Celebrating Montessori Method: In Classes Grouped By Ages, Students Master How to Take the Lead

By Steve Lyttle, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

Jan. 28–None of the 4- and 5-year-olds are paying attention to the teacher in their class.

A few doors away, teacher Kelly Harding is playing an eight-string musical instrument and singing in Chinese to her students. But Harding isn’t the music teacher — she’s the classroom instructor, and the lesson is geography, not music.

Welcome to the world of Montessori education — in this case, Park Road Montessori School.

The idea behind Montessori education, created a century ago by Italy’s Maria Montessori, is that children learn best when self-motivated and they do much of the research and work by themselves. Teachers get them started and provide help — but after that, the children take the lead.

Park Road and the two other Charlotte-Mecklenburg Montessori schools — Highland Mill and Chantilly — are marking the 100th anniversary of the education format with events this month and next.

Alfie Kohn, a Boston-based educator whose concepts are closely tied to Montessori, will speak this afternoon at Queens University of Charlotte. Montessori expert Martha McDermott is spending two weeks in the Charlotte area, working with the three CMS Montessori schools and visiting some of the area’s private schools that use the same format.

“Walking into our classrooms and watching students appreciate the excitement of learning … that’s what makes this school so special,” Park Road Principal Linda Kiser says.

The format has been a winner for CMS. Park Road’s students consistently have scored well on state end-of-grade tests. And Park Road, the first public Montessori school in North Carolina, has a long waiting list every year of prospective entrants.

“At our first five open house programs, the smallest turnout we had was 85 people,” Kiser says.

It doesn’t take long to notice the differences.

For starters, students are grouped in classes by ages, not grades. At Park Road, classes are broken into preschool (ages 4-5), lower elementary (ages 6-9), and upper elementary (ages 9 and older). Students stay with the teacher until they move into the next age group.

And teachers aren’t lecturers. They meet with students for a morning meeting, discuss concepts and problems, then turn the children loose on learning. For most of the day, students work by themselves or in small groups on solving problems.

Much of that problem-solving is hands-on.

For example, in teacher Priti Aery’s preschool class, several children on a recent day were sitting on the floor, using pegs and a pegboard to learn multiplication up to 100. Another group of preschoolers used blocks to learn how to count in 10s and 100s.

“Typically in kindergarten, our children learn to count up to 20,” Kiser says. “Here, they’re handling multiplication and can learn to count up to infinity.”

Teachers at Montessori schools must complete several courses specific to the format. And Kiser says most of her teachers majored in subjects other than education.

Kelly Harding, who majored in music, played a Chinese song as part of a recent lesson in which 5-year-olds correctly identified countries in Asia.

“Our traditional education system has us start at the local level and then spread out, to where we eventually learn about the world,” Kiser says. “In Montessori, we start with the world and then work down.”

Park Road’s PTO paid most of the cost for Scotland-born Martha McDermott, an 82-year-old retired Xavier University professor, to visit the Charlotte area for in-class observations and meetings with teachers. She will spend time this week at the other CMS Montessori schools.

“What I love is seeing the children work — because for them, work is not an imposition,” McDermott says. “It is a choice.”

She talks repeatedly about students’ self-directed work providing them with “moments of discovery.”

“Watching that moment of understanding in a child is pure joy,” she says.

Special Program

Alfie Kohn, an education expert whose concepts are similar to the Montessori program, will speak and conduct a seminar from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. today at Queens University of Charlotte. The program will be in Dana Auditorium on Selwyn Road. Tickets are $15 at the door. Kohn, author of 11 books, including “Punished By Rewards” and “The Homework Myth,” will be available to autograph copies of his books at 1 p.m.

What’s Different?

Here are some ways in which children are taught differently in the Montessori concept:

–Children take responsibility for much of the learning process.

–They learn how to conduct their own investigative work.

–Park Road students help plan their own field trips, even estimating costs and handling publicity.

–Children learn to write using cursive, not printing.

–The classroom is designed as a family, with a family meeting each morning, when students bring their problems to the teacher for discussion.

–If everything is going properly, Park Road Principal Linda Kiser says, students scarcely notice if the teacher is not around.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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