Choose Phoenix Montessori Academy
Montessori vs. Traditional Education:
At Phoenix Montessori Academy, we offer a unique approach to middle and high school education that stands apart from traditional methods. Here's how:In Montessori secondary education, we empower students to take charge of their learning, fostering independence, critical thinking, and a deep love for knowledge that lasts a lifetime.
Discipline and Montessori at the Secondary Level
At Phoenix Montessori Academy, we take a unique approach to discipline that aligns with Montessori principles and the developmental needs of adolescents:
Self-Discipline and Responsibility
• Students participate in creating classroom rules and consequences
• Focus on developing internal motivation rather than external rewards or punishments
• Regular self-reflection and goal-setting exercises
Restorative Justice
• Conflicts are viewed as learning opportunities
• Emphasis on understanding the impact of one's actions on the community
• Collaborative problem-solving to address issues
Freedom with Limits
• Students enjoy increasing independence as they demonstrate responsibility
• Clear expectations and boundaries set by the community
• Natural consequences rather than arbitrary punishments
Emotional Intelligence
• Regular class meetings to discuss social and emotional topics
• Mindfulness and stress-management techniques integrated into daily routines
• Peer mediation to resolve conflicts
Community Involvement
• Students take on leadership roles within the school community
• Participation in community service projects fosters a sense of social responsibility
• Multi-age classrooms encourage mentoring and role-modeling
Our approach to discipline at the secondary level is designed to nurture responsible, self-aware, and emotionally intelligent young adults who are prepared to navigate the complexities of the modern world with confidence and integrity.
Montessori Middle & High School: The Best Option for Today's Youth
Why Montessori Secondary Education is a Game-Changer
Montessori-based middle and high school programs offer the best path forward for today's youth as it offers a transformative educational experience that equips students with the skills, mindset, and resilience needed to navigate the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.
Here's a quick FAQ outlining the key reasons why:
- Nurtures Autonomy and Self-Directed Learning: Montessori secondary education empowers students to take ownership of their learning. Rather than passively absorbing information, Montessori students actively engage with the curriculum, developing the essential skills of self-direction, critical thinking, and independent problem-solving. This cultivates lifelong learners who are intrinsically motivated to explore and discover.
- Fosters Social and Emotional Intelligence: The Montessori model emphasizes the importance of social and emotional development alongside academic growth. Students learn to collaborate, communicate effectively, and navigate interpersonal dynamics - crucial skills for success in the 21st-century workplace and beyond. The multi-age classrooms also promote empathy, as younger students learn from their older peers.
- Personalizes the Learning Experience: Montessori education is inherently personalized, allowing each student to progress at their own pace and dive deeper into areas of personal interest. Teachers act as guides, tailoring the curriculum to meet the unique needs and learning styles of every individual. This fosters a sense of engagement and relevance that is often lacking in traditional, one-size-fits-all educational models.
- Prepares Students for the Real World: Montessori secondary programs prioritize practical life skills, hands-on learning, and real-world applications. Students engage in project-based work, community service, and internships, enabling them to develop the adaptability, creativity, and problem-solving abilities needed to thrive in an ever-changing global landscape.
- Ignites a Lifelong Love of Learning: Perhaps most importantly, Montessori education nourishes a deep, lasting passion for learning. By cultivating intrinsic motivation, fostering curiosity, and celebrating the joy of discovery, Montessori schools instill in students a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge that will serve them well throughout their lives.
The Kindergarten Year in Montessori
Edward Fidellow
www.crossmountainpress.com
Kindergarten is the harvest year for all the planting and intellectual tending that has gone on for the preceding years in preschool. The kindergarten child’s learning explodes into an avalanche of reading and writing and math. All of the earlier preparation (practical life, sensorial) now finds academic outlets. The kindergarten child not only gains a wider breadth of knowledge but a deeper understanding of what she has learned and now is able to use this knowledge to enhance her own intellectual pursuits.
A Montessori education is not just cumulative in its learning; it is exponential in its understanding. The learning that happens in kindergarten is not just adding another year’s knowledge but multiplying what is learned and applying it to what is to come.
It is common for Montessori kindergarten graduates to be able to read well (and write) and to understand math far beyond addition and subtraction all the way to multiplication, division and geometry.
Maybe even more significantly, the lifetime patterns of responsibility, goal setting, having a work ethic, working through mistakes, inquiry and curiosity are being firmly set. To miss this formative year that sets successful life patterns is to miss the ultimate advantage of this unique preschool experience.
The kindergarten year in a Montessori classroom is also the year of mentoring. It is the year when the five year old is able to really help her classmates. This mentoring year is significant for two reasons. First, when you teach others, you really master the subject for yourself. Second, when you are asked to teach you demonstrate your mastery of the material. It is this mastery that produces the profound feelings of self-confidence and assurance that is the hallmark of Montessori students. Real achievement and real achievement demonstrated builds real self-esteem.
Leaving the Montessori program before kindergarten often places a child into an educational setting that is not as advanced; nor one that allows for the initiative that has been carefully cultivated during the earlier preschool years. The child is often introduced to a different curriculum one that lacks the individual intellectual satisfaction that comes from exploring and discovering the wonderful world of learning found in Montessori.
The essence of successful life is to be able to make wise choices. The Montessori kindergarten student is at a major threshold of exercising that wise decision making power. To lose that opportunity is to lose a significant part of the hard won success of the preceding years.
The great gift of an education is not the accumulation of facts and statistics but the lighting of the fire of learning, discovery and joy. It is a gift that Montessori children have the privilege and pleasure of opening and using for a lifetime.
The Most Important Montessori Lesson
Edward Fidellow
www.crossmountainpress.com
I love what a Montessori education does for a child’s love of learning. I love the enthusiasm that it engenders. I love to watch the understanding that dawns on a child as a concept makes sense for the first time.
Montessori children learn to read – often very early. They learn their numbers – not just counting but understanding that seven is one more than six and not just because it follows six. They begin to add and subtract, even multiply and divide. They learn about leaves and leaf shapes. They learn about zoology, geometry and time. There seems to be almost no end of the surprises of what our children learn.
It is ironic, however, that the most important lesson does not appear on a progress report. Montessori is the only educational philosophy that builds its structure on the lessons of grace and courtesy. The individuality of the classroom can only succeed if each child exercises care and consideration for his or her classmates by taking turns, helping each other, encouraging each other and teaching each other. Grace and courtesy sets the tone for the classroom. The quietness and the serenity allow the concentration that precedes significant accomplishment. Learning well the lessons of grace and courtesy will make your child stand out for the rest of his or her life but even grace and courtesy are not the greatest lesson.
The great lesson is the ability to positively control yourself. Most of us grew up with “self-control” meaning to do exactly what someone else told you to do – “be quiet, don’t, stop, no, don’t move” etc. The great Montessori lesson (and the one that takes great effort and often a lifetime to master) is self-control. The mastery of self-control leads to making wise choices. Wise choices come from focus, determination, knowledge and controlling your self. The way you learn to make wise choices is to be allowed to make choices (and live with the consequences.) And then, to make a better choice –living with the consequences until you have practiced enough to begin to make wise choices the first time.
Traditional education does not afford a child the opportunity to exercise real self-control, make independent choices and work through them to a successful completion. Traditionally, if you fail a test you move on. In Montessori, you strive for mastery before you move on. In Montessori you progress from strength (mastery) and not weakness
(failure.)
This same wisdom applies to the lessons of grace and courtesy – learning how to deal with people – and when you offend, learning how to make amends and not brush it off.
The lesson (and benefit) of self-control is that it concentrates your power and enhances your achievement. Self-control is essential to making wise choices. Without self-control the child is subject to every interior whim and outside influence. Self-control helps focus the child to be able to make wise choices.
The most important lesson in Montessori education is not an academic one but one of self-control and focus. Your child will gain many academic skills in Montessori but the greatest lesson is self-control and with it the ability to make wise choices.
What – No Briefcase? Montessori and Paperwork
Edward Fidellow
Cross Mountain Media
Montessori parents are often bewildered by the lack of paperwork when coming home with their child. There’s hardly any! So what does my child do all day? What can he be possibly learning?
For most of us our school experience was a blizzard of paper work – spaces to fill in, lines to write, dots to connect. Pages upon pages of busy work that hopefully conveyed to parents that we were learning. Much of it was redundant, boring and the waste of a good tree! But that was the measure for parents that learning was happening.
You’ve now entered a new universe when you chose a Montessori program. You didn’t choose Montessori because it resembled your learning experience but because it represented the learning experience you wished you’d been privileged to have. When you visit the environment your eyes feast on amazing materials – colors, shapes, complexities. Is this material really for my three year old or four year old - isosceles triangles, quatrefoils, reniform leaf shapes? Does he really touch it and feel it and use it? But when there is no paper trail coming home, you wonder!
Socrates said, “There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the hands.” And it is the touching of these concrete materials that begins the building of the mental processes in your child. Traditional education begins with intellectual development hoping to make the abstract concrete. Montessori education begins with the development and refining of the senses, allowing your child to build this concrete knowledge one step at a time until he is ready and poised to make the great intellectual leap into the abstract. In Montessori education, it is the child’s own developmental timetable that causes this explosion of solid (and unprecedented) learning to occur. It is not an artificial timetable based on age or calendar but a continual cultivation and development of the child’s growing intellectual power that is being fed day by day in a manner that allows your child to appropriate and practice the tools and skills that will form his intellectual abilities for a lifetime.
All this time the child is building within himself this intellectual capability. Montessori education is very much like the construction of a jetty. Rock after rock is submerged in the water, seemingly lost beneath the surface but then the day comes when the latest rocks begin to become visible and break the water’s plane. Your child is building a very concrete foundation for all further intellectual development one achievement at a time.
These processes and achievements, in many ways, are very private for your child. Your child often doesn’t speak of them – or want to speak of them until after (sometimes long after) they have become operative and well established in your child. It is not that they want to exclude you from their developmental journey but they guard it – not jealously – but protectively, as if speaking about it would jeopardize its development.
This is why your best ally in understanding your child’s development and progress is the teacher and not random pieces of paper that wend their way home. The teacher is a good guide to share with you your child’s progress because much of what the teacher does in the classroom is to observe and document this progress. Montessori education is never just a question of teaching or presenting materials but of presenting and teaching at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way. Each child has a different learning style – one size doesn’t fit all. And it is this different learning style of your child that is celebrated and used to your child’s advantage in the learning process.
It is not so much what is put into your child that creates this tremendous Montessori learning explosion but what comes out of your child – out from their personality, their talents, gifts, and temperament. Montessori is about aligning learning with the way your child learns. There may not be another time in his life where the whole world is bent to give him every advantage and opportunity to learn as quickly and as effortlessly as possible.
Every day your child is absorbing the whole world around him trying to make sense of it, trying to master the parts he can. And it is in his Montessori classroom that this world is made tangible and accessible. He can’t always tell you when he is going to make the discoveries that will propel him on to new and even more exciting discoveries. (“Did you know that three times two is the same as two times three? The windows are rectangles and so are the tables.”) Instead of being given the answers – which he would be expected to put down on paper – which could go home; he is given the questions and allowed to discover the answers for himself. This joy of discovery is hard to put on paper.
There are two ways better than paper to know what your child is learning. Ask his teacher. She has the great joy of daily watching the discoveries light up your child’s eyes, of watching your child work the challenges of learning and the joy that comes to your child from mastery. She is watching the emergence of your child’s personality, watching his character form and his intellect develop. When you are talking with the teacher listen to the excitement of her voice as she relates your child’s progress and read in her eyes the joy she shares in your child’s discoveries and accomplishments. Much better than paperwork!
Second, ask your child. But don’t ask him what he learned today – he may not be able to tell you (and it still may be private but he’ll share with you when he is ready.) Ask him what he sees out of the window. He may just read the street signs to you (which isn’t bad for a three year old.) Ask him about his friends. Ask him about colors or dinosaurs or cars – and then listen. He will tell you all kinds of things. He will use all kinds of words – vocabulary and concepts you didn’t even know he knew. And if you keep listening you’ll learn not only what he learned but you will set a pattern for conversation and discussion that will take you well beyond the teenage years – much more satisfying and important than paperwork.