“That’s not very Montessori.”
If you’ve spent enough time working in a Montessori school, you’ve probably heard this phrase more times than you can count. I’ve certainly heard it, and I’m sure I’ve been guilty of thinking it myself. Sometimes it’s a perfectly reasonable observation. Some educational practices directly contradict Montessori’s philosophy, and we should be able to recognize them. But other times, I hear the phrase used in situations where I’m not entirely sure what Montessori has to do with the conversation. Someone proposes a new idea, suggests changing an established practice, or simply approaches a problem differently. Eventually, someone declares the idea isn’t very Montessori and uses that to shut down the conversation. After all, we’re a Montessori school. We should be doing things the Montessori way.
What bothers me is that sometimes what we are actually saying is, “That’s not how I was trained,” “That’s not how we’ve traditionally done it,” or simply, “I don’t think we should do that.” Those are all perfectly reasonable things to say. We should have opinions about education, and we should disagree with each other. But those opinions aren’t necessarily Montessori principles. By invoking Montessori’s name, we can turn a personal preference into something that sounds like established educational doctrine. “I don’t think that’s a good idea” invites a conversation. “That’s not Montessori” can prevent the conversation from happening in the first place.
Before I go too far in the opposite direction, Montessorians have a legitimate reason to protect the name. I understand the concern about diluting Montessori by accepting every new idea that comes along. If everything can be Montessori, then nothing is Montessori. Something has to distinguish Montessori education from every other educational approach, and we should be able to identify practices inconsistent with it. The problem, at least for me, is figuring out exactly where that line comes from.
I think part of the problem is that we’ve forgotten a word. We constantly use Montessori as an adjective to describe our materials, classrooms, teachers, lessons, and activities. Eventually, it becomes easy to think of Montessori as a collection of things and practices that have already been determined to be acceptable. But it isn’t just Montessori. It is the Montessori Method, and I think the second word is just as important as the first.
Montessori developed her method through a process rooted in scientific inquiry. She was a doctor and a scientist. She studied the work that came before her, observed children, developed ideas about what they needed, experimented with materials, and modified those materials and her environment based on what she observed. Many of the materials we now immediately identify as “Montessori” came out of that process. She didn’t begin with a Pink Tower, Brown Stair, Movable Alphabet, and a three-hour work cycle already laid out in front of her. These things emerged from years of observing children and refining an educational environment around what she was seeing.
This is where I think the distinction between Montessori and the Montessori Method becomes important. The materials and practices are the results of the process, but the process itself matters. Maybe it matters just as much. If we become so focused on preserving Montessori’s conclusions that we stop engaging in the observation, experimentation, research, and revision that produced those conclusions, I’m not sure that is necessarily more faithful to Montessori. In some ways, it might be less.
Is What I’m Doing Actually Montessori?
This is also where I have to turn the question back on myself. I make a website called Montessori Physical Education, and if someone looked at some of the games I’ve created, they could reasonably ask: What exactly makes this Montessori?
That’s a fair question, and it’s one I think about quite a bit. If you walked into one of my PE classes, you might see children acting as part of the immune system looking for pathogens, playing a game based on the liver's function, physically modeling convection, or using a game to explore a concept from chemistry. You might also see competitive games, teams, dodgeballs flying across the gym, and a lot of things that Maria Montessori never wrote about. I am doing something in PE that looks wildly different from what most people probably imagine when they hear the words “Montessori education,” and certainly different from traditional Montessori classroom practice. So if I’m going to put the word Montessori right in the name of what I do, I should probably be able to explain why.
The easiest answer I’ve always had is integration. I look at what children are studying in their classrooms and find ways to connect those concepts to movement. If Upper Elementary is studying the human body, maybe we can physically experience something about how the body works through a game. If they’re studying chemistry, maybe we can use movement to model something that is otherwise incredibly abstract. If the concept originates in a Montessori classroom, integrating it into PE seems like a reasonable way to call what I’m doing Montessori Physical Education. Maybe it’s Montessori by proxy. Or at least Montessori by proximity.
The problem is that I don’t think that answer is good enough. If I create a terrible PE lesson about the Timeline of Life, putting “Timeline of Life” in the title doesn’t suddenly make it Montessori. In fact, if I’m criticizing people for casually labeling things Montessori or not Montessori, I can’t turn around, slap a Montessori classroom concept onto one of my games, and claim that settles the question for my own work.
The stronger answer, I think, is in how these lessons have developed. When I started working in PE, I knew some things about traditional physical education bothered me. Some children absolutely love traditional PE, and many of them are the same children who already play sports, understand the games, and feel confident in their athletic abilities. Then there are the children who spend PE trying to disappear. PE also tends to turn into another recess. The children are moving, which is certainly valuable, and they may be having fun, but I kept asking myself what I was actually trying to teach.
Instead of simply accepting that this is what PE looks like, I started experimenting. What if physical education could reinforce something children were learning in the classroom? What if movement itself could help them understand a concept? More importantly, would the children actually enjoy doing it? So I created games and watched what happened. Some worked, others didn’t, and a few were complete disasters. A game might work beautifully with one age group and fall apart with another. Sometimes the children understood a rule completely differently than I intended, and sometimes a child did something during a game that made me realize there was a much better way to structure it.
In fact, I’ve come to think of the children as part of the process of creating these games with me. What I bring to them is really a rough draft. I have the concept, the basic rules, the equipment, and an idea of how I think the game will work. Then we actually play it, and that is when we start debugging. The children find all the “what ifs” that I never considered. What if I stand here? What if two people do this at the same time? What happens if the ball goes there? What if someone figures out a strategy that technically follows the rules but completely defeats the purpose of the game? We stop, figure out an answer, change a rule, move something, and play again. Sometimes we repeat that process several times before the game really works.
I think this is one of the most Montessori parts of what I do, even though it might not look particularly Montessori from the outside. The children aren’t just receiving a finished activity that I created for them. Their actions and observations are actively shaping the activity itself. I might provide the rough draft, but the finished game comes from what happens when children interact with it. That process has also taught me not to become too attached to my original idea. If I imagine a game working one way and twenty children immediately show me why it doesn’t, defending my original rules because “I’m the teacher” would be ridiculous. The children have already given me the evidence I need to change them.
Over time, my observations started pointing me toward something that was working. Children who weren’t always interested in traditional sports were becoming invested in these games. Students were making connections between what happened in the gym and what they were learning in their classrooms. I was finding ways to get children moving while also giving the movement another purpose. The lessons kept changing because the children kept showing me how they could be better.
I want to be careful here because I’m not pretending that what I’m doing in my gym is equivalent to controlled scientific research. It isn’t. These are my observations of my students, in my environment, over years of teaching. But I am observing, developing an idea, testing it, looking at the results, making changes, and testing it again. That process is actually a much stronger argument for why I believe my work belongs within Montessori than simply saying that I made a game about something children learned in their classroom.
Would Maria Montessori like my games? I have no idea. I’m sure there are some she would find interesting and probably others she would tell me to throw away. But I also don’t think she would ask whether I could find a passage in one of her books giving me permission to play them. I think she would want to know what I observed.
And that gets much closer to what bothers me about “That’s not very Montessori.”
Preserving Montessori Without Freezing It
A strange tendency can develop around the work of influential people. Someone discovers or articulates something important, and generations later institutions, traditions, and rules develop around that original idea. Eventually, it becomes difficult to separate the original idea from everything that accumulated around it. Religion is probably the most obvious example. An enormous difference can exist between the central teachings of a faith and the behavior, traditions, institutions, and rules people have created around those teachings.
I think Montessori education can fall into a similar trap. Montessori herself was Catholic, but she was also a scientist. She could hold a religious worldview while investigating physical reality through observation and science. Later in her life, particularly during her years in India, her thinking continued to expand as she encountered different cultures and philosophical traditions. Cosmic Education reflects a much larger vision of humanity, peace, interconnectedness, purpose, and our relationship with the universe. There are fascinating parallels between ideas like the cosmic task and concepts such as dharma, or Montessori’s emphasis on peace and the principle of ahimsa. I don’t think we should casually claim that one directly became the other without historical evidence, but it is hard not to see the philosophical connections.
This is also why I don’t think the answer is as simple as saying Montessori equals science; therefore, we should just follow whatever the latest educational research tells us. Montessori had a larger philosophical view of human development. Cosmic Education isn’t simply about figuring out the most scientifically efficient way to get information into a child’s brain. It asks questions about our place in the universe, our responsibilities to each other, the contributions human beings make, and the purpose we find through our work. Science can help us understand our physical reality, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what kind of people we should become.
That larger philosophy gives us something to hold onto while the Method allows us to continue moving. I think that balance is incredibly important because we can get this wrong in two directions. We can become so dogmatic about Montessori that we reject new ideas simply because Montessori didn’t write about them, or because they weren’t part of our training. That risks freezing an experimental method in time. But we can also become so loose with Montessori that we welcome every educational fad into the classroom as long as we can find some way to connect it to the philosophy. At that point, Montessori starts to mean whatever we want it to mean.
Science itself gives us a useful model for navigating that tension. Science is slow, sometimes painfully slow. One experiment doesn’t establish a fact. Ideas have to be tested, repeated, challenged, and tested again. Even ideas that appear well established can change when enough evidence accumulates against them. That’s one of the things I find so compelling about science: the process is built on the understanding that we might be wrong.
I think Montessori educators should share that humility. We shouldn’t throw away a century of Montessori practice because somebody published an interesting educational study last week. The accumulated observations, materials, and practices handed down through generations of Montessori educators have enormous value. At the same time, we shouldn’t assume that every question about children and education was permanently answered during Montessori’s lifetime. We know more about child development than we did a hundred years ago. We have new technologies, new research, new social environments, and children growing up in a world Montessori could never have imagined. Ignoring all of that in the name of remaining authentic doesn’t make much sense to me either.
So perhaps the never-ending work of a Montessori school is finding that balance. We preserve the principles and practices that have demonstrated their value while continuing to observe the children in front of us. We take new research seriously without automatically chasing whatever is fashionable. We experiment when there is a good reason to experiment. We pay attention to the results. And when the evidence tells us that something isn’t working, we should be willing to change.
That’s Not Very Scientific
Which brings me back to where I started. I don’t want to eliminate the phrase “That’s not very Montessori.” Sometimes something really isn’t consistent with Montessori philosophy, and we should be able to say so. But if we’re going to make that statement, I think we should be prepared to finish the thought. Why isn’t it Montessori? What principle does it violate? What have we observed? What does the research tell us? Does it undermine independence? Does it interfere with concentration? Is it inconsistent with what we understand about the child's developmental needs? Is there something about the prepared environment that makes it inappropriate? Or, if we’re being completely truthful with ourselves, do we just not like it?
There is nothing wrong with the last answer. “I don’t think that’s a good idea” is a perfectly legitimate thing for an educator to say. So is “That makes me uncomfortable,” or “I’m skeptical that this will work.” Those statements create a conversation. We can disagree, explain our thinking, try something, observe what happens, or decide that the risk isn’t worth the experiment. What bothers me is when we replace that entire process with “That’s not Montessori,” because the whole point of the statement is that there is nothing left to discuss.
I keep coming back to what it actually means to remain faithful to Montessori. Is fidelity to Montessori primarily about preserving what she discovered, or does it also require us to preserve the process through which she discovered it? I don’t think those things have to be in opposition. We can value the materials, lessons, environments, and developmental principles Montessori gave us while also recognizing that she arrived at them through observation, experimentation, research, and revision.
That’s ultimately what I’m trying to do in my own little corner of Montessori education. I don’t know that every PE lesson I’ve created deserves to be called Montessori. I’m sure some will keep changing, and others I may eventually abandon completely. But I don’t need to eliminate that uncertainty. It’s what keeps me observing. It keeps me testing my assumptions, listening to the children, changing the rules, and occasionally admitting that an idea I really liked simply didn’t work.
A scientist has to be willing to change their mind when the evidence changes. A teacher should be willing to do the same. If we want to remain faithful to the Montessori Method, we should never use Montessori’s name as a reason to stop asking questions. Maybe that is the part of Montessori we should be protecting most vigorously. “That’s not very Montessori” shouldn’t end a conversation. It should be the beginning of one.