Montessori Dissonance

Meh.

If you read our blog, you know that I work in early childhood. That my career is built around serving small children so that they can be successful and experience improved outcomes. I've dealt with my share of behavior as nanny and as a school psychologist and I like to think I know how to be a good parent to my boys.

So, when the time came to decide where I would send Collin, I really hemmed and hawed. Preschool is the single best investment in a child's education I think (and research supports well). Hands down, its the biggest return on investment in education and can set the foundation for the rest of a child's academic career.

Our first pick was the lab school. I love the lab school. But its spendy. Like 5000+ a year spendy. Its also a full time program- 5 days a week and nearly impossible to get in via the lottery. And so, for all intents here, we didn't get in (more on that later) and I had to have a back up plan.

I really wandered about programs and felt like I was trying to find a match for Collin. Collin has GREAT language skills (surprise, surprise, my work is in early literacy for the most part) and is super social. He loves other kids, being with them, playing etc. and has an inquisitive mind, he's always moving from task to task exploring things. He's also fairly young for his class- he's the youngest in his class usually because of his May birthday, making is maturity level usually a bit behind his peers.

So, for the first time in a lifetime of humbling experiences, I went against my instincts and considered Montessori.

I'm just going to be honest and say that before I had kids I would have said Montessori sucks for preschool. Seriously sucks. Its often recognized by the "rich folks" as quality early-childhood education, but that's probably because they tend to be expensive self-selected programs. The rich kids like to be with the other rich kids.

Maria Montessori's  method is good at heart: she thought "kids can do it themselves" and for the most part taught "help me to do it myself". The Montessori school has both extremes of flexibility and structure, which leads to a unique preschool environment.

On the one hand, Montessori is very flexible and independent-- kids choose their own tasks independently and work on those tasks until they think they are done. They engage in tasks that are self directed and have large amounts of responsibility- they need to know and understand the ground rules and independently respect and obey them. This is the part that I had an interest in for Collin. If he could choose what he wanted to work on, I thought he's spend more time exploring new things and learning about new pieces of the world. He's a very curious kid.

There is another part though. Montessori is in another way exceptionally rigid. Every task has highly specific parameters. These rules govern total behavior in an extreme way- every item must be carried with two hands, down to the smallest objects, every item belongs on its tray and cannot be moved from its tray, every activity must be done on a rug or mat on a table and things cannot move outside this space, every activity has a certain space on a shelf. Child are not allowed to interact with other children spontaneously- you have to be invited to play with something and you can only play with toys that are designed for two people. When you get up from playing with a toy you must push in your chair, carry your activity to the shelf, return to the table and put away your mat, in that sequence every time. There is no sharing of generic toys, there is limited imaginative play and when a child doesn't use a toy as designed (for example, if a child say, lines up beads, instead of strings them) he or she is re-directed to "do it the correct way'. This part is fairly frustrating for me, mostly because it feels sort of ridiculous.

In my prior to kids days, I would have said that Montessori is awful mostly because this rigidity makes them horrible at serving kids with any kind of special need. If a child needs an exception to the rule, its basically unacceptable. So I rarely praise their whole model. When I talk to suburban-ite parents about this kind of stuff they usually talk up Montessori- mostly because I get the sense they have no idea whats going on behind the walls of their child's classroom.

But, even so, I thought MAYBE it would be a good fit for Collin. Given his inquisitive nature AND the fact that he has really no need for academic support- he's counting, doing simple math, almost reading (we're working through lessons), knows all early literacy skills (rhyming, alliteration, blending etc.), is socially engaging, is happy and confident and understands concepts like sharing and taking turns- all of the stuff a preschool traditionally focuses on, he is doing very well with, without preschool. So given he already has all of those skills, that made it okay for me to consider putting him in a classroom where he learns how to basically independently manage a task and follow rules. These are two things he needs to work on. He needs to learn how to  focus, follow rules and manage tasks by himself, thus, voila, I placed him in the Montessori classroom.

Well, as it goes, here I sit, half way through the semester (I wrote this back in December) and I'm wondering if I made the right choice. He goes to Montessori two days a week and is the very youngest child in the school (by over a month) and only attends two days a week while the other kids attend 3 days a week (because I didn't want to pull him from his other M/W program). He's not a rock-star at the Montessori thing- he often gets stuck, uses toys inappropriately (not inappropriate in the sense that he does something awful with them, just in terms of Montessori standards. For example, he likes to play with the plastic animals imaginatively rather than match them to the continents they belong to.)  He often seeks or needs adult guidance and sometimes acts up behaviorally (throwing toys around once or twice this year, or not listening). So, as you might guess, this has lead to some parent teacher conferences.

Here I am, the school psych, and I have the kid that is in trouble. Ugh. How did I get here?
I guess though, this part doesn't bother me so much, because if I know how to do anything, its put a behavior plan into place. The thing is though, the Montessori way of his teachers, seems to be a big roadblock. His teachers are 30 year veterans and at our first conference about Collin's behavior they basically asked "what should we do?" I could barely believe that in 30 years they've never encountered a kid who doesn't listen well and needs guidance???

This seemed sort of ridiculous. And, let me be clear- Collin is not a "behavior" kid. If you walked in you would not instantly notice him as someone who need a FBA (functional behavioral analysis for those who aren't school psychs) to figure out how to change his behavior. You would see him ask for hugs or help or sometimes sit at his activity not really knowing what to do with it, so he plays with it instead. Only once or twice has ever done anything behavior- wise that warranted direct attention (once he threw some beads- no one got hit or hurt, but he did throw stuff, so I totally understood the reason for a note home that day) and another time he threw some cotton balls off a table (which as I understand it was getting a rise out of other children and he continued for attention).

Collin does though, love adult attention. He eats it up. Because he has such strong verbal skills he's able to articulate just what he want or needs and usually that involves conversation with an adult. The single best way to get him to do something is to praise him- he loves positive reinforcement, but that seems sort of absent in Montessori (its too quiet for a few good jobs here and there I guess).

And so this gets to the crux of my conundrum. I do not understand how seasoned teachers have no idea how to work with a minor attention seeking and rule following issue. By minor I mean manageable. Right now, he does eat up a ton of their time each day because he asks them to help him or doesn't know how to use a toy and they sit and help him while other children are independently led. I get that that part feels more than "minor"- nevertheless, I don't seem them using alternative strategies, which is troubling to me.

Because at the end of the day a teacher's job is to teach. A teacher's job is not to watch. I firmly believe that if children are not experiencing a successful educational environment it is because we are NOT TEACHING THEM WELL, not because there is intrinsically something wrong with the child.

So, here I am again, heading back into another conference to tell the teachers what to do. Bringing a laundry list of things from observations I've taken in class and my experience as a school psych (peer learning strategies, a visual timer, behavior charts, preventative antecedent setting, praise and shaping, the list goes on...), but it really is beyond me to understand how they are looking to me for this. I pity the mom who has a kid like Collin in Montessori that doesn't have experience with how to resolve child behaviors. That mom is dead in the water, and its so very unfortunate.

At the end of the day, if I had to do it over again, I don't know that I would put him in the Montessori program, which is too bad, because I traveled out of my comfort zone to put him there in the first place, and now they are sort of confirming my suspicions, which I really really had hoped they wouldn't.

Ugh. Parenting sucks some days.

And Collin, even though he can totally be a pistol, and really is pushing the boundaries a lot about following rules right now, will be fine. He's surrounded by people who love him and will work with him when the time comes that attention to tasks for extended periods of time really impacts outcomes (say when he is 4 or something). We'll modify his behavior (with stickers and charts and such), help him to read chapter books and get him to focus on the things he loves by letting him find his own way and not pigeon-holing him into the Montessori box.

When he finishes this year I hope he does better at following rules and is able to extend his focus on any one thing for more than 15 minutes. I hope he becomes less impulsive and takes time to think about things and self-regulate. My fingers are crossed.

In the end, I pretty much still think Montessori is awful.
Which probably makes me an awful mom. Since I sent my kid there.
Oh well. I wear my opinion on my sleeve, love it or hate it.
I feel confident at the end of this post because I am an educator. I can help create success for him. But there are so many parents out there who aren't, and its unfortunate that there isn't a path to success for them in this Montessori world.

Nevertheless, here we go. Onto another year of preschool, at a different school, in you guessed it- a traditional play-based preschool.