Kaedah Montessori

Sejarah

The "Montessori method" developed from experimental research that Dr. Maria Montessori conducted with disabled and mentally challenged children in the early 1900s. She began this research using the basic idea of scientific education that was developed and employed in the 1800s with special needs children by French physicians Jean Itard and Edouard Seguin. A student and associate of Itard, Seguin extended Itard's initial idea of observing children in their natural, free activity by adding a series of exercises with specially designed self-teaching materials. Based on Dr. Montessori's success using this same approach in her initial research with disabled and physically challenged children, she began to look for an opportunity to study how it might be applied to benefit the education of typically developing children as well.
In 1906, the opportunity presented itself when Montessori was asked to establish a day-care center for young children (2–6) in a low-income housing area of Rome's San Lorenzo district. She opened the center in 1907, calling it a Children's House,and began observing the children in the scientific manner indicated before by Seguin. In this process, Dr. Montessori soon discovered that the children responded to the materials with a deep concentration that resulted in a fundamental shift in their way of being, changing from the ordinary behavior of fantasy, inattention, and disorder, to a state of profound peace, calm and order within their environment. Observing this change occurring with all the children in her environment, she concluded that she had discovered the child's true normal nature. Later, Dr. Montessori referred to this change as normalization and the new emerging children as normalized.
After 1907, Dr. Montessori reported her discovery and experiences to educators and others who became increasingly interested in learning how these changes came about in children. This interest soon led her to write various books on the subject and conduct training programs to explain her approach, which eventually came to be known as the "Montessori method." 
Following her initial experiments with young children, Montessori extended her research by introducing new materials and studying the effects of her approach with children of different ages. For example, near the end of her life, in her book De l'Enfant à l'Adolescent, (From Childhood to Adolescence), Montessori contributed to the work of the International Bureau of Education and UNESCO, by relating how her method would apply to the secondary-school and university settings. Her writings, lectures, and research during some 40 years until her death in 1952 constituted the basic foundation of knowledge about the method, which is currently conducted according to various philosophies in schools and other institutions associated with the name Montessori throughout the world.
Since Dr. Montessori's death in 1952, the method has developed along several different philosophical tracks. Each track has evolved its own distinctive organizational affiliations, training and presentation of the method to the general public.

Bahan dan kurikulum Montessori

The Montessori method involves a curriculum of learning that comes from the child's own natural inner guidance and expresses itself in outward behavior as the child's various individual interests are at work. Supporting this inner plan of nature, the method provides a range of materials to stimulate the child's interest through self-directed activity. In the first plane of development (0–6), these materials are generally organized into five basic categories: practical life, sensorial, math, language, and culture. Other categories include geography (a child's perception of himself in space), history (a child's perception of himself in time), and science (interactions with the natural world).

Kehidupan praktical

Practical life materials and exercises respond to the young child's natural interests to develop physical coordination, care of self and care of the environment. Specific materials provide opportunities for self-help dressing activities, using various devices to practice buttoning, zipping, bow tying, and lacing. Other practical life materials include pouring, scooping and sorting activities, as well as washing a table and food preparation to develop hand-eye coordination. These activities also provide a useful opportunity for children to concentrate bringing about their normalization. Other practical life activities include lessons in polite manners, such as folding hands, sitting in a chair, walking in line.

Penderia

The sensorial materials provide a range of activities and exercises for children to experience the natural order of the physical environment, including such attributes as size, color, shape and dimension. Many of these materials were originally suggested and developed by Seguin in his prior research with scientific education.
Examples of these materials are pink tower (series of ten sequential cubes, varying in volume); knobbed cylinders (wooden blocks with 10 depressions to fit variable sized cylinders); broad stairs (ten wooden blocks, sequentially varying in two dimensions); color tablets (colored objects for matching pairs or grading shapes of color).

Matematik

In this area, materials are provided to show such basic concepts as numeration, place value, addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. For numeration, there is a set of ten rods, with segments colored red and blue and “spindle boxes”, which consist of placing sets of objects in groups, 1–10, into separate compartments. For learning the numeral symbols, there is a set of sandpaper numerals, 1–9. For learning addition, subtraction, and place value, materials provide decimal representation of 1, 10, 100, etc., in various shapes made of beads, plastic, or wood. Beyond the basic math materials, there are materials to show the concept of fraction, geometrical relationships and algebra, such as the binomial and trinomial theorems.

Bahasa

In the first plane of development (0–6), the Montessori language materials provide experiences to develop use of a writing instrument and the basic skills of reading a written language. For writing skill development, the metal insets provide essential exercises to guide the child's hand in following different outline shapes while using a pencil or pen. For reading, a set of individual letters, commonly known as sandpaper letters, provide the basic means for associating the individual letter symbols with their corresponding phonetic sounds. Displaying several letters, a lesson known as the "Seguin three-period lesson" (see below) guides children to learn the letter sounds, which finally blend together to make certain simple phonetic words like “up” and “cat”. The aim of these nomenclature lessons is to show the child that letters make sounds, which can be blended together to make words. For children over six, Montessori language materials have been developed to help children learn grammar, including parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and interjections.

mata pelajaran kebudayaan

The Montessori classroom may also include other materials and resources to learn cultural subjects, such as geography (map puzzles, globes, cultural suitcases containing country-specific materials), and science, such as biology in naming and organizing plants and animals. Music and art are also commonly involved with children in various ways. After the age of approximately six, learning resources include reading books and more abstract materials for learning a broad range of advanced subject matter.

Kurikulum elementari (6–12)

During the second plane (6–12) of development, the curriculum takes on a more conventional appearance of books and writing activities, since children now function more through abstract reasoning and are no longer as sensitive to the physical environment. The contextual format for this more advanced curriculum is described as cosmic education, a concept that was first explained in England in 1935. Cosmic education is the total interrelated functioning of the whole universe, which allows elementary children to store and organize a great amount of knowledge from among a wide range of different subject matter areas and disciplines.

Persekolahan di rumah

The Montessori method is readily employed with children at home. With young children, the practical life materials and exercises are provided through everyday household activities and chores, such as setting the table for meals, food preparation, and folding clothes for laundry. Parents follow the method by using slow, simple movements in showing how to do these chores, as well as by establishing routines for children to conduct their own activities with as much independence and self-direction as possible.

Muzik adalam persekitaran Montessori

Maria Montessori discovered that musical education greatly benefits children during their developmental years. As it is reinforced by Diana Deutsch, a professor at the University of California at San Diego in an interview on WNYC radio, infant brains are sensitive and responsive to musical sounds, preferring them over other types of sounds. A child’s musical receptiveness remains especially strong through the preschool years until about the age of six. That is why parents speak to their infants in a high-pitched, “sing-song” type of voice. Educators, scientists, researchers and doctors are confirming that musical training can significantly enhance child development. Several studies indicate that exposure to music (listening, learning and playing) does have beneficial effects for preschoolers. Active musical training can improve their problem-solving skills, physical coordination, poise, concentration, memory, visual, aural and language skills, self discipline. It fosters self confidence and improves the ability to learn. The Montessori environment provides experiential learning with a set of bells, tone blocks and movable note blocks.

Kritikan Montessori

Some critics claim that a flaw in the Montessori method is its close association with Dr. Montessori herself. In Maria Montessori: a Biography, Rita Kramer reports that a New York Times writer interviewing Montessori in 1913 stated:
...the method is Montessori and Montessori is the method and one may well have grave doubts about how it will go with 'auto-education' when Maria Montessori's personality is removed.” (p. 188)
This close association between the method and Dr. Montessori led to many conflicts and lack of collaboration to extend research into the method itself. For example, despite new insight and greater knowledge available for applying the method in a scientific manner, the philosophical differences of personality and culture still exist to cloud and confuse its representation to the general public.

Manfaat

Angeline Stoll Lillard's award-winning 2005 book Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius (Oxford University Press) presents a recent overview evaluating Montessori versus conventional education in terms of research relevant to their underlying principles. Lillard cites research indicating that Montessori's basic methods are more suited to what psychology research reveals about human development, and argues the need for more research.
A 2006 study published in the journal "Science" concluded that Montessori students (at ages 5 and 12) performed better than control students who had lost a random computerized lottery to attend a Montessori school and instead went to a variety of different conventional schools. This improved performance was achieved in a variety of areas, including not only traditional academic areas such as language and math, but in social skills as well (though by age 12 academic benefits had largely disappeared).
On several dimensions, children at a public inner city Montessori school had superior outcomes relative to a sample of Montessori applicants who, because of a random lottery, attended other schools. By the end of kindergarten, the Montessori children performed better on standardized tests of reading and math, engaged in positive interaction on the playground more, and showed advanced social cognition and executive control more. They also showed more concern for fairness and justice. At the end of elementary school, Montessori children wrote more creative essays with more complex sentence structures, selected more positive responses to social dilemmas, and reported feeling more of a sense of community at their school.
The authors concluded that, "when strictly implemented, Montessori education fosters social and academic skills that are equal or superior to those fostered by a pool of other types of schools." Research by K. Dohrmann and colleagues  supplements this by showing superior math and science performance in high school by children who previously attended public Montessori (as compared to high school classmates, over half of whom were at the most selective city public high schools); and two studies by Rathunde and Csikszentmihalyi showing a higher level of interest and motivation while doing school work as well as more positive social relations among Montessori middle-schoolers as opposed to matched controls.