Monday, May 12, 2008 60 public school teachers join Montessori training
WHEN school opens in June, some 60 preschool, day care and elementary school teachers are expected to apply what they learned about the Montessori system of education in Cebu City’s public schools.
The group is only the first of several batches scheduled to undergo the training this year. The ten-day workshop/training was organized by the Association of Montessorians in Southern Philippines and the Cebu City Government.
What’s the Montessori method and why is it seen as an effective remedy to the limitations of mainstream or public education?
An individualized instruction is what differentiates Montessori from the mainstream education, says Jocelyn Kintanar, president of the Association of Montessorians in Southern Philippines.
Kintanar says the Montessori method respects the individual pace of the child and is sensitive to the child’s stages of growth. Learning is something that is not forced on the child, Kintanar says. The child himself sets his own pace.
Facilitator
The teacher ceases being a “teacher” and becomes a facilitator.
Maria Montessori, in 1907, devised this method based on her scientific observations that children have the ability to absorb knowledge from their surroundings almost effortlessly. She described the child’s mind as naturally “absorbent.”
This means that children actually are their own teachers and adults are just there to guide the learning process.
Every piece of equipment, every exercise and material developed in the Montessori educational method is based on these scientific observations.
So what happens within a Montessori environment? The children are grouped in mixed ages and abilities.
Subjects are interwoven with each other, not taught in isolation. Children are free to move around the room instead of staying at desks. They work on any material they understand at any time, and move on when they are ready.
Facilitators guide the students individually. They don’t interrupt children who are busy at a task and guide individual progress rather than give the children group lessons and assignments.
Passing grade
While in the mainstream educational system children are awarded with passing grades and medals, the Montessori’s test of whether the system is working lies in the behavior of children and how they grow to love learning.
Kintanar admits the difficulty of many parents in understanding the Montessori method, especially that most of them were educated the mainstream way. In fact, it is only this year that Kintanar will introduce a “pure” Montessori teaching in One- World Montessori House in Banawa, Cebu City, where she is the administrator.
For the past years, they’ve been mixing the Montessori and the mainstream methods to gradually prepare the community for it.
But with Cebu City officials and the DepEd becoming more aggressive in introducing 4the Montessori method in public schools, Kintanar sees a brighter future for the country’s public educational system.
