Joséphine Vigouroux
Montessori pedagogy was developed by Maria Montessori, an Italian physician, at the beginning of the 20th century.
Her careful observation of children from diverse social backgrounds allowed her to identify the conditions that foster a child's healthy development, enabling them to become confident and well-adjusted adults.
The foundation of the Montessori pedagogy is that every child is born with all the keys to their own success. The adult's role is to create an environment that allows the child to express their natural desire to learn and thereby acquire skills.
Here, we offer a definition of this pedagogy, broken down into 3 key points.
In active teaching methods, the term "active" refers to the child initiating their own learning. The English terminology "active learning" is more descriptive, as it indicates that the learning process itself is active, rather than just the teaching approach.
Montessori pedagogy is an active approach because it fosters a child's autonomy, allowing them to construct their own knowledge within a supportive environment and with adult guidance. While demonstrating natural self-discipline, children are free to choose their activities, making them much more receptive and able to integrate new knowledge more easily. The child develops with the support of the educator who, after presenting the materials and their use, maintains a hands-off approach to allow the child to learn from their own experience.
One of the core principles of Maria Montessori's educational approach is respecting sensitive periods, which means acknowledging each child's natural pace of development. As they grow, children develop their personality and go through distinct phases during which they show a specific curiosity for certain things (such as order or bright colors) and acquire particular skills. Therefore, it is important that learning occurs step by step and that children are free to choose their activities, ensuring their sensitive periods are honored.
Maria Montessori believed that children learn through experimentation. She advocated for the manipulation of objects that engage their senses during learning. Montessori materials are therefore made up of objects that are very colorful, produce sound, and vary in weight and size.
These materials must be made available to the child at a height that allows them to easily access them. Indeed, the environment in which the child develops must be adapted to their size and needs, always with the goal of fostering their freedom and autonomy. If classroom objects are within reach and easy to manipulate, the child will be more capable of self-discipline and will naturally put them away.
The learning facilitated by Montessori materials is very important because it is through making mistakes during their experiments and manipulations that children become familiar with the world around them and will be able, as they grow, to grasp abstract concepts.
