Bridgebuilder

Neuropsychologist Steven Hughes Makes the Case

By Mark Anderson

Steve Hughes is an enthusiastic Montessori parent, one who’s eager to talk at the drop of a hat about Montessori and the benefits it has provided his daughter and his family.

Hughes is also a pediatric neuropsychologist specializing in brain development, and that credential gives this proud dad’s enthusiasm a big boost in credibility with his steadily growing audience of parents, educators and policymakers.

When we say Hughes is ready to talk Montessori at any moment we’re serious. The 45-year-old University of Minnesota teacher, researcher and—until recently—clinician has spent much of the last year on a one-person campaign, traveling and talking about Montessori and about brains and their healthy development.

The message that Hughes puts at the heart of his talks is simple: Montessori children are good at doing things.

But underlying that simple statement is a deep neurological understanding of why it’s true. Montessori children are motivated learners and effective hands-on participants in their world, Hughes says, largely because of Montessori’s curriculum— a curriculum that precisely triggers brain functions that are the building blocks of learning and personality.

When the stakeholders in America’s schools recognize that linkage they’ll help move Montessori closer to the educational mainstream and into the lives of more children, he hopes.

“This educational approach just makes so much sense from a cognitive developmental standpoint,” Hughes says. “I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about brain development, and I’ll tell you, Montessori is the original brain-based method of learning.”

Most Montessorians already share that view, based on the outcomes they’ve seen in classrooms and students’ lives. Hughes delivers science to back them up, adding to the small but growing body of developmental analysis provided by researchers like Angeline Lillard.

His roadshow presentation—first delivered to the 2006 AMI international conference in Amsterdam—starts with a brief, animated survey of how brain function grows.

Then comes an enumeration of the precise ways that Montessori activities match those developmental steps, a pattern he first observed watching his daughter’s Montessori experience, then by studying the curriculum and quizzing teachers and trainers about their methods and observations.

The more he looked, the more he recognized that each Montessori lesson prompts neurological activity that builds cognition and stirs the intellectual confidence, joy and curiosity that children feel as those capabilities grow.

For instance, the act of reading relies on three separate areas of brain activity —“nuggets” Hughes calls them. The brain apprehends visual symbols, decodes the sound of those symbols and assigns them each meaning.

When children use Montessori’s familiar sandpaper letters and moveable alphabets—looking at the letter and its shape, tracing it with their fingers, speaking its sound — they’re putting each of those nuggets to work and establishing neurological networks that coordinate the activities.

With repetition, those functions grow stronger and faster and eventually enable reading and more complex activities.

“We’ve come up with very good ways to remediate a child with a reading disorder,” says Hughes, whose research and clinical work focused on children with disabilities. “Those remediations are strikingly similar to Montessori. This is a way of reading development that’s really strong, really good, and Montessori kids have been doing it for a hundred years.”

Hands-on learning is another of Montessori’s developmental insights, Hughes says. The brain area that links to our hands is by far the brain’s largest component—indicating that we’re designed to explore and acquire intelligence through hands-on learning.

Montessori’s emphasis on very early hands-on activities in the practical life curriculum creates a crucial opportunity for each child, Hughes says.

“You look at practical life and it looks like its about wiping down tables, cutting up celery. They look like chores until you look at them from a developmental perspective.”

From that perspective practical life emerges as the foundation for success at all the activities that follow.

“We learn simple tasks such as motor movements and sequences and we store those in our brain as templates,” Hughes says. Those templates grow secure and multiply, giving the child a jumping off point for each new developmental step.

“Montessori gives children a rich, rich opportunity to develop the inherent skills of laying down templates for activities. Those come in a way, a sequence that’s never available in a conventional school environment.”

If Hughes’ developmental antennae gave him an early indication of Montessori’s value, his experience as parent and citizen helped him appreciate the moral life that grows in the Montessori environment —maybe Montessori’s most important contribution, he believes.

“Children come out of Montessori environment understanding there’s a richness and diversity to human culture and there’s also a sameness. We all want love, we have families, we care about people, we don’t want to live on a barren plant and we need to respect everyone’s pursuit of those things. That’s a basic but critical lesson of socialization, and it’s something children get very well in Montessori.”

Obstacles for Montessori...

While Hughes has been learning everything he could about Montessori’s developmental genius, his travels and contacts have also given him insights into the hazards the movement faces today.

“Branding is a problem,” he says. “Montessori conjures all kinds of images in people’s minds,” many of them inaccurate and not attractive.

That results in part from a lack of standards that allows untrained teachers and poorly run schools to carry the Montessori name.

It results from a movement that at times alienates parents, he says. An article by a mother in the online magazine Slate last year endorsed the outcomes in Montessori education, but then went on in a sinister tone to wonder what went on behind the school’s doors. “She said ‘it’s like a black box, parents aren’t welcome there, and nobody wants to tell me what’s happening.’”

And it’s a result of Montessorians failing to tell their own story effectively.

An example: The Montessori Training Center of Minnesota—run by Molly O’Shaughnessy, one of Hughes’ friends and Montessori mentors—was rejected for a recent grant because an educator who reviewed the submission said Montessori fails to support language development, especially for children who need special language help.

“That couldn’t be further from the truth, but that gets traction because Montessorians haven’t done a good job of telling people what it is.”

Hughes hopes to play a part in correcting that in the next few years. He left clinical work last year to lead TOVA, a small St. Paul test-publishing company, and his new job provides him flexibility to travel and speak about Montessori, and about the development of the new, expanded Minnesota training center.

Hughes hopes to play a role there as an advisor and research partner with O’Shaughnessy, adding to the educational and developmental case for Montessori.

One project they’re considering would follow up on Lillard’s research on Montessori outcomes in Milwaukee, targeting this time successful programs like the East Dallas Community School in Dallas.

That program has built a long record of high academic and social performance with an enrollment of mostly low-income, Latino and African-American children.

“Those are fantastic success stories that have never been reviewed in the scientific literature,” Hughes says. “From a scientific standpoint, that means those outcomes don’t even exist.”