If doing my masters wasn’t enough, I’ve decided to commit to a year-long 6-part series on Montessori Learning presented by the Montessori Training Center of BC. For context, I work in a dual track elementary school that offers Montessori learning. As the prep teacher, I work with all of the classes in the school, so half of my students learn through the lens of the Maria Montessori’s pedagogy and philosophy. I am currently not Montessori trained and what I do know about it is bits and pieces from when I visit classes, get pulled to TTOC, or what my colleagues tell me about it. I have always been curious about what makes the pedagogy so fundamentally different from the traditional training I received in Teacher Ed. My district offered a few non-Montessori teachers the opportunity to enroll in this course where we are supposed to receive a certificate from the Montessori Training Center. I thought I could commit to 6 sessions, so I dove right in to start this journey.

October 30th 2023 was the first session – How do we meet the needs of the elementary child hosted by Terrence Millie and Kelsey Keller. Terrence is the current Vice President of the Canadian Association of Montessori Teachers, and Kelsey Keller is the current Montessori Support Teacher for Coquitlam School District 43.

We discussed how Montessori centers a child’s development when we consider the Montessori Universal tendencies and the second plane characteristics. Our goal in elementary Montessori education is to develop independence and push their intellect. Montessori education is meant to be student-driven where the teacher facilitates rather than explicitly teaches concepts and ideas, all while students interact with specific materials and real-world items to solidify their learning. In elementary, through the Montessori lens, educators should be considering the development of intellect, social and moral sense, and the hands. For each category of development, we have 2 options: rush in, fix, or correct the action/behaviour; OR guide the child with open-ended questions such as “why do you think…?” We are training our brains and our students’ brains to no longer seek one-word answers in superficial questions, but rather ask open-ended questions with multiple avenues for exploration.

We also discussed the idea of cosmic education – the idea that everything is interconnected with one another, and everything is set out to complete a certain task. There are 6 components to this idea: cosmic vision, cosmic plan, cosmic agent, cosmic task, cosmic education, and the cosmic story.

  1. The cosmic vision is the interdependent and intertwined nature of things
  2. The cosmic plan are the rules and laws that activate intellect
  3. The cosmic agent is the manner in which things contribute to the universe (When life is introduced to that task, the agent is reversed. For example, water naturally follows gravity and runs down stream, but if you plant a flower in the path of the water flow, water suddenly goes up the roots and into the plant instead)
  4. The cosmic task is a being’s unconscious work
  5. Cosmic education is the integrated way of delivering education
  6. The Cosmic Story is the whole (the 5 great stories that make up the cosmic story are the key lessons)

The major takeaways of cosmic education were that the lessons must fill in the details, must be delivered indoors, and provide a catalyst to go out and do something about it. If your lessons do not have an action plan to go out in nature, in the community, or leave the confines of your classroom, it is not true Montessori learning.

My initial thoughts on this workshop series is that there is so much that I didn’t know about Montessori learning. I thought it was all self-directed, student-focused learning with the manipulation of specific materials, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I’m a little confused on the whole concept of cosmic education, as it pertains to Montessori education. I have never heard my colleagues, nor their students mention any of the 5 great stories that seem to anchor the teachings of Montessori/cosmic education, and it was extremely difficult to find any written record of the stories on the internet. The stories would be described, but never actually told. Are these stories a well-kept Montessori secret? Are the stories only passed down through oral language? Can a non-Montessori teacher have access to these stories? Are these stories not really stories but rather a state of thinking to frame the intended learning for the day? Coming from a computer science teaching background, the concept of this interconnected nature of the universe as it pertains to education completely challenged my current way of thinking. Computers are not organic beings that are governed by ideas of innate unconscious work, so how does the everchanging landscape of educational technology inform and contribute to the Montessori way of thinking?

At this point, I believe that I have a long way to go in my Montessori learning journey. I’m hoping that my upcoming courses will help fill in the gaps of my understanding, and give me the resources/supports to better align with the Montessori way for the students who have been educated in this manner. I like to think that some of the teaching that I do is at least Montessori-inspired where independence and teacher facilitation are key components to the way students work through assignments. For example, when I teach the basics of Microsoft office, I will do a traditional lesson, but then provide my students with learning guides that can help students complete an assignment without my intervention. They must complete the task, sign off that they did it, have a friend assess it and also sign off on it, and I can do a final check. Students keep track of their work completion with a stamp system. When they are missing certain assignments, they can retrieve the appropriate learning guide and hop right into work without my intervention. Some students will complete the work at different paces, but everyone finishes the units with great success and confidence. Now I need to stretch my thinking to see if what I am doing with my students will align with the secondary plane characteristics, universal tendencies, and cosmic learning.