Montessori Method: Strategies, Outcomes, and Criticisms

The Montessori approach to teaching and learning involves strategies that seek to develop the whole child. This paper reviews and critiques those strategies and evaluations of the Montessori Method based on available literature, examining what Montessori does in practice, what criticisms it has attracted, and which of those criticisms have merit.

The idea of developing the whole child is based on the theory that Dr. Maria Montessori developed early in the twentieth century: preparing a child academically is just part of the task of enlightened schools, because the child also needs social and emotional development. The whole-child approach incorporates more than traditional private or public schools typically offer.

According to the Montessori website, the strategy in the Montessori classroom is to place children not by grade but by age. Children ages two and three are in one group, children ages three through six are in another group, and children ages six through twelve are in yet another group. This tactic helps children develop social skills, challenges them to learn and work together, and allows directors and directresses to carefully observe activities and guide children so that each student may develop at his or her own pace (Montessori.com).

During the time when foundational skills are being taught, teachers encourage children to explore other styles of learning and expression. These creative endeavors include musical activities, spatial learning, body-kinesthetic activities, and interpersonal, intrapersonal, and intuitive modes of engagement (Montessori.com). In Montessori schools there are no grades in the traditional sense, but teachers do keep records and carefully observe each student's progress in order to maximize the value of each child's experience.

The development of self-esteem and self-confidence in each child is central to the whole-child philosophy that Montessori emphasizes. The Montessori strategy helps a child grow in a way that allows him or her to solve problems and approach questions with the confidence needed to find answers independently.

More specifically, the Montessori approach emphasizes the following distinctions from traditional schooling: (a) cognitive and social development, rather than social development alone; (b) teachers who are unobtrusive rather than controlling; (c) an environment that encourages self-discipline rather than externally enforced discipline; (d) individual instruction rather than uniform group instruction; (e) mixed-age groupings rather than same-age classes; (f) students helping to teach one another; (g) children choosing their own projects; (h) a learning pace set by the child; (i) instruction in self-care such as cleaning up and personal organization; and (j) children finding and correcting their own errors rather than having a teacher mark their mistakes (Montessori.com).

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Curriculum Inquiry, Jacqueline Cossentino reports on an in-depth investigation she conducted into how Montessori approaches the education of children, with an eye toward comparing it to traditional educational experiences. Cossentino reviews several criticisms that the Montessori approach has received from traditional educators, including an attack on the concept of "work" in the Montessori setting. In traditional educational settings, "work" means preparing a child for a financially productive adult future — something very young children arguably should not be burdened with — but in Montessori, "work" simply means allowing a child to choose his or her own projects.

In Montessori, work equates with the desire to create something meaningful. Critics, however, insisted that the emphasis for very young children should be on "the play spirit," which is "the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this stage" of childhood (Cossentino, 2006, p. 66). Maria Montessori pushed back against these criticisms, arguing that "work" in the Montessori method is really about "development," which is "both natural and effortful" (p. 66). Moreover, she pointed out that "work serves as the bridge between development and pedagogy" for the child, and that in the Montessori approach pedagogy offers "the proper design of an environment within which to work as well as the protection of the child's concentration once work is underway" (Cossentino, p. 66).

Work in the Montessori school helps the child become whole because it is both "the path to and the manifestation of a particular conception of 'goodness'" (Cossentino, p. 68). The real value of work in a Montessori environment is that the child — not the teacher — directs what work will be undertaken, and because the child makes those decisions, it helps to "set free" the child's emerging personality (Cossentino, p. 68).

Cossentino — whose son attended a Montessori school, stimulating her interest in the concept of "work" — explains that "joyful work, freely chosen" links the development of the young person with that child's "social progress" (p. 69). In a Montessori school, the concept of work embraces development of the moral, spiritual, intellectual, and social dimensions of the child's world. Cossentino also takes aim at No Child Left Behind, arguing that schools obsessed with test scores offer very little of the "goodness" a child should experience during the educational process. Because most traditional schools are "narrowly focused on productivity" and test results — and less interested in developing the whole child with a holistic worldview — Cossentino believes future educational reform should be centered around the Montessori model (p. 88).

An educational research study conducted in Turkey — involving 25 five- and six-year-old Montessori students and 25 non-Montessori children of the same age in a control group — found that the Montessori Method makes "positive contributions to preschool children's readiness to primary school" (Kayili et al., 2011, p. 2104). After a full school year of evaluating progress in both groups, the researchers also determined that the Montessori Method "is more efficient than current preschool education programs" (Kayili, p. 2104).

The authors noted the thoughtful physical design of the Montessori classroom: furniture suitable to a child's height, cupboards with hangers and locks that small children can easily operate, and soap bars sized to fit their hands. They observed that the Montessori Method increases children's reading maturity, numeric maturity, social skill levels, and ability to develop concentration (Kayili, p. 2107). Learning to concentrate is important because a child's environment contains many distractions that can interrupt productive learning (Kayili, p. 2107).