large schools from Kindergarten - 6th.
Unless this school had more than 12 grades, why would you describe that as "the limit being removed"?
https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-37/chapter-15...
he said it was dismantled. teacher's unions and their political allies and pliant schoolboards are always vehemently opposed to any programs like this. something that shows some students excelling and or makes some teachers look good just makes other teachers look bad, and that raises questions and increases scrutiny from outside, and they can't allow that.
My issue with this is that it just is selection bias, telling you nothing about how good the method is at teaching.
Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better? Or it's just that those who are good and bad already get divided up, and we know not why some are good and others are worse?
Yes, you shunt all the disruptive/obstinate kids into class 2 and they can spend 4 hours of math lessons every week rehashing arguments about how they have a phone so they don't need to know what 7x12 is.
This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
Because of the way these things are done, it does have the unfortunate side effect that the kid who struggles with math because he's dyslexic gets put in a class with the kid who doesn't give a shit about math. But they'd be in the same even if the school didn't place by ability, so they're not that much worse off.
Too many kids are just completely lost because they were moved up to the next math class despite not understanding the previous math class.
I came to comment (without reading it) that the study results are probably not universal. The programs are self selecting because kids not suited for it won't stay. This is not a critique of the program or the kids who dont fit it. Just an observation that its so "extreme" that only kids who benefit will stay.
Absolutely, how many ghetto kids are in the school? It weeds them out through $ and expulsions.
Thinking the Montessori system is relevant to the public system shows your schooling failed.
Montessori has the ability to chose pedagogy so certainly has facets that are the quite good and should be applied publicly except for liberal arts graduate ideals.
This study is very young children, limited pregnancies and gang bangers, and also not random. It's randomised on kids who enter the lottery.
Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline. We have 100+ years of data. Air-conditioning to control behavior is an example of what helps. Liberal arts graduates destroy anything else that could work so don't interact with them, stay outside their broken world.
I thought it was parenting? This study claims that "parental involvement is a more significant factor in a child’s academic performance than the qualities of the school itself." [0]
I couldn't find better sources on my phone but this is a theme I've heard repeated over and over throughout my life. Parenting makes the difference.
Got a citation/link?
There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.
Or worse, know we need a remedy when no one is even checking for success or failure?
Thankfully the US is well on its way to dismantling the Department of Education. So no stuffy bureaucrats getting in the way /s
Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.
Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.
This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots.
It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
My parents cared enough to find ways to get me into private schools on grants and scholarships.
My neighbors had just as many if not more opportunities to do so but did not care enough to do so for their children.
Yes, it’s caring. Education as a top priority for poor families is the number one way a parent can give their kid a better life than they had. Most do not even try.
I have autism and nobody noticed or did anything about it until it was time to start preparing for high school in seventh grade. I had read all the books in the school library but was not able to spell and write. It was just way to easy for me to escape work I did not want to do.
We moved after I started high school and my sisters had to change school because of it. One of the first things they noticed at their new school is how incredibly lazy they where.
I am very happy working as a mailman but I do wonder what I would be doing now if I had learned how to study and learn at a younger age.
I changed my daughter this year and overall I'm disappointed in that school. There were many issues but the most important ones to me where:
- No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace. When I worked with her at home I could easily identify many gaps and deficiencies. She's now struggling a bit in her new school because of this but I think it will resolve soon.
- Because they didn't like comparing kids to standards or among each other the feedback I received was useless. It was always "she's doing excellent, we see strong growth" but it wasn't true.
- The school rejected most parent feedback and issues raised with something "maybe this style of education is not for you". For example, I know of a few other kids that had to leave because the school didn't take action against bullying because they didn't believe in punishments, etc.
I have to say there were good things too, in particular my daughter really enjoyed it there and formed strong bonds with other kids. I think in general it was ok for elementary education but I strongly think it's not after that and I now have a perhaps unjust bias against Montessori and derivatives.
that's not true. it is possible to notice if a kid is learning at a good pace without exams. that is part of what the montessori method is about.
it sounds like this school just picked the things they liked but did not understand the point. the core of the montessori method is intensive observation, to understand what the children need and how they can thrive. it looks like this didn't happen in your daugthers school.
Another thing that kind of tempers my opinion of this kind of school is anecdotal, some friends were lamenting that in their otherwise excellent public elementary school in an affluent district, some parents are pulling their kids out of _first grade_ and moving to private school because "there is not enough homework." What a sad image.
My Montessori persona was to be competitive about "finishing my weeks work first" usually on Monday or Tuesday, so I could enjoy working with other students on their work lists, and getting a crack at the highschool algebra book when the teacher would let our group at it. I had some strengths in English, math and computing, but weaknesses in foreign language and science where there were fewer opportunities for social learning. Obviously there were no opportunities for that in HS.
In addition to terrible grades, the transition to public school completely destroyed my social confidence and I had to stop playing sports due to my small stature. My dad noted this year (in my 40s now) later that I was unrecognisable after just a few months but he lost the argument to pull me out. It wasn't until my late 20s that I started to find my original confidence.
Indeed there's all kinds of Montessori.
I can vouch for my daughter's .
If anybody wants to give it a go, my benchmarks are:
1) find reviews of parents, especially no abuse, shouting, kids in the last year should LOVE the place.
2) observe even for few minutes a class in their focus time -- you will feel almost shocked if you haven't seen this before -- like you entered Santa's workshop -- children should be deeply engaged in their activities. If you haven't seen it before you might suspect abuse (that's why point 1 is so important), no way kids love to wipe the floors, lay tables, prepare food and so on, but they actually do.
And all that done in almost complete silence.
Proper Montessori with good, empathetic, dedicated educators is amazing!
Different levels of Montessori authenticity make the results even more impressive. They do have some inclusion criteria, like 2/3 of the teachers must be AMI/AMS certified but even so I'd expect a lot of these public school montessori programs to be less "true montessori" than what you'd get at a fully certified AMI/AMS school.
Howrver, I was also pretty far behind in math for reasons unrelated to ability (standardized testing and secondary educational success indicate that I'm actually pretty good at math). I also left with very underdeveloped time management and study skills.
Could these downsides have been mitigated? Definitely, and my parents largely made sure they were. But in talking to my peers at the time, my parents after the fact, and parents of to hers that went to Montessori schools, I think the general idea holds.
Point being that self driven education is fantastic for a lot of reasons. But it will also let a lot of kids stay far behind their ability if not carefully monitored.
I would amend this somewhat to say that most ideologies have aspects that are much less effective in practice than they are in theory. I think this matches your sentiment, but addresses the likely rebuttal of "But X method has this specific element designed to address the shortcoming."
if that is the case you didn't experience a good montessori program, because that should have taken care of that.
I'm actually a huge fan of Montessori schools, including the one I went to. It was a great experience.
But in my experience and the experience of a lot of others I've talked to, Montessori schools aren't perfect. The method does really well fostering natural curiosity and harnessing it for learning. Essentially, it develops internal motivation super successfully.
But, as I've seen and heard from plenty of parents and at least one teacher, the method struggles with students that can't find that internal motivation. The sort of freedom a Montessori classroom gives you is not ideal for everyone. I think it's okay to admit that.
So I don't see how special needs would bias the results. If the lottery excludes those with special needs (either by design or due to self-selection) then there's no bias between control group and treatment group. If the lottery doesn't exclude but the enrollment decision is biased by special needs, then it doesn't matter because they use ITT and not enrolment.
Big ticket items like a dedicated SPED department, or a professional working 1:1 with a student can be accounted for. But if a special needs child participates in a standard class (which they do) and the standard teacher needs to do more than average work to accommodate them; that cost is not earmarked for that specific student. Once the bean counters see it, it is just "teacher salary", which gets averaged out across all the students.
That doesn't necessarily mean the result will extrapolate, though. It seems plausible that teachers in Montessori schools are more motivated and knowledgeable than the average teacher and have made a conscious decision to teach in such a school. If every public school were to become a Montessori school, you would still get the cost savings (student-to-teacher ratios are higher in Montessori!) but you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise and so the learning gains might not carry over. It's just really hard to know whether something might generalize in the educational sciences.
We accept that different colleges (and other post-secondary training) at different cost points serve different populations.
We somehow do not accept the same idea for secondary or primary education. Why not improve educational outcomes for some of the population?
> "Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data."
That seems like some kind of supportive evidence as well. Teachers should logically be happier when working inside a system optimized for teaching efficacy!
Personally: we put our child in a Montessori preschool because we liked its emphasis on self-directed learning (I kind of think all learning has to be self-directed on some level. Even a lecture requires you to listen to and think about the lecture, instead of something else). We later moved him to a Reggio Emilia program for non-pedagogical reasons (there were problems with the building that the Montessori school was in). They're definitely different—in Montessori, he mostly played on his own, and in Reggio we now see him in pairs and groups all the time. I have no idea which is better, but his teachers at the Reggio school seem to like it.
1. Lack of support from parents. Many parents treat school as free daycare and are not invested at all in their kids. They don't care of their kid gets good grades, they don't care if they get bad grades. They don't come to parent-teacher conferences. When their kid gets in trouble, they either insist that their kid didn't do anything wrong. Or literally tell the school, "hey, after that morning bell rings, he's your problem, don't hassle me about it."
2. Lack of funding. Need I say more.
3. Lack of authority. If a kid is being constantly disruptive, the teachers are told they just have to deal with it. They can't eject a kid from the classroom for ANY reason except when physical harm is imminent. My son's class had several students who were pretty much allowed to be on their chromebooks all day every day because the alternative was constant verbal abuse toward the their classmates and teacher. My son thought this was deeply unfair. He wasn't wrong.
4. Many school systems have a kind of twisted version of "no child left behind." All the kids who have special educational, emotional, or behavioral needs get plopped into regular classrooms with regular teachers. This is bad for basically everyone. The kids with special needs aren't getting the specialized teaching they require. If they are disruptive (and they often are when they aren't getting what they need), the whole class falls behind in learning because the teacher has to spend 1/2 their time dealing with 1/30th of the class.
So, sadly, they weren't able to directly compare 'public Montessori PK3' with 'public non-Montessori PK3'.
That doesn't change the fact that the title and article (which is all that most people will read) paints that as comparing public Montessori preschool vs public non-Montessori preschool.
But that's not what it's doing!
The baseline condition was NOT one where everyone had access to a public PK3 as a fallback if they didn't win the lottery.
likewise peer quality should not be even a factor because of the way how montessori education works. children are not given the opportunity to disrupt others.
the methodology is all-encompassing. it affects the children from the moment they enter the school, until they leave to go home. most of the potential other factors in the school are eliminated by the methodology itself.
it's hard to envision. you have to observe a class in action to understand why.
Teachers who pass the tests required for this probably are from the top of their teacher cohort regarding intelligence, consciousness, empathy, motivation etc and they are likely better paid, so less stressed from life stuff like bills or whatever.
The peers all come from non-random families who generally have good life outcomes either way. These kids will model good behavioral norms. If kids can interact, they will influence each other. It's not only disruption or no disruption, but likely more subtle.
The effects were only shown here up to end of kindergarten. It likely disappears later.
My default assumption remains that these fashionable methodologies do very little actually. The correction is probable almost entirely due to who the people involved are. I know that the study participants were randomized to Montessori or not, but the rest of peers and the teachers are not random.
The real test would be for a Montessori kindergarten to drop the methodology while keeping the same people.
What worked for us better is competence grading which is Summit system that originated in California.
But principles are system are great, if you can make it work. It requires effort from teachers and parents and all. It is not trivial to make it work everywhere.
They're always looking for foreign tourists to help teach English, even if it's just for a few days or a week.
Kids stop caring way too young as a self-preservation mechanism. This means many of them also stop trying... It's a spiral that can only be broken by restructuring.
This is a big if. Until the 1990s, class sizes routinely exceeded 30 and school sizes 500 in former Czechoslovakia, but I wouldn't call us "pathologically self-centered society".
As for self-centeredness, shrinking family size might be the true reason. Only children tend to be a lot more pampered than kids who were born into a family of six. In China, they are called "Little Emperors".
the montessori method can handle larger class sizes specifically because of the way it is designed. in other words, large class sized are an even better argument for why the montessori method should be used.
Why not? Costs are lower, etc.
The upfront costs of teacher training and Montessori materials were amortized
over their expected lifespan of 25 y. Total costs for Montessori and
traditional programs were divided by the average number of children in each
type of classroom at the PK3, PK4, and kindergarten years, then summed to
yield the cost difference of Montessori and traditional programming over
three years of public preschool.
https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...
Talk of causation anywhere other than the unit of randomization is speculation.
>As shown in Figure S1, we began with a list of 588 public Montessori schools in the United States supplied by the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector
>[procedural stuff, possibly introducing bias but not definitional]
>Finally, because “Montessori” is not a trademarked term, we checked whether schools met our minimum standards for Montessori inclusion
>- At least 66% of the lead Primary classroom teachers are trained by one of the two most prominent Montessori teacher training organizations, the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) or the American Montessori Society (AMS). One school was excluded on this basis.
>- No more than two adults, the trained teacher and a non-teaching assistant, in the classroom on a regular basis. No school was excluded on this basis
>- Classrooms are mixed-age, with at least 18 children ranging from 3 to 6 years old. Five schools did not mix ages so were excluded.
>- At least a 2-hour uninterrupted free choice period every day. Five schools were excluded on this basis.
>- Each classroom has at least 80% of the complete set of roughly 150 Montessori Primary materials, and fewer than 5% of the materials available to children in the classroom are not Montessori materials. No school was excluded for failing to meet this criterion. [italics mine, furthermore, holy crap!]
I think one thing that is particularly noticeable is that, while there is definitely some particular form of education being put forward here which is interesting, there is obviously a very "aesthetic" trend as well, because plenty of schools are failing on the practices and the teachers while somehow none are failing the materials. But maybe this is actually just path-dependence in measuring the exclusion per criterion?
Also, this is just about preschool. For regular school, I've grown more skeptical, because it didn't work well for either of my kids. They struggled with the independence and planning, and didn't get much done. One switched to special education during primary school and is doing excellent there (but that has much more guidance and costs more, though I wish it was available for everybody), the other switched to a regular school during secondary school after almost failing to pass year after year despite his extraordinary intelligence. He's doing somewhat better now.
It's a good option to have, but it's quite likely the advantage is bigger for preschool than school.
You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids. — Marissa Mayer
It is not like they were Abel and Gauss as impressionable tech workers seem to think.
I compared Montessori and non Montessori labeled daycares/preschools for my 3 and 4 year olds, and was unable to discern a meaningful difference in the course of the day.
Edit: I ended up going with the daycare that had cameras (so that at least management could audit employees), and a livestream for the parents, which was at a non Montessori daycare. Staff turnover also seemed lower. Was more expensive, but have been happy with results.
"The final implementation criteria for school inclusion were thus:
• At least 66% of the lead Primary classroom teachers are trained by one of the two most prominent Montessori teacher training organizations, the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) or the American Montessori Society (AMS). One school was excluded on this basis.
• No more than two adults, the trained teacher and a non-teaching assistant, in the classroom on a regular basis. No school was excluded on this basis.
• Classrooms are mixed-age, with at least 18 children ranging from 3 to 6 years old. Five schools did not mix ages so were excluded.
• At least a 2-hour uninterrupted free choice period every day. Five schools were excluded on this basis.
• Each classroom has at least 80% of the complete set of roughly 150 Montessori Primary materials, and fewer than 5% of the materials available to children in the classroom are not Montessori materials. No school was excluded for failing to meet this criterion."
So seems like the criteria for this research is fairly good.
In general though it's hard to tell if a school is Montessori or not. The method is not trademarked and anyone can claim to be a Montessori school ,or Montessori inspired etc...
There are two organizations that certify - AMI, which was created by Maria Montessori's daughter and functions mostly in Europe, and AMS which is an American organization founded by people inspired by the Montessori method.
AMI is stricter while AMS is more modern, but most places that identify as Montessori is neither.
I would say the best way to identify if a school is Montessori is first if they have mixed-age classrooms, the standard is a 3 year class (so 1-3, 4-6, 7-9...).
If all the kids in a class are in the same age, it's not Montessori.
Second, for preschool, you expect the class to be very organized with intermittent shelves and work areas, and very neat (no mountain of toys etc...) - https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=montessori+classroom
The difference between these two, from my experience, is HUGE. Certified AMI schools, while a little more rigid in terms of teaching fine motor skills, generally have been better at making my kid more independent at doing things he likes to do. AMS schools are kind of wishy washy by comparison, and my kid was bored and under-engaged.
Look for a school/teachers with AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) certification.
Once I asked some advocate of the method, what was it exactly; the reply was very good and detailed, but then I pointed out institutes that “follow” the method, which were nothing as what he described. From that point, it was a mess. “Well, you must not absolutely do it that way” “there are variations” etc. I was pretty dissatisfied with the description, and was clear that is not very well defined.