A Curriculum that Fits

Grade-level Lessons in the Classroom

By Daniel Bachhuber

I’m concerned when Montessorians—whether heads of a major training center or classroom teachers—begin to advocate grade-level lessons and the concept of “exposing children” to the full curriculum, whether they’re ready for it or not.

The argument goes this way: the teacher, after delivering the presentation, can work individually with those children who lack the academic foundation to accomplish the work independently. I’ve heard the confident assertion that “the curriculum drives the classroom.”

This idea is as alien to Montessori methodology as a statue of St. Peter is in a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s the truth: if the teacher’s job is to deliver curriculum to aggregates of students, she will have less time available to work with individuals who are struggling. If the curriculum drives the classroom, the needs of the individual child and her unique academic profile become secondary, and the teacher’s attention will gravitate to next presentation, because she wrongly assumes she can write concepts in chalk on the collective blackboard of “the student mind,” making the individual child precisely the blank slate Montessori specifically argued she wasn’t.

Teachers who teach grade-level lessons all day long don’t spend much time working with those children who shouldn’t have been at the lesson in the first place. Those students recede into the mental background of the teacher’s mind we might call “the denial of ignorance” until the inevitable standardized test results show us the cold truth. Only then does our fantasy explode, and we exclaim: “My God, she doesn’t even know how to subtract across zeroes.”

It’s imperative that training centers not give their adult students the wrong map or, once in the classroom, these teachers will eventually find themselves in the middle of a cornfield kicking a rusty car with no gas.

Think of it this way: Is the curriculum an apartment building, or is it a glove?

Imagine for a moment the apartment building. Three stories high. The first story is sometimes called, “level 1,” and sometimes “level 4.” Story number two can be “level 2 or 5,” and the third story can be called “level 3 or 6.”

The children are playing in the sand outside the apartment building. Each child has a material that captures his interest; some work alone and some in small groups. Every once in a while the teacher emerges from the apartment building, stands at the doorway and calls out, “Level 1,” or “Level 2” and so on. “It’s time for your math lesson,” or “It’s time for your grammar lesson.”

At that moment, children who are playing in the sand need to leave their materials behind and follow the teacher into the apartment building. The children stand up and look across the sandbox to identify their unlikely counterparts in this long trek into the building, who often come from the most disparate territories.

Children with poor social skills frequently call back at the teacher, “Do we have to?”

Those with good social skills follow promptly, sensing that any delay might cause the teacher embarrassment.

The teacher spends so much time in his apartment building planning lessons that he has little idea what the children in the sandbox are working with. Much too busy to observe, he holds onto his curriculum the way a patriot holds onto the flag. In the face of any complaints or failures, he simply waves the flag.

Once in a while the teacher longs to play in the sand with the kids. They look like they’re having a lot of fun, but he feels such behavior might be irresponsible.

Do I give grade-level lessons? Yes, of course I do. But I try to keep them in perspective.

Grade-level lessons are, to some extent, a matter of my own convenience. When I’m giving a lot of grade-level lessons I’m not being a very good Montessori teacher. Sometimes I’m just plain selfish and I insist on having my own way.

After seeing last year’s standardized test results for my students in the area of measurement, I decided that my students needed to know their stuff. Within a week or so, I learned that the grade-level groupings didn’t work the way I had hoped. Instead, I developed a sequence of lessons from simple to complex.

The standard Montessori curriculum was, by the way, almost no help. Measurement simply hasn’t been developed, in spite of the fact that metric measurement lends itself well to physical, “hand to brain” materialization. I can envision Neinhuis developing a set of gram weights and a beautiful scale with a wooden pedestal…

Can you imagine a better way to reinforce place value, or the fundamental truth of the base ten system, or the process of decimal division and multiplication than the interlocking stages of multiples and divisors that drive one’s progress from kilometers to millimeters and back? It’s like a flipbook, or Jacob’s Ladder. Surely some clever materials developer can do something about this issue.

Once I had developed my own inelegant sequence, I added a page to my master list of presentations, gave the kids a copy, and had them look it over. I explained that this was the best I could do for now, but that I had tried to make the lessons fun.

“Decide where, along this sequence, you think you can start,” I told them, “Let me know. Move at your own pace, and I’ll try to keep up. One rule. Once you decide on your own point of entry, you need to stay with the sequence without skipping steps.”

Such a rule protects the methodology: each new lesson is a form of indirect preparation for what comes later.

Now, I asked, “Who’s ready to start?”

By means of the master list I didn’t need to present to the grade level. Never working with more that five students at a time, the lessons went quickly. If someone wasn’t ready for the point of entry they had chosen, I mirrored their level of proficiency back to them with a short quiz. They now had the information to make a better choice for themselves.

Now I felt I had reentered the Montessori fold, the methodology I had devoted a part of my life to serving.
I had left the apartment building to play in the sand.

I was happier, and so were my students. By means of my planning (preparation of the environment), I had taken the grade-level curriculum and turned it into an array of gloves. All the student needed to do was choose a pair. If his hands swam in a pair of gloves that were too large, what was the harm? Eventually he’d learn that he couldn’t pick up anything and he’d return for a better fit. If someone chose a pair that were too small, she’d learn that laziness induces boredom, and that boredom can be painful. Each pair of gloves had its own attraction. Some allowed students to use a computer application. Others were specially designed for handling gram weights and balance scales. Montessori wanted us to “entice” children to the work, not to obligate them.

The materials had left the lesson table because the students had carried them outside the apartment building into the sand. Now I, the teacher, wanted to be outside with my knees in the sand because it was fun to see where they ran into trouble. Those moments when I could say to a student, “Let me show you something that will help,” were precious. It was as if the student had built a castle whose walls kept crumbling for lack of support. I knew enough to build a proper wall, and the student joyfully took what was given, the moment of instruction that fed the moment of concentration rather the moment of instruction that broke it.

Daniel Bachhuber teaches at J.J. Hill Montessori School in St. Paul, MN.