With respect to engagement, children learn by engaging hands-on with the materials most often individually, but also in pairs or small groups, during a 3-h 'work cycle' in which they are guided by the teacher to choose their own activities. With respect to the learning materials, Montessori developed a set of manipulable objects designed to support children’s learning of sensorial concepts such as dimension, colour, shape and texture, and academic concepts of mathematics, literacy, science, geography and history. One way of making sense of the Montessori method for the purposes of this review is to consider two of its important aspects: the learning materials, and the way in which the teacher and the design of the prepared environment promote children’s self-directed engagement with those materials. One of the teacher’s roles is to guide the child through what Montessori termed the 'prepared environment, i.e., a classroom and a way of learning that are designed to support the child’s intellectual, physical, emotional and social development through active exploration, choice and independent learning. 1, 2, 3, 4Ĭentral to Montessori’s method of education is the dynamic triad of child, teacher and environment. There was international interest in this new way of teaching, and there are now thousands of Montessori schools (predominantly for children aged 3–6 and 6–12) throughout the world.
On the basis of this work, she argued that children pass through sensitive periods for learning and several stages of development, and that children’s self-construction can be fostered through engaging with self-directed activities in a specially prepared environment.
She continued to develop her distinctive pedagogy based on a scientific approach of experimentation and observation. There, she set up her first 'Casa dei Bambini' ('children’s house') for 3–7-year olds. What was holding them back and preventing them from reaching their potential? In 1907 she had the opportunity to start working with non-disabled children in a housing project located in a slum district of Rome. When her pupils did as well in their exams as typically developing pupils and praise was lavished upon her for this achievement, she did not lap up that praise rather, she wondered what it was about the education system in Italy that was failing children without disabilities. In 1900, she was given the opportunity to begin developing her pedagogy when she was appointed director of an Orthophrenic school for developmentally disabled children in Rome. While working with children with intellectual disabilities she gained the important insight that in order to learn, they required not medical treatment but rather an appropriate pedagogy. As a doctor she specialised in psychiatry and paediatrics. She initially resisted going into teaching-one of the few professions available to women in the late 19th century-and instead became one of the very first women to qualify as a medical doctor in Italy. Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was by any measure an extraordinary individual.
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