Maria Montessori is most famously known as a child development theoretician and pedagogist. She posited new theories about how children grow and develop, and created a pedagogy based on those theories. She was also the first female doctor in Italy.

She started her developmental theories and the resultant pedagogies by working with children who lived with developmental differences, under the assumption that they had more potential to grow, learn and develop than contemporary society believed. She gave them a space, materials, and a purpose, and in that act I believe gave them a sense of dignity that might not have been offered by society previously. And she was successful in helping them learn and grow beyond what society would have them believe themselves capable!

She proceeded to posit that all young children could benefit from this level of intentional care, and a sense of purpose. This idea led her to start her first Children’s Houses, which were opportunities for low income factory worker’s children to have intentional spaces to spend their days. This led to an exciting new pedagogy, which launched her to fame: the Montessori Method.

The Montessori Method is the pedagogy that Maria Montessori developed, based on her observations of young children’s developmental patterns. She was a developmental theoretician in a chain of theorists, including Vygotsky, Seguin, Itard, Piaget, etc. These theoreticians are foundational to society’s current ideas of how children learn and develop, namely by self-constructing their understanding of the world, their role in it, and the reflexively influential nature they have with the world, and Maria Montessori and her Montessori Method has it’s place amongst these great names.

The Montessori Method suggests that all children learn and develop in certain patterns and timelines, and that there are planes of development (0-3, 3-6, 6-9, etc.) which each contain certain developmental milestones. In the 3-6 plane, for instance, she posits that children go through certain “explosions” into literacy learning, or math, and that supporting those periods of sensitivity, or predisposition, towards those topics at those times will facilitate a deeper, broader, and more engaging learning experience.

The Montessori Method suggests that children, when given freedom with appropriate limits in a given environment, will follow their internal motivations to act on their environment. This interaction with their environment will allow them to build theories about how their world works, and their role within it. These theories evolve over time, and this is how we envision the process of learning here at Little Belt Montessori.