S.P.
I teach Junior High in a Montessori school. My daughter is currently in 3rd grade in our Montessori school and has been here since she was 2 in their Toddler program.
In my opinion, there are several really amazing benefits of a Montessori education:
1) Children learn to self-regulate and to choose appropriate work. This means that a child who has been in a Montessori program enters into life understanding his strengths better while also being much more self-reflective about his work. From a cognitive perspective, this is one of the hallmarks of an effective learner.
2) Children are encouraged to be independent thinkers and are treated with the same respect that we as adults would like. This means that they are not coddled, though they are supported through their development in an appropriate way. I frequently hear from friends, neighbors, and strangers, that my daughter (who is now 7) carries herself with dignity and confidence, that she is interested in and capable of having confident discussions with adults, and that she is much more mature and polite than many other children her age. (You'll have to trust me that very little of this is due to my parenting! :)) She recently learned how to use a phone book so that she could call and talk to experts when she was writing a report.
3) Montessori allows students to choose work (academic, social, and physical) that is challenging to them. It also allows students to work at their level for as long as they need or want. If a student wants to go deeper, Montessori classrooms allow for that. If a student wants to repeat something 1,000 times, Montessori classrooms allow for that, too. The key here is making sure that you have a qualified AMI-certified Montessori teacher who will help guide your child and direct him to choose appropriate, challenging, and diverse (balanced) work.
What’s more, Montessori classrooms allow children to approach the “required” material from many different angles, allowing them to get a full sense of what their topic or work means.
On a related note, Montessori education encourages and promotes mastery of subjects, rather than simply surface skimming. From Children’s House through Junior High, we look for students to work toward mastery of the appropriate skills.
4) Children tend to read earlier and more fluently and to have higher math scores (and what’s more important to me as a science and math teacher) higher comprehension of and appreciation for math than other children. My daughter was slow to read in her Montessori Children’s House classroom and as her parent I worried about it though as a teacher, I recognized that everything was fine. She is now (in first grade) reading the fourth Harry Potter book, as well as A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle. She reads, on average, a novel a week. She is a pretty average student, but she is also doing multiple digit multiplication and division – and what’s more, she understands them more than the students in 4th and 5th grade that I worked with in the public schools.
5) Montessori schools allow for freedom of movement. Throughout the entire cycle, students are allowed to move freely and to choose where to position themselves in the classroom and environment. This gives children a real sense of control and confidence. It also cuts down on many behavior issues because a child isn’t “stuck” in one space for a set amount of time.
6) Montessori schools promote social responsibility and global awareness. Montessori schools encourage respect and compassion in children, for people who are near to them, as well as those that are on the other side of the globe. Students in Montessori schools are often very active in their communities. Whether it be organizing a fund-raiser to send money to victims of hurricanes, tsunamis, or tornadoes, or researching and reporting on endangered animals, to becoming active in the local political environment, to volunteering in many various capacities – students in Montessori schools are keenly aware of their potential impact for doing good in the world. Montessori schools actively teach and promote environmental awareness, stewardship of the environment, and active work to think globally but act locally. Montessori schools work hard to promote peaceful understanding among young children, and to broaden this to a local perspective and further to a global perspective throughout a child’s Montessori career. Montessori schools teach that peace is a positive thing worth working toward and provide students strategies to employ as they work to create peace.
7) Hands-on materials for most subjects. The Montessori method has been around for 100 years, and yet educational research is only just now catching up to the things that Maria Montessori said in the early 1900s. As I read educational research papers, I often find myself thinking about some corollary in the Montessori classrooms for their “new” idea. The most prevalent of these are the manipulatives that a child engages with. These manipulatives not only help students make sense of the concept, they stay with a child from age 3 to age 6 so that a child can refer back to them, can go back and touch them and move them as they need to revisit concepts, and so that they can extend their understanding with the same materials for more advanced concepts. In this way, ideas build on one another. They are not abstract, independent objects, but rather part of an interconnected whole.
This goes beyond the usual lip-service paid to these attributes. They are embodied in a Montessori education in ways big and small. Students really do tend to absorb these values of peace, responsibility, respect, and compassion and to learn how to act on these values.
From a teacher's perspective, I can assure you that Montessori students are different than 98% of the students I worked with in public schools in a number of key ways. By the time students left my classroom in 8th grade, I felt confident that they were ready to take on any challenge and survive anything that they experienced. Academically, they were more willing to take positive risks than other students I have worked with, were more supportive of their peers, had higher self-confidence, and were more well-rounded. Most of my students have had a very mature and complex view of the world and of their place in it – In addition, I think most of my students had a rich, deep understanding of the academic content that they had explored.
Now, I'm not saying that school caused this for them, or that all of my students were the same, or that all of them were academically gifted. But, I think that what Montessori does for students is to allow each of them to build on their strengths, to find support in one another for the areas that they are weak in, and to build the confidence to challenge those weaknesses in themselves.
The social nature of schoolFirst, my daughter is an only child and her favorite part of school is being able to see her friends. What she has learned through her Montessori experience, is that there are times to choose work on her own and times to choose to work with peers. In the elementary classroom in particular, but previously also at the Children’s House level, she often chooses to work with peers on various projects. What’s more, she has learned that there are some times when it should be all silliness, but some times when her social self should be channeled to work effectively with her peers, and that there are other times when she would rather work alone. Her Children’s House teacher and I sometimes had to work at this with her – because her natural inclination is to be silly all the time with her friends. Especially around the age of 5, this became difficult for her – she didn’t want to work. Now, however, she is very adept at knowing who are great work friends and who are great play friends, and at identifying those that can be both.
I, personally, strongly believe in a Montessori education, and after studying education from both a practical perspective and from a theoretical standpoint in my career at the University, believe that it is the best educational method available. However, from a practical standpoint, I don’t believe that it’s the right choice for every family.
Most students that I've talked to who have gone on to either public or private schools at any level find that they have an adjustment to make in terms of how teachers and other students interact with them, what is expected of them, and what their day feels like. The transition from Kindergarten (the last year of Children's House) and first grade is a big one regardless of whether a child stays in the Montessori system or goes to a more traditional school. I would say that most children are extremely successful in their transition.
Most of them are well above their peers academically when they enter a public school (I'm particularly thinking at first grade). In the Montessori system, it is expected that a child is reading independently by the end of Kindergarten and they have already been introduced to concepts like adding, subtracting, and multiplying with hands-on materials. This usually works to a child's advantage when they enter a traditional setting, as they have concrete experiences to refer back to with a more traditional teacher teaching with numbers only. I have heard of some children becoming frustrated in public schools. Some of them return to Montessori at some point in their schooling, but most find ways to challenge themselves (extracurriculars, etc.) and are very successful in a traditional setting.
In addition, Montessori students tend to be a bit more socially mature than other children, at least in my experience. This can really help with the transition. Don't get me wrong, there can be frustrations, but for the most part, I think students transition beautifully from a social standpoint.
I think the hardest transition point that I have heard about, from all age students and parents, is to sit in a desk for 6 hours a day. To me, personally, this was STILL a hard transition as an adult when I went back to work on my PhD, and I went to public school throughout my K-16 career! I think this would be difficult no matter where your daughters went to preschool and kindergarten, where they certainly don't require students to sit in desks. :)
Again, wherever you find that is right for your family, is the best choice. I hope that Montessori fits for you, but it doesn't have to. I know Waldorf schools are a perfect fit for many families, but they would not have been a good fit for us. I wish you lots of luck !
