Montessori: A Modern Approach, Chapter 1

 As I begin to wind down from my own school year and prepare for observing in a Montessori classroom/summer camp in a few weeks, I decided to begin reading Montessori: A Modern Approach to obtain an overview of ideas and workflows that I might observe.  As it has been a few years since I have studied Maria Montessori on a more in-depth level, I chose to read this book first as I thought it might give me some good insight into who Maria Montessori was as a person and what lead her to choose her methodologies.  I was surprised to learn that Montessori employed many of her methods first with children who seemed to have neurodivergent needs.  When Montessori first worked with children who had varying needs, she was astounded that once the children completed the task using the materials they were given, they returned to repeat the task several times afterwards and found complete joy in doing so.  This immediately caused me to think about several of my neurodivergent students currently in my classroom.  After reading this chapter, I began to observe their work more closely, watching for any repetitive actions after tasks were completed and noticed that especially when working with our Loose Parts collections, two out of the three created a "forest" (as they called it, see pictures below) and then would clean it up and recreate the same "forest", almost identical to the first.  The third child was repetitive in the materials they played with, the same set of plastic animals and wooden trees.  They played with these materials for a whole week and never tired of reliving the same actions of the animals and script they created for themself to act out.  Much like Montessori observed, this child would play through the sequence, and then be finished and clean up the materials and move on to play with something different each day. These materials are not representative of the materials that Montessori used with her first students, however, even with different materials, I did notice repetitive play and work occurring.  

A paragraph that caught my attention reads:

"Montessori believed that the child must have certain conditions in his environment or he will not develop normally; and further, when periods of disruptive behavior occur, it is because the child is trying to tell us some great need of his is not being met.  His reaction is often violent because he is literally fighting for his life.  She found this type of behavior disappeared when the child began to concentrate on his work, and thereby, developed self-confidence and self-acceptance through the discovery of himself and his capacities." 

This chapter immediately brought to mind a student I had in my classroom this year.  This student had periods of steady, calm, predictable behavior, but every so often, would have a week or two where they would have unpredictable fits, sometimes multiple times a day.  Our job was to figure out the triggers of the fits.  We found out that each chunk of fits at school directly related to a life change at home (new puppy, birthday, sibling birthday, moving to a new house).  When we found work tasks that this child enjoyed engaging in, we began to create a collection of them, and would set them aside for when they were needed next.  It was absolutely incredible to watch how that small collection of tasks could center that child and help them regain their confidence and provide stability when around them there was uncertainty. 

This statement also reminds educators who work or do not work with Montessori methods that behaviors are the child trying to communicate.  The behaviors are for us to study and interpret for meaning so that we can provide the work (or play!) tasks each child needs to regain self-confidence, self-acceptance, and control of their out-of-control world.