Essential Elements of High Quality Montessori Education

Members of the Montessori Forward List serve group have recently been sharing thoughts and ideas about just what are the essential elements of high quality Montessori education. We would like to thank Marci Martindale from CT for sharing a document on Essential Standards. (The CT version can be found at Montessori Foward under the resources tab).

The original, from which the Montessori Schools of CT. worked, was chaired by Betsy Coe in collaboration, and agreement, with AMS, AMS, NAMTA, MEPI, and the Southwestern Training Center. Does anyone know when it was completed?

In condensed form, here it is:

• A Montessori credentialed teacher in every classroom
• A Montessori credentialed administrator
• The full compliment of Montessori materials
• A 2-3 hour uninterrupted work cycle
• Multi-age grouping with an, ideally, 3 year age span
• A school that, ideally, starts at the Early Childhood level
• Assessments that are congruent with best Montessori practice
• All staff participate in ongoing professional development

In the current public policy clamor for accountability, many of these Montessori Essential Elements components are required of all early childhood education programs, albeit without the Montessori philosophy behind them.

Most state QRIS and all proposed federal and state initiatives and proposed legislation have a teacher education requirement as a measure of quality. The requirement of a bachelor's degree in early childhood is more and more becoming the norm. Teachers have to register through the Career Lattice and/or Professional Registry which gives them a rating based on education level, years of experience, and professional development (often state course mandated). These scores are counted towards a QRIS rating.

All state QRIS and most federal, state and city initiatives and proposed legislation have requirements for program administrators.

All state QRIS and most federal and state initiatives and proposed legislation have requirements that curriculum align with Early Learning Standards, and have specific materials in the ECE classroom.

All state QRIS have specific assessment tools to determine quality in the environment, of the staff, and program components such as parent communications, cultural diversity and working with special needs students.

We all know the emphasis being placed on early childhood education through Universal Pre-K, Pre-School for all, and many other initiatives and grants. A recent Gallup poll (June 13, 2014) determined that 65% of those polled support passing new legislation providing access to high quality pre-school to every child in America.

These are initiatives that are not going away. Accountability is not going away. More and more states are mandating accountability through QRIS and publishing rating results to the public. Public funds are being made available to all levels of families for their children to attend pre-school.

As a Montessori community, shouldn't it be up to us to define what quality Montessori education looks like? We need to have our teacher credentials recognized as high quality and not simply equal to a CDA. We need to define what materials are in our classrooms and have a rationale so that we can educate parents, decision makers, policy implementer s and policy  makers. We need to support multi-age groupings at a ratio and maximum group size that we know benefits children. We need to "translate" what we do so that when our classrooms and programs are rated, it will be understood why we do what we do. The Montessori ECE curriculum should be recognized as high quality in every state.

We can move this discussion forward. We can invite our colleagues from across the country to join in (there are currently 22 state groups with no voice on this website). Let's agree that we can talk about our similarities and our differences with grace and courtesy. But let's start the conversation. Comment here or better yet, join in the Montessori Forward List serve.

Montessori Forward