Observation Montessori Quotes

Scientific observation then has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment.

Montessori Schools. Dr. Maria Montessori developed the Montessori method of teaching in the early 1900s after observing children’s natural curiosity and innate desire to learn.

In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity, and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. The

The educator must be as one inspired by a deep worship of life, and must, through this reverence, respect, while he observes with human interest, the development of the child life. Now, child life is not an abstraction; it is the life of individual children. There exists only one real biological manifestation: the living individual; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself. By education must be understood the active help given to the normal expansion of the life of the child. The child is a body which grows, and a soul which de- develops,–these two forms, physiological and psychic, have one eternal font, life itself. We must neither mar nor stifle the mysterious powers which lie within these two forms of growth, but we must await from them the manifestations which we know will succeed one another.

If we think of an emigrant who goes to a new country ignorant of its products, ignorant of its natural appearance and social order, entirely ignorant of its language, we realize that there is an immense work of adaptation which he must perform before he can associate himself with the active life of the unknown people. No one will be able to do for him that work of adaptation. He himself must observe, understand, remember, form judgments, and learn the new language by laborious exercise and long experience. What is to be said then of the child? What of this emigrant who comes into a new world, who, weak as he is and before his organism is completely developed, must in a short time adapt himself to a world so complex?

A Montessori home has space for mistakes, it offers peaceful and quiet time to observe, explore, make independent choices and support when needed.

Habits such as order and consistency in presentations aid our children to better master their aptitude and accuracy. Daily, one must remember to observe and respect our children by not interrupting their concentration. Encouraging our children’s contribution to the life of the family or other social groups is also suggested (cleaning, table setting, pet care, etc.).

Observation is key. As a teacher/guide we must put an emphasis on learning rather than teaching, our primary role is observing the child and providing an environment for him based on our observations. By following the child, his interests and sensitive periods, we’ll be able to adequately provide activities a 2-6 year old can keep engaged in. During presentations/work time, silence and concentration are a priority; we should eliminate distractions even if one must use a minimum of words and movement. Finally, we must allow 2-6 year old children the freedom to explore and grow at their own pace, all while embodying patience ourselves.

The most innovative schools, from the established Montessori to the new-age MUSE, know this and have modeled themselves accordingly. Students in these schools don’t learn geometry from a textbook; they learn it by building real structures and observing real phenomena. They don’t study biology by listening to a teacher drone on; they learn it by cultivating gardens that feed the entire school.

World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding for infants up to six months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond.[11] Montessori wrote about the benefits of breastfeeding (up to two years or more), not only because of its beneficial influence on the health of the child, but also because it allows babies to always be close to their mother, to watch what she does throughout her day and to learn by observing her as she goes about her daily chores.[12]

The functions to be established by the child fall into two groups: (1) the motor functions by which he is to secure his balance and learn to walk, and to coordinate his movements; (2) the sensory functions through which, receiving sensations from his environment, he lays the foundations of his intelligence by a continual exercise of observation, 7 comparison and judgment. In this way he gradually comes to be acquainted with his environment and to develop his intelligence. At the same time he is learning a language, and he is faced not only with the motor difficulties of articulation, sounds and words, but also with the difficulty of gaining an intelligent understanding of names and of the syntactical composition of the language.

Observation is the basis of the Montessori approach. As part of my Montessori training, we observed babies and young children for 250+ hours.

Innovations are happening in conventional schooling. Some people will read the chapters to come and respond that their own children’s schools are incorporating evidence-based changes, making them more like Montessori schools—eliminating grades, combining ages, using a lot of group work, and so on. One could take the view that over the years, conventional schooling has gradually been discovering and incorporating many of the principles that Dr. Montessori discovered in the first half of the 20th century. However, although schooling is changing, those changes are often relatively superficial. A professor of education might develop a new reading or math program that is then adopted with great fanfare by a few school systems, but the curricular change is minute relative to the entire curriculum, and the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure of the school environment still underlie most of the child’s school day and year. “Adding new ‘techniques’ to the classroom does not lead to the developmental of a coherent philosophy. For example, adding the technique of having children work in ‘co-operative learning’ teams is quite different than a system in which collaboration is inherent in the structure” (Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001, p. 13). Although small changes are made reflecting newer research on how children learn, particularly in good neighborhood elementary schools, most of the time, in most U.S. schools, conventional structures predominate (Hiebert, 1999; McCaslin et al., 2006; NICHD, 2005; Stigler, Gallimore, & Hiebert, 2000), and observers rate most classes to be low in quality (Weiss, Pasley, Smith, Banilower, & Heck, 2003). Superficial insertions of research-supported methods do not penetrate the underlying models on which are schools are based. Deeper change, implementing more realistic models of the child and the school, is necessary to improve schooling. How can we know what those new models should be? As in medicine, where there have been increasing calls for using research results to inform patient treatments, education reform must more thoroughly and deeply implement what the evidence indicates will work best. This has been advocated repeatedly over the years, even by Thorndike. Certainly more and more researchers, educators, and policy makers are heeding the call to take an evidence-based stance on education. Yet the changes made thus far in response to these calls have not managed to address to the fundamental problems of the poor models. The time has come for rethinking education, making it evidence based from the ground up, beginning with the child and the conditions under which children thrive. Considered en masse, the evidence from psychological research suggests truly radical change is needed to provide children with a form of schooling that will optimize their social and cognitive development. A better form of schooling will change the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure on which our schools are built into something radically different and much better suited to how children actually learn.

With a foundation of the five basic ingredients, we can apply seven principles to help them become curious human beings. 1. Follow the child—let them lead. 2. Encourage hands-on learning—let them explore. 3. Include the child in daily life—let them be included. 4. Go slow—let them set their own pace. 5. Help me to help myself—let them be independent and responsible. 6. Encourage creativity—let them wonder. 7. Observe—let them show us.

Maria Montessori, a European educator of an earlier generation, designed a setting for children that was “between the classroom and the church.” It was a place where children came to meet God and to know the deep realities of faith—a place, not for instruction, but for experiencing the religious life.[4] My observations suggest that few churches provide such a place for children.