My daughter’s recently turned 3 years old, and has just moved from the pre-school where she was one of the oldest children to a new preschool for 3-4 year olds. She’s having some trouble settling in, so I spent a few hours with her on Thursday morning settling her in.
The preschool teaches in the Montessori tradition, and while watching the children I was struck by the experiential nature of montesorri education. There are a range of learning activities that the children can choose from. Many activities require little or no supervision. The aim is for the child to explore the items involved in the activity, and they learn as a byproduct of this exploration. It’s clear to the children when something needs to be corrected, as the activity is designed to make this clear. Sometimes guidance from the teacher is beneficial, but often the child’s natural process of investigation is sufficient to provide all of the learning.
I’m intrigued by this idea within the context of online adult education, unfortunately Maria Montessori died in 1952 before completing her project to develop materials for adult learners.
Christina Stringher is involved in adult education in Italy (more specifically adult illiteracy). In her paper MONTESSORI MATERIALS IN ADULT EDUCATION SETTINGS: HYPOTHESIS OF USE IN ITALIAN CTPs (2005), she discusses several reasons why a montessori approach may be useful in adult education.
- Frees the learner from a static, top-down teaching approach
- Allows self-expression, autonomy
- Avoids prescriptive subject learning
- The teacher acts as a facilitator rather than an authority
- Emphasis on experiential, research-based learning
Her proposed model for implementing Montessori-style education for adult learners is as follows
- Assess the entry level of the learner
- Consider the types of tasks and knowledge domains which could benefit from Montessori materials (implying that not all learning will be best suited to montessori methods)
- Consider the role of the facilitator/tutor in presenting and discussing the use of the materials
- A self-evaluation method to enable participants to assess their level of competance
Stringher intends to implement an experiment based on the above approach to assess it’s efficacy. It will be interesting to see how it goes.
The online context is well-suited to a range of self-directed modules/exercises that the students may choose to move through at their own pace. There are some limitations to this model. Our professional assocation requires specific competancies to be held by graduates, and it’s likely that other professional assocations have the same type of requirements. This means that while we can provide some flexibility we cannot allow students to completely follow their own path of learning.
The ideas are intriguing to me however. I will keep Maria Montessori’s ideas in mind when creating learning modules, and will attempt to make them self-directed and self-correcting where possible.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 21, 2007 at 8:58 am
leighblackall
Hi Dave, interesting post. The link is not quite right – http://www.ruc.dk/paes/forskerskolen/program/info/summer_school/summer2005/papers2005/Cristina_Stringher/
July 21, 2007 at 9:02 am
Montessori methods may be useful in Adult Education « Learn Online
[...] doesn’t discuss the other methods more often.. well, at all! Otago Polytechnic lecturer David McQuillin is though. The online context is well-suited to a range of self-directed modules/exercises that the [...]
January 26, 2009 at 11:18 am
bm khan
hi david,
i would like to know more about this and any progress that u have made. i came across this article in 2008 for my subject specialistaion.
i am very much interested in using this method and have done in my literacy class of adults who are L1 illeterate. with good results
the general feedback from the tutors is apprehension and doubt. it requires carefully staged phases and atleast year and half minimum before any major breakthrough..
reply as i want to research on this
Batul
January 26, 2009 at 8:49 pm
davidmcquillan
Hi Batul
I have to admit to not really travelling with these thoughts much further. The Montessori school that my daughter is currently studying through were going to lend me a book by Maria Montessori, which never ended up happening, and I moved on as a result.
The basic ideas though are reflected throughout the online education literature. We try to use formative tests where possible (time permitting) to provide students with the ability to gain feedback on their progress.
Our study skills course (which is an area which students typically enter with a wide variety of abilities) is fairly strongly aligned with these ideas. Rather than assessing students entry level (as suggested by Stringher), we have provided a series of modules to assist the development of skills, and have set a series of assessments to measure their competency at the end of the process. The student are then free to self-assess their abilities, and engage with the learning objects which they perceive to be appropriate for them. The students thus get feedback from the learning objects (is this too easy/too hard/about right?), and also from the assessments.
Re: teacher acting as a facilitator. My opinion, based on my experience is that a learning facilitator is most effective when they gauge where on the directed learning – pure facilitation continuum they should be given the material which is being covered & the level of understanding which the learners are exhibiting.
Teaching vs facilitation
At times I take the role largely of a facilitator of learning, and at times I’m quite directive.
Hope some of that’s useful