Montessori Curriculum

The Montessori curriculum is based upon the work of Maria Montessori (18701952), an Italian educator, educational theorist, and student of child development who contributed enormously to the field of curriculum studies. She developed and promoted the enduring Montessori method of schooling and teaching. At the core of her method was an emphasis on the child's experience in a learning environment that was based both on the student's interests and was rigorously structured. The method remains popular in many parts of the world today and represents a child-centered curriculum with self-directed activities and specified areas of learning.

Montessori had an abiding respect for the competence of children, and that fact was served as an underpinning of her child-centered approach to the curriculum. In her approach, students are taught to develop skills and acquire knowledge at an individualized, self-guided pace. Within the Montessori educational approach, children were, first and foremost, the center of intense study by the teacher, who made rigorous observations of them in their natural environments. It was then the role of the teacherwho no longer occupied center stage in the schoolroomto structure the school environment in a manner that aroused the interest of students through their senses. Structuring the school environment around the interests of the students would lead to the restructuring of the school environment in a manner conducive to exercises in which students engaged independently in practicing the activities of daily living. The teacher would guide students through activities that, on the one hand, were personally and practically meaningful to them while, on the other, engaging them in the use of their powers of observation and reflection.

Montessori's child-centered educational strategies owed much to the previous work of Frederick Froebel, especially the notion of instructive play as described in his The Education of Man. Other influences on her method came from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, and Edouard Seguin. Moreover, her emphasis on the interactions between the child and his or her environment also accorded somewhat with the progressive curriculum platforms of U.S. pragmatist educationists such as John Dewey. Other emphases shared by Montessori and informal educators included the placing of the teacher on the sidelines of an educational process that sought to foster self-realization and self-determination in the students. The most useful and significant learning was seen to occur when all senses of the students were fully engaged in the experience of living.

For Montessori, as for many other progressive and informal educationists, the result of this process would also include the development of responsibility, self-respect, and respect for others. This Montessorian emphasis on attitudes and habits of mind may be seen as presaging John Dewey's focus on the fostering of a democratic mind-set in children and adolescents. The Montessori curriculum revolved around specific areas, including activites of practical life, sensoral experiences, mathematics, language and literacy, and a general cultural realm to include arts and sciences and geography and history.

Although Montessori passed away in the Netherlands in 1952, the Montessori method is still very much alive. Although Montessorian purists have sometimes decried the modern modifications of the method within the operational curriculum of some schools, most of the central characteristics [Page 585]discussed above have endured. Her groundbreaking approach to the place of children in the curriculum is still widely visible today inside and outside of Montessori schools, especially in the early grades.

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