Montessori and Bronfenbrenner the Most Effective Classroom

Montessori and Bronfenbrenner

The most effective classroom environment is one in which there is a sense of trust, advocacy for the student, engaging learning activities, and a sense of regular adventure. Students should be encouraged to actualize, to participate, and to think of their classroom as a community. Because each individual is unique in their learning style, classroom success is based on flexibility and the willingness to adapt and evolve on a moment's notices -- the idea of fluid intuition taken to the nth degree. Within the modern pedagogical rubric, classroom management remains challenging at almost every level. One way to understand the theoretical basis of learning and the pedagogical issues surrounding learning is to understand some of the theories surrounding the subject. We need a template or structure from which to base our assumptions, and to formulate the reasons for our decisions and ideas.

Maria Montessori, for example, based much of her philosophy on the work of 19th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For Rousseau, and Montessori, humans are born into a natural sense of goodness and until society influences them, are uncorrupt. It is the educator's responsibility to prevent that for as long as possible by acting as a shield to allow children to develop more naturally. Education prepares children for life, not for any specific social institution. Since each person is born with innate gifts that are unique to their own personality, the perceptive educator must nurture those gifts and help the child discover their own individual purpose. Because the process of education is individualized, the school should be away from an indoor "room" and, if possible, in the country, without textbooks, in which the teacher uses nature to discuss science, art, history, philosophy, etc. Rote memorization is discouraged, as is corporal punishment. In fact, the two most important lessons for Rousseau's viewpoints on education are that the child learns morality by experiencing the consequences of inappropriate acts and that the most important thing a teacher can do is guide the process of thinking and reading, so that the child can explore the world through their own gifts (Ibid). This is particularly important when thinking about children as open books -- the ability for children to conceptualize, actualize, and as learning sponges, retain a tremendous amount of stimuli -- all types of stimuli (Hainstock, 1997).

One of the more interesting contemporary theorists in the nature of development and theory related to a more ecological approach was Yuri Bronfenbrenner. (1917-2005). His early background in developmental psychology thrust him into working with the U.S. Army during World War II where he found that the environment shaped behavior more than any other, in his opinion, activity. For Bronfenbrenner, though, development was a far more complex, interactive model. It was fluid in the sense of time and place, and far more interdependent upon societal and cultural modeling than his predecessors. One can think of Bronfenbrenner as a sociological Stephen Hawking -- explaining the very minute and how it works with the very large. Bronfenbrenner sees the world, from the very tiny micro system (the atom); through a series of "universes" to then form what we might term culture or society. Within each of these structures, actions and interactions flow both ways, and much of what harkens towards human development is the result of situational and environmental issue. Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Johnson-Larid, 2009).