Moving on up

Happy Friday, everyone.

We’ve started to move children up—that is, graduate them from one program level into another, as from Toddler to Children’s House—earlier. The median move up between programs is earlier both than it has been for us in the past, and earlier than is typical in most Montessori programs.

Any particular move up is, of course, variable, and subject to individual developmental factors. But, on average: we’re moving infants up to toddler programs a couple of months sooner, toddlers up to Children’s House about half a year sooner, Children’s House students up into elementary up to a year sooner, and finding that Montessori elementary students are ready for middle school earlier than their peers.

If you’re at a school where this shift isn’t yet happening, you can expect to see it in the near future—and indeed, can start moving towards that shift immediately in cases where it makes sense to do so. The average age of move-ups is, across the board and where allowed by regulations, something we are consciously shifting younger.

Why is this?

Well, what’s the reason for the current age of programmatic transition? The essential indicator for a move up isn’t a birthday or a set passage of time. It’s the readiness of a child for the next developmental and educational stage, and that readiness is shifting younger.

Maria Montessori rejected the notion that children should be grouped in 1- or 2-year age bands out of convention or convenience. She instead believed that there were underlying biological and psychological factors that determined the sort of educational support a child needed. She was a pioneer in stage theories of development.

Montessori argued the basic nature and developmental aim of children under 6 years old was different from that of children from 6 to 12, and that both were different from adolescence. Within each 6-year stretch, she made further distinctions, especially between the first and second half: the first 3 years are more about growth, and the second three years are more about consolidation.

Here’s the visual sketch we have from her Perugia lectures:

She based her stages of education on these developmental stages, taking a markedly different approach to early childhood, elementary, and adolescent education—and subtly different approaches to each of the half-stages (e.g. lower and upper elementary).

Her developmental theories on these stages, including their timing, were based on detailed, extensive, cross-cultural observations that she and her collaborators made in their lifetimes.

How precise is the timing? Not that precise. It’s not the case that on a child’s sixth birthday they cease having an absorbent mind and enter the age of reason. Nor does puberty suddenly onset. We’re in the realm of biology, and with biology, variation and continua are the norm. The changes between planes of development are marked—but multi-dimensional and gradual, with different individuals undergoing them at slightly different times.

How universal is the timing? Though her observations were, as mentioned, cross-cultural, they were of course time-bound. And, interestingly, it turns out that the average age of onset of new developmental stages is not historically constant. With adolescence, this has been showing up in studies for a decade or more. There is a broad spectrum of evidence that, globally, the onset of puberty is now shifting earlier. There is reason to think that it’s shifted multiple times through history. What causes these shifts is not completely clear, but both cultural and nutritional factors are plausible culprits.

Puberty has clear biological markers and is quite culturally salient, so it is better studied than the developmental shift out of early childhood. But across our schools and programs, our many and close observations of children at this age—analogous to the sorts of observation Montessori did—are also strongly suggestive of a shift. The developmental characteristics and behaviors that Montessori ascribed to the 3 to 6 age range seem to be moving half a year or a year earlier—conservatively somewhere in the 2.5 to 5.5 range.

It's not unusual for a 2-and-a-half-year-old to be capable of, for example, cognitively isolating the attributes in the first materials of the Children’s House sensorial curriculum. The kind of physical and emotional control displayed by many children of this age is also typical of a child leaving the “raw growth” phase and entering into the “consolidation” phase. Likewise for the transition to elementary. There is already (intentional) overlap in the Children’s House and Lower Elementary curricula, and we’re seeing that more of the advanced materials are capable of being deployed to more children in the 3-to-6 age range.

Our current time features plentiful, nutritionally fortified foods and a cultural milieux that is saturated with educational opportunities. It’s not surprising that children (especially in our programs) are growing up a bit faster, physically, psychologically, and cognitively.

So that’s the reason for the shift in defaults regarding move-up ages.

Beyond general move up timing, the foregoing is also a reason to be extra mindful about doing something that Montessori believed in strongly: be loose about the divisions between classrooms.

I’ve already mentioned materials: it’s good for Toddler environments to include some Children’s House materials, and mutatis mutandis for every program adjacency. Montessori herself went so far as to define an “open doors” policy for her schools, where children could choose to go between classrooms, including classrooms of different levels. This allowed children to gravitate towards what was naturally interesting and challenging for them, and also have an even wider-band mixed-age experience. Older students could help and mentor younger ones, and the younger could admire and model after the older—at age differences beyond the 3-year band in a single classroom.

These sorts of cross-program classroom interactions can be practically and logistically challenging to do well. Here I’m just mentioning them as an illustration of the broader point: programmatic divisions are not separations; they are there to serve the child, and exist in a context of continuous, thoughtful adaptation.

The truly timeless Montessori principle, the principle underlying all of these recommendations, is to follow the child. It’s our job to adapt the environment and the programming to the child’s needs; it’s never the child’s job to adapt to our programs. When and where we see children moving on up a bit faster than Montessori herself expected, the Montessori thing to do is to move with them.

Enjoy your weekends,

Matt Bateman

Board of Directors