Linda's ECE World

 July 19, 2014

                                                 What Maria Montessori Found

            Early childhood development was just a theory when Maria Montessori began working with children who had been institutionalized and classified as idiots.  Montessori’s back ground was in anthropology and she was the first woman to graduate with a degree in medicine in Italy.  When she was asked to work with the children in a mental institution her world turned upside done and she was more or less thrust into researching child development.  What she discovered while working with the children in the institution has changed the field of early childhood education forever. Montessori observed the children and discovered that they were deprived of activity and sensory stimulation.  As she developed her theories and provided activities for the children they began to be happier and more aware of themselves and their environment. She taught them to read and write and to do math.  When it was time for the national scholastic tests she presented the children to be tested and they out did the students in a regular school classroom.  This of course was a remarkable, Montessori wanted to find out if “normal” children’s performance could be enhanced by her methods so she dropped her work with the children in the institution and turned her attention to children who were living in the ghettos of Rome. While these children were not considered to be “idiots” they were deprived of many things such as self-discipline, personal hygiene and language. She set up a children’s house as an experiment to see if her methods could be used to teach these children. Again her method of observation and providing an environment that included practical, sensorial, language and mathematic work succeeded in the children becoming what Dr. Montessori termed as “normalized”.  Normalization in the Montessori world means that a child is ready to fit into society and contribute in a positive way to those about her. She began to train others in her methods and presented her methods at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, California here in the United States. She traveled the world teaching and lecturing and as she did her ideas developed even further to thoughts of teaching children to be peaceful and what we would see as conflict resolution.  Her work is ongoing today all over the world and Montessori trained teachers and practitioners are expanding her philosophy and methods into infant toddler programs.  Below are some of her works I have found to best explain what she did and some websites that you may find useful. 

1)      Maria Montessori a Biography – Rita Kramer

2)      Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook – Maria Montessori

3)      The Montessori Method – Maria Montessori

4)      Montessori the Science Behind the Method - Angeline Still Lillard.

5)        Sobe, N. (2004) Challenging The Gaze: The Subject Of Attention And

              A 1915 Montessori Demonstration Classroom. Educational Theory (54)3 281-297

              Retrieved July 19, 2014 from http://www.luc.edu/faculty/nsobe/NWS--      Challenging%20the%20Gaze...

American Montessori Society – http://www.amshq.org

http://www.ageofmontessori.org

There are many more but for some reason I cannot find the links  so I will leave that up to you.

Thanks for dropping by.