John Snyder

Four Ways of Learning: An Explanatory Framework

All of us who guide a Montessori classroom are frequently called upon to justify our very unusual methods to those whose ideas about education have been shaped by traditional schooling.

Often we lead off with our Montessori theory, and often our dialogue partners hear only confusing jargon: prepared environment, auto-didactic materials, three-hour work period, Cosmic Education, practical life, sensorial materials, sensitive periods, planes of development, human tendencies, psychological characteristics, spiritual embryo, inner guide, even (heaven forbid!) mneme and horme.

All these ideas which Maria Montessori appropriated or invented to explain her work to a curious world are still core concepts among Montessorians, yet our free use of them can wall us off from the surrounding culture even as we endeavor to build bridges.

Another more difficult, yet more rewarding, approach is to reinterpret some of these ideas in light of current research and contemporary language. For example, the work of Kevin Rathunde and Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi on “flow” has given us new ways to talk about the central role of concentration in the development of the psyche.

Another non-Montessori thinker whose books offer us a different way of explaining our work is Frank Smith, a psycholinguist who taught and researched at the University of Toronto, the Ontario Center for Studies in Education, the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and elsewhere. A novelist and journalist before he was a professor, Smith writes about teaching and learning with precise, straightforward language and a keen instinct for what is important in the learner’s experience. I have incorporated many of his metaphors and explanations into my own talks with parents and others to whom I need to explain my Montessori practice.

In his beautifully written, deeply thoughtful book The Book of Learning and Forgetting (Teachers College Press, 1998), he introduces the very helpful language “forgettable learning” and “unforgettable learning” (or “permanent learning”). I have incorporated this language into a simple four-part framework that speaks directly to every listener’s personal experience of learning.

Imagine a 2x2 grid titled “Four Ways of Learning.”

The columns are labeled: “Forgettable” and “Unforgettable.”

The rows are “Painful” and “Pleasurable.”

Into these four quadrants, one can place just about any learning experience.

Here is my explanatory strategy:

1. Enumerate the educational, developmental outcomes we seek in Montessori.

2. Display the “Ways of Learning” grid and discuss each quadrant, working interactively with the audience to find examples of each from their personal experience.

3. Identify the “pleasurable, unforgettable learning” quadrant as the “home base” for Montessori learning.

4. Outline the tools we have as Montessorians for helping children stay near “home base;” these include the Human Tendencies, and the psychological characteristics of the age, which help us create a classroom full of experiences that lead to pleasurable, unforgettable learning and the achievement of our desired outcomes.

5. List (and discuss as time permits) some of the methods of traditional education that conflict with our goals, largely because they lead away from pleasurable, unforgettable learning.

6. If I am talking to parents, I wrap up by discussing how the home environment can either support or undermine the way the children work in the classroom.

Our Goals

In Montessori we look for certain characteristics in a healthy, well-functioning learning community and in each individual in that community.

We want to see enthusiastic learning. Whether the children are quiet and deeply engrossed in work or actively exploring and discussing together, there should be an aura of happy, spontaneous expression of their natural drive to learn.

We know, both from classroom experience and from decades of educational research, that this kind of learning only comes about when the learner is intrinsically motivated.

We want to see children developing at their own pace on all fronts: strengthening concentration, gaining self-confidence to take on greater challenges, developing perseverance, increasing self-knowledge, gaining knowledge in all areas while exploring deeply and joyfully in some areas.

We want to see children growing in the knowledge and practice of social relationship and the morality that is rooted in community living.

Four Ways of Learning

Sometimes we wonder aloud if our children are “learning anything.”

In fact, both we and our children are always learning.

Short of extreme situations of deprivation and abuse, it is impossible to keep a child from learning. Learning is what a human mind does whenever it is awake and encountering the world.

The question is what is being learned—and learning is always happening on different levels, which we sometimes refer to as “cognition” (thinking and learning) and “meta-cognition” (thinking about thinking and learning about learning).

Most of our learning is forgettable, and that’s both natural and fortunate.

We learn things, use them while there is a need and then let them go. I remember my own phone number; I remember my office phone number as long as I work there; but I don’t try to remember every phone number I dial.

However, our most important learning is unforgettable or permanent learning—learning that becomes a part of who we are, learning that “sticks with us” even when we have no immediate need for that skill or knowledge.

My 100-year-old grandmother can still remember precise details of her childhood experience, even though her present circumstances and needs are completely different.

A moment’s reflection on a list of one’s unforgettable learning will reveal that invariably this learning is attached to some strong emotion or feeling. This connection between the “cognitive,” or thinking, mind and the “affective,” or feeling, mind is well-known to all good teachers (and brain researchers). Various educational reformers down through the years have attempted to codify and capitalize on this connection, as in the “confluent learning” movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

In ways that we will see later, the Montessori classroom is a place in which the connection between thinking and feeling arises constantly and naturally in the children’s work.

When it comes to the permanence of learning, it does not seem to matter whether the associated emotion is painful or pleasurable. This leads us to four possibilities:

• painful forgettable learning

• pleasurable forgettable learning

• painful unforgettable learning

• pleasurable unforgettable learning.

If all painful learning were unforgettable, we would presumably never make the same bad mistake twice. Whatever the case, for designers of an educational system it would be nonsensical to employ painful means to learn what will soon be forgotten anyway. Yet, this seems to be what happens in many educational settings.

I suspect that painful learning becomes forgettable when the meta-cognitive learning is painful and the content learning is eminently forgettable. So, a child who is learning multiplication tables under duress may be learning a number of things:

(1) multiplication tables

(2) that they hate math

(3) that they hate the teacher

(4) that learning is something they must be forced to do, etc.

They may still forget their multiplication tables, but what they learned about learning may be near-permanent.

And what if they do remember their multiplication tables?

Then we have painful unforgettable learning, in the same category with learning not to pick up a hot frying pan with your bare hand or remembering where you were when you first heard about the destruction of the World Trade Center or the assassination of John Kennedy.

Sadly, this is about the best that one can hope for in a school system based on coercion, fear, and punishment.

The incremental improvements in academic performance that can be measured by standardized testing come at the great expense of much permanent negative meta-cognitive learning that will only show up decades later as a spectrum of societal and individual ill-being.

As Montessori said of the traditional schools she knew, “Study such as it is today, is a work against nature, so the students carry it out aridly and under compulsion without animation. […] Other needs exist, which if not satisfied always cause inner conflicts that influence the mental state and confuse the clarity of the mind.” (From Childhood to Adolescence)

In a classroom where learning is routinely pleasurable, its permanence or impermanence will be dictated by the child’s perceived need for it and for its usefulness to the child’s own purposes. This is why Montessori spoke of a good education as an “aid to life” and worked to make her schools just that—relevant to the child’s life as it currently was and as it soon could be.

In Montessori, there is little place for “memorizing it now because you might need it when you grow up.” However true such an adult need may be, if the learning does not connect with the child as she presently is, it will very likely be impermanent. This is not the perversity of the child, but the nature of human learning.

It is the fourth possibility—pleasurable unforgettable learning—that is “home base” for the Montessori classroom. This is not so much because Montessori guides tend to be kind people (we do!) but because we know that this is the only way that we can successfully educate on both the content and meta-cognitive levels. That is, it’s the only way to help children learn both what they need to know to function in our society and simultaneously to develop positive, healthy attitudes about learning, community, and their own abilities.

Pleasurable, unforgettable learning is what stands behind Montessori’s famous claim that graduates of her elementary schools would know “at least as much as the finished High School product of several years’ seniority” and that, most importantly, this learning would have been “at no cost of pain or distortion to body or mind.”

Tools for Unforgettable Learning

By the end of her career, Montessori was able to see that one of the keys to the success of her methods was that in her classrooms children were given the freedoms they needed to express the basic tendencies or characteristics of the healthy human of any age or race. Among these human tendencies are the tendency to explore; to orient oneself physically, temporally, and socially; to create order; to imagine; to think conceptually and abstractly; to move, to use one’s hands, and to work; to perfect a skill through repetition and to find one’s own errors along the way; to freely communicate with others; to belong; and to create meaning through symbols and rituals.

Montessori guides are trained to see all the children’s activity as expressions of such universal tendencies, and the human tendencies are also our guide for furnishing the classroom environment with a rich assortment of activities and materials.

Along with the human tendencies, each age group displays certain physical, psychological, and cognitive characteristics distinct from those of younger and older groups. For example, the elementary child is gregarious, imaginative, independent, fascinated by extremes, worshipful of heroes, interested in questions of morality, and developing greater capacity for responsibility and abstract thinking.

Montessori guides use their knowledge of these characteristics to help elementary children create the personal emotional connection with their studies that results in unforgettable learning.

Universal tendencies and characteristics of age groups aside, every child is a unique package of abilities, propensities and energies.

The Montessori way of working with children allows and, indeed, requires the adult to get to know each child’s personal idiosyncracies and to work with them as they really are, not as we imagine them to be or statistically predict them to be. In particular, for learning to be pleasurable and unforgettable, children must work at their own pace, with allowances for their personal social maturity, their personal cognitive strengths and weaknesses, their relative need for closure, and their personal history.

In a future article, we will look more closely at a number of common methods in traditional education in light of our “Four Ways of Learning” model, contrasting them with the Montessori approach based on human tendencies, psychological characteristics, and personal idiosyncracies.

If you are, as I am, often astonished by the wisdom of Maria Montessori, it is perhaps only a vindication of Emerson’s observation that, “Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.”

As always, I am happy to hear from you via e-mail to jsnyder@pobox.com.

John R. Snyder is an upper elementary guide at Austin Montessori School in Austin, TX.