Bianca Tanis teaches a combined kindergarten-first grade special education class in the Hudson Valley in New York. She is on the board of New York State Allies for Public Education, the group leading the campaign against high-stakes testing and privatization in the state.
She writes:
I had the opportunity to spend the day visiting a public Montessori school in Kingston yesterday. I have been considering this approach in my classroom and was able to tour the school along with my principal and one of our ENL teachers. I have not been this inspired in a long time.
Kingston is considered a small city school district and George Washington Elementary School is one of seven elementary schools in the Kingston City School district. Over 80% of the students receive free and reduced lunch, 17% are English Language Learners, and 26% are students with disabilities. When the principal first took over the school, they had 2,500 discipline referrals per year. They are not down to a handful and attendance has gone up exponentially. The lobby has couches for parents sit in and the principal’s dog roams the halls and often comforts anxious or upset students. The tables in the cafeteria have flowers on them and there is a library in the corner. The walls are covered with photographs of the students laughing and playing and student artwork. They are swapping out bench-style tables and replaced them with round,family style tables so that the students can converse with each other.
In every classroom students were engaged, working purposefully on self-selected tasks that are based on NYS curriculum. In the upper elementary classrooms each student has an individual work plan for their “independent period” of what tasks they must complete but within that period, they are free to work at their own pace and in the order they choose. During this independent period, teachers pull small groups or 3 to 4 students for lessons. Many of the classes are multi-age and students complete whole class science and social studies projects together. We saw older students helping younger students and children taking ownership over their learning. The teachers seemed relaxed, enthusiastic and HAPPY.
In the combined Pre-K-Kindergarten rooms the classes were very large, but you would never know it. The students were independently engaged in “tasks” and when they needed to speak with the teacher who was talking to me, the kids waited patiently and calmly, asking each other for help and then solving the issue themselves and walking away. If you work with 4 and 5 year olds, you know how amazing this is. The noise level was a productive hum…not silence, but not the cacophony you would expect from almost thirty 4 and 5 year olds. The children were independently drawing, making words with letter tiles, working on fine motor skills, counting beads, and pouring beans back and forth between two jars, etc.
There are about 320 students. The school has several inclusion classes, two self-contained special education classes and a dual language program. This a school that welcomes ALL children and provides them with a truly child-centered education. Their discipline policy is best described as a restorative justice model that does not focus on rewards, incentives, or punishments, believing that intrinsic motivation works. It was AMAZING.
These schools exists and are proof of what is possible when we look beyond test scores and look at what really matters. I just wanted to share because I think we can all use some good news 🙂
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Given the right school environment, almost any child centered program will succeed.
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I have taught as a wkly visiting enrichment in a wide variety of PreK/K school-types. I think what makes Montessori more likely to succeed than many is that ‘environment’ & ‘child-centered [curriculum]’ are planned out & structured very carefully at higher levels of the organization, according to long-tested models, w/staff trained by the org in how to facilitate maximum benefit to kids as they work w/n the structured environment/ curriculum. There is room for directors to enhance the org’l precepts w/ their own inspiration, but their role is more focused on staff devpt. [Waldorf may be similar, I have no exp w/it.]
All of the other models I’ve observed have structural weaknesses causing them to be overly-dependent on the quality of the phys plant/ curriculum or the director or the individual teachers.
(a)in commercial-chain schools, the brand dictates phys facility features & curriculum, all of which lean toward teacher-directed (not child-centered) academics, w/little nuanced teacher-training. A gifted director can tweak the phys structure & curriculum toward child-centered & can innovate staff training to support it, but w/o such a director the school will be mediocre at best.
There are a few rare recent models– I’m thinking Kidville, Music Together, Preschool of Rock, & Gymnastic PreK– where the phys plant/curriculum dominate & teachers are trained specialists: here again, for the right group dynamics & any pre-reading/ math/ sci activities, all will depend on the right director.
(b)in tradl private PreK/K’s (in our region, long associated w/anchor churches or temples), the phys env & curriculum tend to molder w/inertia along decades-long trad’l lines. Here, ind teachers have much more flexibility, as do directors; your kid’s experience may be great or awful depending on classroom &/or director. There will be little or zero staff devpt.
Same could be said for the few employer-daycares still extant, but they are smaller and more director-dependent. The handful I’ve seen were started up in the ’70’s and purely the creation of a gifted director whose guidelines were either carried on or abruptly overhauled by their replacements.
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We have one non-rapacious charter school in our District. It is quietly run by the parents and is never the subject of stories about excessive teacher turnover, lack of qualified or certified teachers, sweetheart contracts with the administrators or conflicts of interest. It is the Montessori School.
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I love the Montessori approach and was this close to going for my Montessori certification, but couldn’t find child care for an entire summer – and then the institution hosting the training cancelled anyway and I had moved on by the time it came back. MY experiences there, however, have definitely informed my decision to take more Early Childhood credits (eventual certification is my goal) and also informed the way I approach kids in schools and in my Music Together classes (I’ve been teaching Music Together for about 12 years now!).
I would encourage EVERYONE to visit a Montessori classroom – better yet, visit several, because the term “Montessori” is part of the public domain and any school can use it without being truly Montessori. Read Maria Montessori’s history, read her own writing. While you could pick and choose what you like best and “transplant” it into a traditional classroom – I used some of the works when I held a long-term substitute position in a 3YO Head Start classroom one year – it’s really best to first understand the overarching mindset and approach, not to mention why the materials – exotic and complicated at first to an outsider – are made and used the way they are. The one “Montessori”-in-quotes preschool I worked in for a time had some “Montessori-trained” (but not certified) staff and left out a number of the more important precepts in their practice, which meant that the final product left a lot to be desired; in the weeks before a number of staff left, we attempted a “WWMMD?” campaign to no avail – so when it comes to observing Montessori settings, I’m sorry to say it’s “Buyer Beware.” Make sure you don’t just see one setting and assume it’s the real deal. (The setting described above sounds like they have it right, if they have that many kids in a multi-age classroom creating a “hum” and not chaos. :-))
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Learner-centered schools have been creating joyful learning environments like this since the days of Rousseau. But if an observer tries to pick out surface details, such as the materials the students use, or keep asking “WWMMD”, they have missed the point. The following article describes the fundamental philosophy of a wide range of learner-centered schools.
http://learninginmind.com/authentic-learning.php
Each of these approaches is/was based on a belief and trust in the innate abilities of children.
This article describes common factors in learner-centered schools based on a 9,000 mile trip I made around the U.S.
http://learninginmind.com/common-factors.php
I wish every public school teacher could spend time in these schools. Questions about how to “increase motivation” and “get students engaged in learning” are not an issue in these schools…nor are concerns about how to “teach” social and emotional learning. The greatest stumbling block for traditional teachers is recognizing that learning does not require teaching!
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