Parents often wonder how a child can possibly learn in a Montessori setting when children are given free reign over what they want to do. There is a grain of truth here but it barely scratches the surface of what really goes on in the Prepared Environment. Please check out our entry on the role of teachers in the Montessori classroom to learn more about the Prepared Environment.
It is true that our students are given much more freedom than their peers who attend traditional schools, but this freedom doesn’t necessarily mean discipline goes out the window. Our goal is to encourage our students to engage with activities and lessons in the Prepared Environment that capture their imagination while simultaneously developing their social skills through interaction with their classmates.
This means that though the children enjoy a level of autonomy our teachers are ultimately still responsible for providing structure to the class. It can be as simple as demonstrating how a new lesson works or making sure a conflict is gracefully and peacefully resolved. The key to how all this is supposed to work is that the students are given enough freedom to do an activity for as long and as much as it holds their interest.
As unintuitive as this may seem, this level of engagement from a child is truly a part of the learning process. By repeatedly working on a lesson, a child is able to practice and process the lesson at their own pace resulting in deeper understanding. This means that there will be days a child will repeatedly work on an activity for days on end, and there will be days they ask to work on multiple activities instead.
As you can see, the Montessori method makes a lot of accommodations for differences in individual children by allowing them to tackle activities that are uniquely suited to their abilities. Our students aren’t forced to learn everything all at the same time because even at our students’ age group (3-6 years old), each of them develop differently. Some are visual learners and will prefer to engage with lessons that visually striking, while others may be tactile learners instead and prefer activities that stimulates their sense of touch.
Regardless of a child’s current state of development or their style of learning, our teachers make sure the Prepared Environment has something for all of them. Our students are then given the freedom to choose, which in itself, is a valuable part of teaching every one of them how to be independent and self-confident. It is from these foundations that everything else is learned in the Montessori classroom.