Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori



Maria Montessori (August 31, 1870 – May 6, 1952) was an Italian physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout Catholic best known for the philosophy of education which bears her name. Her educational method is in use today in public as well as private schools throughout the world.

 

Life and career

Maria Montessori was born in 1870 in Chiaravalle, Italy, to Alessandro Montessori and Renilde Stoppani (niece of Antonio Stoppani). At the age of thirteen she attended an all-boy technical school in preparation for her dream of becoming an engineer.  At the time, she insisted specifically that she did not want to be a teacher because the teaching profession was one of the few that women were encouraged to take part in at the time. Montessori was the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome La Sapienza Medical School, becoming one of the first female doctors in Italy. She was a member of the University's Psychiatric Clinic and became intrigued with trying to educate the "special needs" or "unhappy little ones" and the "uneducable" in Rome. In 1896, she gave a lecture at the Educational Congress in Turin about the training of the disabled. The Italian Minister of Education was in attendance, and, sufficiently impressed by her arguments, appointed her the same year as director of the Scuola Ortofrenica, an institution devoted to the care and education of the mentally retarded. She accepted, in order to put her theories to the test. Her first notable success was to have several of her 8 year old students apply to take the State examinations for reading and writing. The "defective" children not only passed, but had above-average scores, an achievement described as "the first Montessori miracle." Montessori's response to their success was "if mentally disabled children could be brought to the level of normal children then (she) wanted to study the potential of 'normal' children".

"Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society".

Because of her success with these children, she was asked to start a school for children in a housing project in Rome, which opened on January 6, 1907, and which she called "Casa dei Bambini" or Children's House. Children's House was a child care center in an apartment building in the poor neighborhood of Rome. She was focused on teaching the students ways to develop their own skills at a pace they set, which was a principle Montessori called "spontaneous self-development". A wide variety of special equipment of increasing complexity is used to help direct the interests of the child and hasten development. When a child is ready to learn new and more difficult tasks, the teacher guides the child's first endeavors in order to avoid wasted effort and the learning of wrong habits; otherwise the child learns alone. It has been reported that the Montessori method of teaching has enabled children to learn to read and write much more quickly and with greater facility than has otherwise been possible. The Montessori Method of teaching concentrates on quality rather than quantity. The success of this school sparked the opening of many more, and a worldwide interest in Montessori's methods of education.

After the 1907 establishment of Montessori's first school in Rome, by 1917 there was an intense interest in her method in North America, which later waned, in large part due[citation needed] to the publication of a small booklet entitled "The Montessori System Examined" by William Heard Kilpatrick – a follower of John Dewey. (Nancy McCormick Rambusch contributed to the revival of the method in America by establishing the American Montessori Society in 1960); at the same time Margaret Stephenson came to the US from Europe and began a long history of training Montessori teachers under the auspices of the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI). Montessori was exiled by Mussolini mostly because[citation needed] she refused to compromise her principles and make the children into soldiers. She moved to Spain and lived there until 1936 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. She then moved to the Netherlands until 1939.

In 1938, Montessori visited Alexandra Remenco, who founded an orphanage in 1929 that became a model institution for pre-school education in Romania.

In 1939, the Theosophical Society of India extended an invitation asking Maria Montessori to visit India. She accepted the invitation and reached India in the same year accompanied by her only son, Mario Montessori Sr. This heralded the beginning of her special relationship with India. She made the international Headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Chennai, her home. However the war forced her to extend her stay in India. With the help of her son, she conducted sixteen batches of courses called the Indian Montessori Training Courses. These courses laid a strong foundation for the Montessori Movement in India. In 1949 when she left for The Netherlands she appointed Albert Max Joosten as her personal representative, and assigned him the responsibility of conducting the Indian Montessori Training Courses. Joosten along with Swamy S R, another disciple of Montessori, continued her work and ensured that the Montessori Movement in India was on a sound footing.

During a teachers conference in India she was interned by the authorities and lived there for the duration of the war. Montessori lived out the remainder of her life in the Netherlands, which now hosts the headquarters of the AMI, or Association Montessori Internationale. She died in Noordwijk aan Zee. Her son Mario headed the AMI until his death in 1982.

Maria Montessori died in the Netherlands in 1952, after a lifetime devoted to the study of child development. Her success in Italy led to international recognition, and for over 40 years she traveled all over the world, lecturing, writing and establishing training programs. In later years, "Educate for Peace" became a guiding principle which underpinned her work.

 

Pedagogy

- Small, child-sized furniture and creation of a small, child-sized environment (microcosm) in which each can be competent to produce overall a self-running small children's world

- Creation of a scale of sensitive periods of development, which provides a focus for class work that is appropriate and uniquely stimulating and motivating to the child (including sensitive periods for language development, sensorial experimentation and refinement, and various levels of social interaction)

- The importance of the "absorbent mind," the limitless motivation of the young child to achieve competence over his or her environment and to perfect his or her skills and understandings as they occur within each sensitive period. The phenomenon is characterized by the young child's capacity for repetition of activities within sensitive period categories (Example: exhaustive babbling as language practice leading to language competence).

- Self-correcting "auto-didactic" materials (some based on work of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and Edouard Seguin)

Bibliografía

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Montessori

In conclusion, I have chosen to publish the bibliography of Maria Montessori as I believe it was a great fighter and a professional woman, is remarkable for being the first woman with a career at the time. It was therefore the interest to their students how to impart their knowledge and professional passively without any distinction or preference, curiously chose to talk about this great educator because this issue discusses innovation and Maria Montessori sought an innovative way of their classes, which were individualized and through play, she believed that children learned better this way, which many educators Habemos not apply this method to be less tedious lessons for students, I believe that from now on forward should do in order to innovate and be more attentive to the needs of students and make them more creative and dynamic in our classrooms, and more will grasp the attention of the learners.

Defining Educational Innovation

Refining Educational Innovation

From the standpoint of educational innovation is extremely important because education has been strengthened and attached to a single plan and a very tedious to teach lessons, some students of a foreign language are faster to capture and acquire the second language , others have learning disabilities, this reading you want to define what is an educational innovation in this way for the development of reading learn about it.

This chapter discusses another innovation ELTO, is said to be a rather effective and applicable to teachers and administrators will always have many ways of learning, with difficulty or simplicity, we as educators we must provide the best way towards the benefit of the student .

As regards the programs of the MEP, the MEP in recent years sought to increase and enrich the knowledge of the students, this in order to meet the demands gradually requiring this globalized world, since some years now we have seen in schools and colleges, taught many specialties, such as computers, English and other academic and conversational, this in order that we all have better training and be competent in working environments.

Incidentally this is an educational innovation and not only find different ways to teach a class but we are also innovating for educational improvement looking to make competition with other developing countries that have all that is advanced technology.

In order to form a conclusion, we are intent on receiving everything that will benefit our student population, because every day we are exposed and forced to keep improving our quality of education, so the MEP provide all the tools to develop classes and educators in us find a creative way to develop the kind to make it fun and tasty for students.

This document aims to provide language teaching professionals with the theoretical
Knowledge needed to answer precisely these questions. More specifically, asking such questions –which focus primarily on issues of syllabus implementation rather than design – involves adopting a “diffusion –of-innovations” perspective on understanding educational change. This perspective leads to other questions about what change is, what attributes innovations should poses in order to be adopted, how different kinds of individuals react to innovations and how various systematic factors –all sociocultural in nature –interact to affect the implementation of innovations.

First, educational change should be part of the basic intellectual preparation of all language teaching professionals- particularly of those individuals who posses or seek to obtain advanced graduate degrees in the field. Second, curriculum development and teacher development are often treated as separate issues, they are in fact indivisible. The adoption and diffusionist perspective on educational change involves addressing the short –and long term professionalism of teachers, on whom real, long lasting change in the classroom always depends.

The implementation of change in language education occurs within a systemic ecology that either promotes or inhibits innovation. In other words, cultural, economic, political, and other factors always mediate the possibility of change

Language teaching professionals should also know what limitations of innovation research are. For example, Everett Rogers, one of the leading scholars in this field, notes that diffusion research has been criticized for displaying (1) a pro-innovation bias, in that is has been assumed that such research was conducted only to help promote the adoption of innovations; (2) an inequity bias, in which the socioeconomic and other consequences associated with developing in innovations have been ignored or downplayed; (3) an individual-blame bias, in which individuals (rather than the larger social system) tend to be blame for failure; and (4) a lack of methodological rigor, as when researchers rely on the subjective recollections of informants instead of using objective observational procedures to describe adoption behaviors.

For example, Fullan (1989, cited by MacDonald 1991) argues that, within education at least, all the conscious strategies of innovation developed to date have failed to fully achieve desired goals. Though, these issues are not raised to make language teaching professionals shy away from a diffusionist perspective. Otherwise, the importance of continuous innovation as part of professional and organizational development, particularly as circumstances in the wider environment are constantly changing.

Innovations in second and foreign language teaching

The British Council’s international development work

English Language Teaching Officers (ELTO) program. ELTO is funded by the Overseas Development Administration (ODA), the Foreign Office agency responsible for all British aid work, and is administered by the British Council, which is responsible for staffing and managing ELTO projects. ELTO personnel - typically, specialist in curriculum design, materials development, teacher training, or evaluation – operate in underdeveloped countries. They are usually based for up to five years in education ministries, universities, or teacher training institutes. Lately, ELTO projects have also been sited in secondary schools.

From a language teaching perspective, the aims of ELTO projects are quite innovative. Most “regular” language teaching professionals probably view themselves fairly narrowly as language specialists.

Something that looks odd is that while most methodology textbooks focus on learner centered ELTO projects do on teachers. In doing this, ELTO come up with teachers better prepared to work and make their classes student-centered.

The notional –functional syllabus

The result was the notional –functional syllabus which saw the needs of adult learners as being quite different from those of secondary school students, ho study foreign languages as part of their general education. In contrast, adults typically require foreign language instruction that is geared to specific professional and personal needs.

In analytic syllabus, learning is organized in terms of the social purposes that learners have for learning the target language. This suggests that learners must interact with and analyze samples of language that are relevant to their needs. Learners are invited, directly or indirectly, to recognize the linguistis components of the language behavior he is acquiring, we are in effect basing our approach on the learner’s analytic capabilities.

The process syllabus

Syllabus refers to the content or subject matter of an individual subject whereas curriculum refers to the totality of content to be taught and aims to be realized within one school or educational system. Third, in its strong from at least, not only the content but the materials, methodology, and types of assessment used in a course are not predetermined.

The process syllabus promotes innovation through a problem –solving model change. In traditional syllabus writers specify content before a course begins. Traditional syllabuses are predictive documents because they set out what is to be taught.

The natural approach

1. The acquisition -learning hypothesis posits that adults can get a second language or foreign language through the activation of two different systems (1) acquisition involving subconscious learning process that allow them to pick up the language naturally, as in first language acquisition; and (2) learning, consisting of the development of formal conscious knowledge about the grammatical rules of the language. According to this hypothesis, formal instruction does not aid acquisition but is necessary for learning.

2. Even then, monitor use can be effective only if three conditions are met. Performers must (19 have enough time to monitor their output, (2) be focused on form, and (3) know the grammatical rule for the form in question.

3. The input hypothesis states that learners acquire syntax and vocabulary by receiving and understanding input that is slightly beyond their current level of competence. By guessing and inferring the meaning of linguistic information embedded in the communicative context, learners are able to comprehend syntax and vocabulary that would otherwise be too difficult for them to understand. This input is known as comprehensible input or “i+1.” Thus, learners gradually acquire (not learn) fluency by being exposed to i +1 in the target language.

The natural approach proposes that (1) language classrooms should promote communication in the target language rather than focus on its structure; (2) teachers should allow linguistic competence to emerge over time, rather than try to dictate when and in what order particular linguistic items should be learned; and (3) error correction should focus on meaning, not grammatical form.

The procedural syllabus

The procedural, or communicational, syllabus emerged out of the Bangalore Project, an experimental English language teaching project that lasted from 1979 to 1984. the locus of the project was eight classes in primary and secondary schools in southern India, where English is a school subject. This project was initiated because of dissatisfaction with the status quo- in this case, a structural syllabus coupled with an Audiolingual methodology(Prabhu, 1987) or, according to Tickoo (1996), a form of grammar translation.

The analytic syllabus type was innovative in at least three aspects. First, it was tried to develop a syllabus with a content that was not linguistically based. Instead of organizing instruction in terms of preselected language items, they eventually hit upon the idea of using tasks as the principal carrier of language content. Second, it developed a meaning-focused methodology in which students learn language by communicating. Third, Prabhu tried (at least in principle) to avoid using form –focused activities in the classroom (i.e, explicit grammar teaching or error correction).

Task –based language teaching

Focuses on analytic activities as well as material. It contributes to work with different groups based on top -down activities.

The context based approach

The rationale for the content –based approach has two different kinds of knowledge: declarative knowledge is what a person knows about; procedural knowledge is what a person can do.

The content –based approach produces both declarative and procedural. Consequently, the students gains mastery of the language (procedural knowledge) and mastery of the subject (declarative knowledge) simultaneously. Innovations which focus in the content –based approach is very important because through activities such as games and songs teachers can transform classes into attractive and effective ones.

Implications for educational change

Curricular innovation is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. It is a socially situated activity that is affected by ethical and systemic constraints, the personal characteristics of potential adopters, the attributes of innovations, and the strategies that are used to manage change in a particular context. The newness of any idea or practice is more a matter of adopters’ perceptions than an objectively definable fact.

In a society like ours, academic patterns change more slowly than any others. In my lifetime, in England, they have crystallized rather than loosened.

A theoretical framework for understanding innovation: who adopts what, where, when, why, and how?
A diffusionist perspective on curricular innovation involves (1) explaining differences in the rates of adoption by users in terms of potential adopters’ and social characteristics, social system variables, and the attributes of innovation; (2) analyzing how different channels of communication (broadcast and print media, electronic mail, face –to – face communication, etc) may be used to inform potential adopters about an innovation; (3) identifying the stages potential adopters go through in deciding whether to adopt, maintain, reject, or discontinue an innovation; (4) understanding the personal and social consequences of innovations; and (5) analyzing how change may be designed, implemented, and maintained.

Characteristics of a renewed and innovative pedagogical practice

It should not be routinized.

It should be a conscious act.

One that enables a good atmosphere in the classroom, excellent participation of students, permanent interactions between teacher and students, and among students.

It should enable students to construct knowledge by means of different strategies.

Where individual differences are taken into account and prior knowledge is recognized.

Where a holistic view of knowledge is stimulated.

Where the context in which the school is located is considered along the type of students.

The teacher varies strategies, methods and techniques according to subject, objectives and curricular content.

Where students’ interest in learning is awakened.

Where the teacher recovers the social and cultural knowledge of the community and adapts the curriculum to the real world and the student’s needs.

Where the teacher centers his teaching on real problems and solutions of students confronting knowledge and their development and before a local, national and worldwide context.

Where the teacher uses not only the classroom but the whole school and community.

One that allows students to develop autonomy from self learning, because this fosters confidence and gives greater value to what they do.

One that stimulates creativity as one of the best abilities an individual can develop to solve concrete situations in the learning process.

Bibliography

Scattered by Mesén, Robertho for study purpose 2009.