Category Archives: L&B Blog

Maria Montessori described observing children in a traditional classroom as being tantamount to an entomologist observing dead insects pinned to a board, “where the spontaneous expression of a child’s personality is so suppressed that he is almost like a corpse, and where he is so fixed to his place at a desk that he resembles a butterfly mounted to a pin” (Montessori, 1967b).

Despite her observations taking place around the turn of the 20th century, they sound eerily familiar. Even over a century ago, she acknowledged that in order to best learn, children need a certain freedom in order to explore their interests and take ownership over what they are doing.

Presumably motivated by the discrepancy between reality and practice, she developed an approach to education. Initially working with children with learning difficulties, and later with children between the ages of 3 and 6, Maria Montessori–who first studied medicine–developed her approach almost completely through careful observation of the way in which children interacted with their environment.

Montessori’s insights about the way children learn and develop were not confirmed by science until many years later. In a book, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, Angeline Stoll Lillard (2005) outlines the eight principles incorporated into Montessori Education and provides the evidence base supporting each one. The principles are:

1. movement and cognition are intertwined
2. students should have a sense of control
3. interest improves learning
4. extrinsic rewards hinder intrinsic motivation
5. learning from and with peers
6. learning should be contextualized
7. optimal adult-child interactions
8. order in the environment

While there are many examples of each of these embedded in the Montessori classroom, and separately each one of these concepts now brings with it an immense amount of research, for each principle I cherry-pick just one or two examples from the classroom.

I also provide a brief mention of some supporting research to help give you a sense of the science that now reinforces the Montessori approach to education, developed over a century ago.

This blog post will address the first four principles listed above, part 2 will be posted at a later date and will address the latter four.

1. Movement and Cognition are Intertwined

Montessori activities and materials purposefully incorporate movement into learning activities. Let’s take the Sandpaper Letters, for example, used to introduce preschool-aged children to letter sounds. (Children are not taught the names of the letters nor the order of the alphabet at this point). The Sandpaper Letters are lowercase letters, about five inches in height, made out of sandpaper and affixed to thin piece of painted wood.

When introduced, children are simultaneously shown how to trace the letter and produce the sound that the letter makes. The child is then free to use the Sandpaper letters to practice producing the letter sounds and tracing the letters.

Research has since underscored many instances of the interconnected nature of movement and cognition, including the improvement of memory when movement is involved at the moment when something is learned. For example, students who acted out actions described by sentences remembered the sentences better than students who did not act them out (*Cohen, 1989; *Engelkamp, Zimmer, Mohr & Sellen, 1994).

In the same way, when children simultaneously trace a letter and produce its sound, they are better able to remember it.

2. Students should have a sense of control

In the Montessori classroom, this sense of control is brought about by giving children the choice of activities they wish to pursue, from among the options that have been laid out by the teacher; the Montessori m.o. is freedom within limits.

So if Thomas wants to pick up where he left off on a mathematics activity, he may do so. Or, if he wishes to take out the Knobbed Cylinder work from the Sensorial area (which, unbeknownst to him, will help him to develop his pincer grip necessary to later begin writing), he may do that as well. Thomas has a choice over what activity he wants to do, and how long he wants to do it for.

Researchers carried out a simple experiment which highlighted the importance of choice in activities. Children aged seven to nine years were presented with six categories of anagrams to work on. While all of the children in reality had the same choices, one group was told to choose from among the six categories, a second group was told that the experimenter chose the categories for them, and a third group was told that their mothers had made the choice of categories for them.

Children in the first group who “chose their own work” solved twice as many anagrams as the other two groups in the same amount of time. Additionally, during an optional free-play period after the time allotted to work on the anagrams, children in the first group elected to spend more time continuing to solve anagrams (*Iyengar & Lepper, 1999).

When children in a Montessori classroom have the freedom to choose, they have a sense of control, they take ownership over what they are doing, and their performance and their persistence improve. The freedom to choose also fosters independence in young children.

3. Interest improves learning

In a previous post, I talk about the importance of emotion in learning. The Montessori method is yet another approach to learning which capitalizes on this notion.

Making the most of student interest can be seen from many different levels in the Montessori approach:

• the design of materials in which young children tend to be naturally interested,
• the introduction of language activities at a time when, developmentally, children take an interest in learning their language,
• allowing children to pursue activities that they find interesting at a given moment.

It only makes sense that people will better learn something in which they are interested. All else held constant, if two people are given piano lessons, one who has pined for professional instruction for some time, and the other whose parents forced it on him, the former will most certainly learn how to play better more quickly. Interest matters.

There are numerous studies that confirm this common sense conclusion. (I won’t delve into them here, but they’re out there.) Let me instead present you with the psychological definition of the word: being in a state of interest involves, “focused attention, increased cognitive functioning, persistence, and affective [emotional] involvement” (*Hidi, 2000, p. 311).  In capitalizing on student interest, the Montessori approach encourages all of these things.

4. Extrinsic rewards hinder intrinsic motivation

Depending on the circumstances, extrinsic rewards can get fast (though not necessarily long-lasting) results. Extrinsic rewards have their place, though when it comes to one’s learning, the Montessori approach views extrinsic rewards as a hinderance to concentration and intrinsic drive: the characteristics that Montessori herself sought to instill in individuals.

Instead of extrinsic motivators, Montessori education relies on children’s natural curiosity for motivation, and does all that it can to get out of the way of children and their learning. By giving children extended time to pursue the activities that interest them, Montessori teachers let students focus on an activity for as long as they wish, in order to complete it as many times as desired. This freedom allows children to obtain for themselves a strong sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

These feelings, not gold stars, provide the impetus and motivation for more challenging pursuits.

One study in particular (*Lepper, Greene & Nisbett, 1973) highlights particularly well the detrimental effect that extrinsic rewards can have on individuals–even with activities individuals otherwise would enjoy.

In this study, researchers put out markers available for use in classrooms of 3- to 5-year-old children. They noted which children were heavy marker users. One at a time, the heavy marker users were pulled aside and shown a “Good Player Award” (a card with a gold star and ribbon), and when asked, all the children said they would like to receive one. These children were told that all they had to do was draw with the markers.

In one condition, children were told they would receive a “Good Player Award” after drawing with the markers for six minutes. In another condition, the children were allowed to draw for six minutes and were unexpectedly given the award on the board. And in a third condition, the children drew for six minutes and no award was ever mentioned.

A panel of judges blind to each child’s condition rated the drawings of the children who expected the reward as being much lower in creative quality than those of the children in the two other conditions.

They researchers also found that a few weeks after the experiment, the children conditioned to expect a reward for using the markers used markers far less than the other children, and about half as much as the other children in the class.

In an activity that children otherwise enjoyed, the introduction of extrinsic rewards decreased children’s creativity, in addition to later decreasing their voluntary participation once the possibility of getting a reward was removed.

(For a recent LatB blog article about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, click here.)

Conclusion

Developing curricula around these four principles would be powerful. I wish that my own education had better leveraged these four insights, I’m sure I’d be all the better for it.

What I continue to find intriguing is that these were developed simply through the meticulous observation of young children over time, carried out by one person. No scientific experiments necessary.

More recent studies have revealed that these principles are in line with the way we learn. Designing her approach with the way children learn and develop better enables them to engage with and take ownership of their learning. This, I believe, is a major oversight with the way children are currently educated.

Look out for part two where I will delve into the other four principles, and discuss what this can look like in the classroom.

Reference

Lillard, A. S. (2005). Montessori: The science behind the genius. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Montessori, M. (1967b). The discovery of the child. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

*References marked with an asterisk are cited in Lillard, 2005.

 

It’s finals time!

As the promise of spring and summer days rolls in, the increase in sunshine can mean only one thing for students: assignments, exams, papers, and projects are due.

Not surprisingly, this time of year arrives with no shortage of stress for those with tight deadlines, writer’s block, computer glitches, or myriad other dilemmas inherent to the academic world.

And for those faced with the daunting sight of a blank page needing to be filled, I like to offer the charming words of Sylvia Plath: “let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”

Of course, taken from Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, the quote’s implied ease of eloquent composition belies much of the strife of writing. Which brings us to an important question: where do good writers come from? Or, better yet, how do children acquire the words that will eventually be put on paper to make them good writers (and to ace those finals)?

Given that language and literacy skills are ubiquitous, their development has been an interest of researchers for years. And it turns out that early language exposure has long-lasting implications for childhood skill growth.

Let’s Talk about School Talk

Hoping to better understand if the amount and type of vocabulary that preschool teachers use around their students would predict children’s language skills at kindergarten and beyond, Dickinson & Porche (2011) conducted a longitudinal study. [1]

The researchers observed and videotaped classroom interactions in a number of Head Start preschools. Teacher-child talk was then separated into several categories:

• teacher extending utterances were those times when teachers tried to keep conversation going by encouraging children to talk further;
• sophisticated vocabulary reflected the number of low-frequency or sophisticated words used by teachers;
• attention-related utterances were those times when teachers tried to gain or hold their students’ attention;
• correcting utterances arose when teachers corrected the accuracy of what students said;
• and analytic utterances during book reading happened when teachers prompted their students to explore reasons for characters’ actions or discussed the meanings of words.

The researchers also examined children’s literacy skills. To do this, the children completed tests targeting storytelling, receptive vocabulary, reading comprehension, and word recognition at both kindergarten and 4th grade.

Analyses showed that reading comprehension in 4th grade was positively related to preschool teachers’ use of sophisticated vocabulary and attention-related utterances.

As well, preschool teachers’ use of sophisticated vocabulary positively influenced 4th grade decoding skills.

Finally, a mediation model, or an indirect chain effect, emerged among preschool teachers’ sophisticated vocabulary, children’s kindergarten decoding skills, and children’s 4th grade reading comprehension. That is, students who had a preschool teacher that used more sophisticated vocabulary were better able to decode words in kindergarten, and in turn had better reading comprehension skills in 4th grade.

So, in essence, preschool teachers who used more varied words, and maintained their students’ attention to these words, seemed to provide more opportunities for their students’ language skills to grow.

Let’s Talk about Home Talk

Of course, no discussion of schooling’s impact on early skill development is complete without a look toward the home’s impact.

One such home-based study investigated the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s early language development. [2]

There were two primary hypotheses here:

1. that SES-related differences in children’s vocabulary could be the result of SES-related differences in language-learning experiences;
2. that maternal speech would mediate the relation between SES and child vocabulary development

33 high-SES families and 30 mid-SES families agreed to video record daily activities in their home and allowed researchers to transcribe them. Parent-child interactions were recorded twice, 10 weeks apart, and included such activities as getting dressed, eating breakfast, and playing with toys.

The researchers then used a variety of measures to analyze maternal speech.

They tallied word tokens (i.e., the number of different words used), word types (i.e., the number of root words used, such that using both ‘run’ and ‘running’ counted as one use), and word totals (i.e., the total number of words, even if some were used more than once).

They also counted the number of times the parent built upon something the child said (topic-continuing replies).

Finally, children’s vocabulary skill was assessed as a measure of productive vocabulary, or the number of word types used in an average 90-utterance speech sample.

These data showed that SES was significantly associated with both child vocabulary and maternal speech: high-SES mothers produced more utterances, more word tokens, more word types, spoke for longer periods of time, and produced more topic-continuing replies than did mid-SES mothers.

The average length of the mothers’ speech significantly predicted child vocabulary. And, the association between SES and child vocabulary became statistically weaker once the researchers subtracted maternal speech from the equation. In other words, the difference in vocabulary that the researchers found between the high-SES and mid-SES children was due (almost fully) to the differences seen in their mothers’ speech.

It seems, then, that SES-related differences in child-directed speech may arise from more general SES-related differences in language use. That is, the style of language use among higher-SES mothers appears to influence the way they talk to their children, which in turn affects the rate at which their children build their vocabularies.

Small Steps toward Big Words

These studies contribute to a large literature that suggests early language experiences have a substantial long-term impact on children’s language and literacy skill development.

So should parents and teachers grab the thesaurus in hopes that that their children will fast-track to the Dean’s List?

Probably not.

But a little mindfulness about how we (as parents, teachers, and/or caregivers) use our words around our youngest learners will probably go a long way.

In fact, studies have shown that even small increases in the richness of language that children are exposed to can have a lasting positive effect. [3]

So here and there, we can ask ourselves:

The next time I ask her to put her toys away, can I say it in a new way?

How can I push them to think about why the story character feels both happy and sad at the same time?

And my personal favorite: Am I saying this well, in good sentences?

 

References:

Connor, C.M., Morrison, F.J., & Slominski, L. (2006). Preschool instruction and children’s emergent literacy skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 665-689. [link]

Dickinson, D. K., & Porche, M. V. (2011). Relation between language experiences in preschool classrooms and children’s kindergarten and fourth-grade language and reading abilities. Child Development, 82, 870-886. [link]

Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development, 74, 1368-1378. [link]

Exciting news: my book was published at the beginning of April. (I’m resisting the temptation to put in an exclamation point.)

Learning Begins explores the science of working memory and attention, and offers practical strategies for putting this research to work in our classrooms.

Here’s what the first Amazon reviewer wrote:

“This book feels more like a personal discussion with the author. Andrew shares stories with meaning, current useful research, and provides clear suggestions to better teaching methods and student supports. A quick and easy read! Andrew is a proficient educator himself who knows his audience and uses humor and story telling to reach them!”

I hope you’ll read it, and let me know what you think! (Okay, I gave in. There’s the exclamation point.)

(BTW: if you email me–[email protected]–I’ll give you a code for a 20% discount from the publisher.)