Reinventing the Wheel: Seeking Excellence in Education

In this viewpoint, the author shares her professional experiences leading her from public school teaching to founding a private Montessori school in the hope of fulfilling her ideal goal of meeting students' individual needs so that they may achieve success in the classroom. An Organized Desk, Idealistic Goals and a Bad Dream During the night before my first day of teaching I experienced a fitful sleep. Like most new teachers, I was nervous about meeting and managing my first class. I had been assigned twenty seven second graders, but I would not have a teacher's aide. Instead, I would have the knowledge of methods and materials from recent college classes along with behavior modification techniques under my belt, a stack of teacher guides, and a brand new collection of necessary objects for my very own teacher's desk, including a matching desk set, a brass apple, plenty of pencils and red pens, and a plan book. It was the desk that caused me to lose sleep that night. Unfortunately, I dreamed that when I walked into my new classroom, my desk was so high that I could not reach it! That first day took place in September of 1974. Teaching jobs were hard to come by then and I had truly reached my lifetime goal of becoming a teacher, only months after graduating from college. I was, and still am, idealistic about my profession in that I believed my primary purpose was to assist students by meeting their individual needs in order to learn successfully. I worked very hard for the next five years to create a learning environment where students would be motivated to achieve. The open was a popular educational practice in the 70's. So too were learning centers and student/teacher contracts by which individual assignments and due dates were agreed upon. I embraced these techniques in my classroom and more, including individualized spelling lists, with many hours spent creating educational materials for the learning centers and designing twenty seven individual contracts each week for my students. I enjoyed the challenge and experienced a satisfactory level of success for my students. They loved the environment and became more responsible and enthusiastic about learning. However, I noticed that there were similar problems each year among my students. Many of them had trouble concentrating. Some could not complete a task. Others were unable to maintain a sense of order in their efforts. Most disappointing was the lack of self-motivation. Some were not comfortable with their freedom in the classroom and needed more guidance. Although I worked to make learning fun, I knew I had not found a way to truly meet all of my students' individual needs. While working on my master of education project, which focused on individualized instruction, I read a book written by Dr. Maria Montessori, published in 1912 entitled The Montessori Method. I became totally absorbed in her educational philosophy which seemed to resolve many of the problems I was experiencing in my classroom. Dr. Montessori determined how to meet students' individual needs in her first school, Casa dei Bambini, in Rome, Italy almost a century ago, and I felt as though I were attempting to reinvent the wheel in my own classroom. I immediately set out to observe a classroom in a Montessori school to see for myself if this concept really worked. I found one and was able to confirm what I had read. How amazing it was to see multi-aged students and a team of teachers work together to foster independence, self-motivation, concentration, cooperation, and individual success, all within a peaceful and productive environment. It was this visit to a little Montessori classroom in the basement of a church that led me to take an educational leave from my cherished, second grade teaching position for the following year to study the Montessori Method. I thought at the time I might be able to bring the principles I would learn back to our district's second graders. …