Are We Too Precious

There's a subject that has been playing on my mind for a few weeks since I read a discussion on a Montessori Facebook page. People were talking about the appropriate use of Montessori materials and what children should and shouldn't be allowed to do with them. Some people felt that we should stick rigidly to the presentations and extentions. Others had decided that children should be allowed a certain amount of freedom as long as they didn't misuse the equipment. This got me thinking about my own practice and what Maria Montessori intended.

As a home based Montessori practitioner, the children in my care range in age at the moment from eighteen months to six. This presents it's own logistical problem as I don't want to set out activities that are too challenging for the youngest child but have to make sure that the older children don't get bored. Throughout the process of choosing which exercises to put on the shelves, as I don't have the space to have everything displayed, I constantly observe how the children have used the previous activities. This is when I discovered something totally unexpected. Every child was at least six months further along than I had thought and I had been putting out a lot of the later Practical Life and Sensorial exercises. This threw up a new question; how exactly was each piece of equipment being used? Generally speaking, I don't do Practical life presentations unless I see a child struggling with how things should be used, allowing them full autonomy, so were the children misusing the equipment? Were the children sticking to the presentations being shown to them in other areas of the curriculum?

First I decided to observe our newest and youngest. She has only been with us since September, doing one day and week, and then in November changed to three days a week. It was incredibly interesting to watch her. She still needs a little direction to finish the work cycle, returning her activity to the shelf, but I left that to my assistant so that I could observe. She chose pouring beans, pouring them from one jug to the other for a minute or so. She then poured the beans onto her hand, letting them fall onto the tray with a clatter. I indicated to my assistant not to redirect, to let the little one continue with her investigation. She put all the beans back into the jug and poured them onto her hand again. She continued to do this a few more times, and once she had finished, decided she was going to see what else she could have a look at. She was brought back to the table and asked if she was finished with the pouring activity. She said she was so my assistant told her that it would be lovely if she could tidy up the tray so that someone else could use it. She was happy to do as she was asked with a little help from the adult.

I also decided to observe another child who has only been with us since September and who is only comes for a day and a half. He is four and has been in a regular daycare setting since he was a baby and now attends a school nursery when he is not with us. My expectation was that he would not have any respect for the Montesoori materials or have any desire for the work cycle. However, on the day that I decided to observe him, he chose to work with the magnets. I had not shown him how to do the exercise but chose to step back and observe what he would do. He manipulated the iron filings for a few minutes and then a different, more determined, look came over his face. He pushed his chair in and took the magnets with him. I followed him into the next room and watched as he touched the magnets to different objects made of different materials. When he realised that he magnets would stick to certain metallic objects he sought out similar things to stick them to. He was asked by one of the children what he was doing and instead of telling her, he offered her one of the magnets and said to her 'Watch!' The two of them then explored the environment, seeking out anything metallic.

On another day, a child who has been with me since he was a baby and is now almost four took out the Pink Tower and Broad Stair. Having built the wall extention, he decided to see what else he could create with them. He didn't allow the cubes to topple and was respectful of the materials,  but wasn't following any of the extentions I had shown him.

An Introduction

This week has felt like a reawakening for me. For four years, now, I have been working as a Montessori childminder, aquiring the Montessori equipment that will fit into my home as I went along and sustaining the children in my care as closely as I could in the Montessori method of education that my experince has allowed. However, it has been a long time since I have been part of a Montessori community, probably not since I was training twenty year ago, despite having run a Montessori nursery for many years. Last year, I became a member of the Montessori Childminding Network. Meeting these wonderful ladies, many of whom have been working closely with the MSA (Montessori Schools Association) and the St Nicholas Montessori charity, created a sudden shift in my consciousness. I was aware that, although the children in my care were thriving and learning, in spite of the restrictions imposed by governmental changes and the EYFS, I had lost that conectedness to the pedagogy that so inspired and thrilled me over twenty years ago. It was only when we were discussing accreditation at our last meeting at the beginning of October that I decided to reexamine my practice in a more detached manner.

This week, I took a step back, something which is possibly more easily done in a nursery setting than in the front room of a three bedroom house, andI was amazed at what I observed. The children, whose ages ranged on this particular day form two and a half to four, moved around the room without any direction from either myself of my assistant, choosing their activities, carrying them to a work space at the table or on a mat, and returning them to the shelf when they had finished. But this is not what made me thrill with excitement as the children do this at every Montessori session. It was the palpable peace that radiated from the room as I stood at the door and just observed. This peace continued for the whole of the rest of the session and it made me so happy that I found myself smiling at odd times during the day.

In contrast to this I decided to observe my After Schoolers, whose ages are between four and five, in the same way. Often, when I pick one of them up from school he has a sticker emblazoned on his chest. When I picked him up on this particular day, I asked him why he had been given a sticker. He told me that he couldn't remember. When we arrived back at RDM, (Red Door Montessori), I explained to him and one of the other After Schoolers that I had some new activities that I wanted to show them. When this particular boy had left my setting to go to school a year ago, he had been a fairly confident and independent individual, rarely needing reassurance from me that he was doing something correctly. I showed him how to use the Multiplication Board, explaining how to apply the beads each time and how the number of beads required was displayed at the side of the board so he wouldn't forget. I then gave him a piece of paper with a list of sums going from 1 x 3 right up to 10 x 3. He was thrilled to be doing something so different and he was excited by the prospect of being able to do something that none of his classmates had the opportunity to do. I was surprised that he didn't have the confidence in his own ability to be able to complete the task independently, without looking to me for reassurance that he was doing it correctly, even though he was. The smile on his face when he had finished the activity, despite needing adult affirmation, this wonderful sense of achievement, made me feel exactly as I felt when watching the younger children from the doorway: that giving children freedom to learn for themselves, and giving them the freedom to learn what they feel driven to learn, is the right way forward.

I was completely shocked then today, when I decided to reread 'The Montessori Method' by Maria Montessori as part of my ongoing reflection of my Montessori practice. In the first chapter she describes how scientific research had led to educational reform before the time of her writing this book. She talks about how, when faced with children slouching and fidgeting during lesson, scientists decided that the way to combat this was to design a desk which made the children sit up straight and restrain them from moving. These desks were still in use when I went to school in the 1980's. I had thought that science and education had moved on since then. However, when I read the end of her chapter, I thought about how far the education system has really progressed in the last twenty five years since the national curriculum was introduced, and successive governments have tinkered with the ideology of education. She wrote,

"To-day we hold the pupils in school, restricted by those instruments so degrading to body and spirit, the desk - and material prizes and punishments. Our aim in all this is to reduce them to the discipline of immobility and silence,- to lead them,- where? Far too often toward no definite end. Often the education of children consists in pouring into their intelligence the intellectual content of school programmes. And often these programmes have been compiled in the official department of education, and their use is imposed by law upon the teacher and the child. Ah, before such dense and wilful disregard of the life which is growing within these children, we should hide our heads in shame and cover our guilty faces with our hand-,! Sergi says truly : " To-day an urgent need imposes itself self upon society : the reconstruction of methods in education and instruction, and he who fights for this cause, fights for human regeneration."". Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method.

 
Reading this I feel disheartened that in the 21st century, more than sixty years after Maria Montessori's death, education is still something that is letting our children down. That education is still using the reward and punishment method, there is little or no freedom for either child or teacher, that the rights of the child to formulate their own nature is ignored, and that both child and teacher are slaves to a system that is failing to ensure better lives for our young people is a disgrace. However, I also feel optimistic that there are people, not just Montessorians, who are fighting for the rights of the child to be educated and not made into machines enslaved by their opressors. I also feel proud that I can be part of this in my own small way, encouraging the children in my care to be the best they can, allowing them to follow their own paths as long as they are with me and hopefully beyond.

I hope that through this blog I will be able to document my journey with these children, enabling them as much as I can.