Free Paper Sample on Montessori: The Forgotten Theory

The paper highlights the fundamental points that mark the Montessori Method, like how the technique and approaches to education within the Montessori Method pertain to studying (i.e., social education and behaviorism). It will explore the extent of dissimilarities attained compared to Piaget's or Vygotsky's approaches and how the Montessori method may be similar to those approaches. The paper will also examine the notion behind why the Montessori Method I less recognized by researchers within the context of cognitive learning despite its popularity. Finally, a critique will be made of the statement that the Montessori Method may be the most sensitive to diversity.

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Being an Italian physician, Maria Montessori sprung up a unique approach to enhance young children's cognitive development about a century ago. From her observations, children from low-income households were frequently well behind their peers on school admission. Therefore, she pursued a technique to assist them in preschool to attain success better.

Maria's method of learning is one unique scheme and affirms social, biological, and intellectual domains. Her main focus was to implement the technique for the development of early childhood appropriately. From her perspective, immature children should not be exposed to tests and grades Lillard (2016). This is because they portray an instinctive plea to learn about the world and be fortified and enriched. Montessori's educational practice helps children mature in originality, trouble-solving, risky thinking and time-management skills, environmental responsibility, and empathy. Montessori developed the program to put more emphasis on learning by self-directed exploration. Children are rendered with various materials and activities, and they understand in a self-directed way as they select from between the alternatives.

One of the Montessori technique gains is that the children are treasured as distinctive persons who are allowed to study at their stride and elevate once prepared. Therefore, this technique demonstrates that children learn in diverse ways and have different learning methods. Besides them, they are also the beneficiaries of having a classroom plan, resources, and daily sequences that allow them to teach themselves and think about what an individual is acquiring.

Piaget and Vygotsky can naturalize their theories with the Montessori technique in early childhood learning even though most researchers do not ascertain the method. Therefore both ways have numerous similarities. All three approaches acknowledge that children should be included in their intellectual growth and be involved in their cerebral enrichment. Besides, they ought to play a vital role in the manner they study. It is also identified that all philosophies suggest that children dissect and reattach information at a high rate if they are included in their environment; they are peculiar about studying Lillard (2016). Under this principle, they improve their creativity in conjunction with being active when learning. It is also projected that the three theories accept that culture is essential in cognitive development; hence exposing children to diverse cultures and ethnicities is significant.

Montessori's technique has proved to be popular in the modern world. There are numerous Montessori preschool programs around the world. The study conducted by progressive psychologists like Lillard (2016) has attested to the validity of Montessori's perceptiveness. In Lillard's research, a group of children was compared (between 3 to 6 ages). She reached between a group of children who had attended Montessori preschool and a group that participated in other types of preschools. However, the group of children had initially been applied to Montessori schools. The study design's crucial aspect was that despite the previous applications of the non-Montessori group, they were still unable to receive admission due to space limitations that were determined by a random lottery. This study's idea was that a difference would have been problematic to deduce if the researchers had compared children in Montessori schools with children in non-Montessori schools (Fleming & Zhang, 2019). This is because some differences would be achieved between the parents with children from Montessori schools. This will indicate that parents with children from Montessori will be regarded as more educated than their peers because the parents of children from non-Montessori schools had applied to get their children to Montessori school. However, an assumption is made that both families had a similar background.

It is ascertained that the children who conducted their learning from Montessori preschools were more elevated in intellectual and social growth than their peers who learned from other preschools (Ansari & Winsler, 2020). From a cognitive perspective, children from Montessori preschools are more cerebral than their peers from other preschools. This is evident because they scored higher on reading tests and math skills than their peers from other preschools. Other dissimilarities attained are varied ability to apply decision rules. This is evident as children from Montessori preschool performed better than their peers in other preschools on a card-scoring task. Also, children from Montessori preschools were observed to engage more in cooperative play than wild and chaotic games like wrestling. From the analysis above, the Montessori Method is ascertained to offer children an environment that encourages self-pioneered, dynamic learning, enhancing cognitive and social development.

References

Ansari, A., & Winsler, A. (2020). The long-term benefits of Montessori pre-K for Latinx children from low-income families. Applied Developmental Science, 1-15.

Fleming, D. J., Culclasure, B., & Zhang, D. (2019). The Montessori Model and Creativity. Journal of Montessori Research, 5(2), 1-14.

Lillard, A. S. (2016). Montessori: The science behind the genius. Oxford University Press.