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• Published: 27 October 2017

Montessori education: a review of the evidence base

• Chloë Marshall 1  

npj Science of Learning volume  2 , Article number:  11 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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The Montessori educational method has existed for over 100 years, but evaluations of its effectiveness are scarce. This review paper has three aims, namely to (1) identify some key elements of the method, (2) review existing evaluations of Montessori education, and (3) review studies that do not explicitly evaluate Montessori education but which evaluate the key elements identified in (1). The goal of the paper is therefore to provide a review of the evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective.

Introduction

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was by any measure an extraordinary individual. She initially resisted going into teaching—one of the few professions available to women in the late 19th century—and instead became one of the very first women to qualify as a medical doctor in Italy. As a doctor she specialised in psychiatry and paediatrics. While working with children with intellectual disabilities she gained the important insight that in order to learn, they required not medical treatment but rather an appropriate pedagogy. In 1900, she was given the opportunity to begin developing her pedagogy when she was appointed director of an Orthophrenic school for developmentally disabled children in Rome. When her pupils did as well in their exams as typically developing pupils and praise was lavished upon her for this achievement, she did not lap up that praise; rather, she wondered what it was about the education system in Italy that was failing children without disabilities. What was holding them back and preventing them from reaching their potential? In 1907 she had the opportunity to start working with non-disabled children in a housing project located in a slum district of Rome. There, she set up her first 'Casa dei Bambini' ('children’s house') for 3–7-year olds. She continued to develop her distinctive pedagogy based on a scientific approach of experimentation and observation. On the basis of this work, she argued that children pass through sensitive periods for learning and several stages of development, and that children’s self-construction can be fostered through engaging with self-directed activities in a specially prepared environment. There was international interest in this new way of teaching, and there are now thousands of Montessori schools (predominantly for children aged 3–6 and 6–12) throughout the world. 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Central to Montessori’s method of education is the dynamic triad of child, teacher and environment. One of the teacher’s roles is to guide the child through what Montessori termed the 'prepared environment, i.e., a classroom and a way of learning that are designed to support the child’s intellectual, physical, emotional and social development through active exploration, choice and independent learning. One way of making sense of the Montessori method for the purposes of this review is to consider two of its important aspects: the learning materials, and the way in which the teacher and the design of the prepared environment promote children’s self-directed engagement with those materials. With respect to the learning materials, Montessori developed a set of manipulable objects designed to support children’s learning of sensorial concepts such as dimension, colour, shape and texture, and academic concepts of mathematics, literacy, science, geography and history. With respect to engagement, children learn by engaging hands-on with the materials most often individually, but also in pairs or small groups, during a 3-h 'work cycle' in which they are guided by the teacher to choose their own activities. They are given the freedom to choose what they work on, where they work, with whom they work, and for how long they work on any particular activity, all within the limits of the class rules. No competition is set up between children, and there is no system of extrinsic rewards or punishments. These two aspects—the learning materials themselves, and the nature of the learning—make Montessori classrooms look strikingly different to conventional classrooms.

It should be noted that for Montessori the goal of education is to allow the child’s optimal development (intellectual, physical, emotional and social) to unfold. 2 This is a very different goal to that of most education systems today, where the focus is on attainment in academic subjects such as literacy and mathematics. Thus when we ask the question, as this review paper does, whether children benefit more from a Montessori education than from a non-Montessori education, we need to bear in mind that the outcome measures used to capture effectiveness do not necessarily measure the things that Montessori deemed most important in education. Teachers and parents who choose the Montessori method may choose it for reasons that are not so amenable to evaluation.

Despite its existence for over 100 years, peer-reviewed evaluations of Montessori education are few and they suffer from a number of methodological limitations, as will be discussed in Section 3. This review has three aims, namely to (1) identify some key elements of the Montessori educational method, (2) review existing evaluations of Montessori education, and (3) review studies that do not explicitly evaluate Montessori education but which evaluate the key elements identified in (1). My goal is to provide a review of the scientific evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective.

Some key elements of the Montessori educational method

The goal of this section is to isolate some key elements of the Montessori method, in order to better understand why, if Montessori education is effective, this might be, and what elements of it might usefully be evaluated by researchers. These are important considerations because there is considerable variability in how the Montessori method is implemented in different schools, and the name, which is not copyrighted, is frequently used without full adherence. 5 , 6 Nevertheless, some elements of the method might still be beneficial, or could be successfully incorporated (or, indeed, are already incorporated) into schools that do not want to carry the name 'Montessori' or to adhere fully to its principles. Pinpointing more precisely what—if anything—about the Montessori method is effective will enable a better understanding of why it works. Furthermore, it has been argued that there might be dangers in adopting wholesale and uncritically an educational method that originated over 100 years ago, in a world that was different in many ways to today’s. 7 If the method is to be adopted piecemeal, which pieces should be adopted? As outlined previously, two important aspects of Montessori’s educational method are the learning materials, and the self-directed nature of children’s engagement with those materials. Some key elements of each of these aspects will now be considered in turn.

The learning materials

The first learning materials that the child is likely to encounter in the Montessori classroom are those that make up the practical life curriculum. These are activities that involve pouring different materials, using utensils such as scissors, tongs and tweezers, cleaning and polishing, preparing snacks, laying the table and washing dishes, arranging flowers, gardening, doing up and undoing clothes fastenings, and so on. Their aims, in addition to developing the child’s skills for independent living, are to build up the child’s gross and fine motor control and eye-hand co-ordination, to introduce them to the cycle of selecting, initiating, completing and tidying up an activity (of which more in the next section), and to introduce the rules for functioning in the social setting of the classroom.

As the child settles into the cycle of work and shows the ability to focus on self-selected activities, the teacher will introduce the sensorial materials. The key feature of the sensorial materials is that each isolates just one concept for the child to focus on. The pink tower, for example, consists of ten cubes which differ only in their dimensions, the smallest being 1 cm 3 , the largest 10 cm 3 . In building the tower the child’s attention is being focused solely on the regular decrease in volume of successive cubes. There are no additional cues—different colours for example, or numbers written onto the faces of the cube—which might help the child to sequence the cubes accurately. Another piece of sensorial material, the sound boxes, contains six pairs of closed cylinders that vary in sound from soft to loud when shaken, and the task for the child is to find the matching pairs. Again, there is only one cue that the child can use to do this task: sound. The aim of the sensorial materials is not to bombard the child’s senses with stimuli; on the contrary, they are tools designed for enabling the child to classify and put names to the stimuli that he will encounter on an everyday basis.

The sensorial materials, are, furthermore, designed as preparation for academic subjects. The long rods, which comprise ten red rods varying solely in length in 10 cm increments from 10 cm to 1 m, have an equivalent in the mathematics materials: the number rods, where the rods are divided into alternating 10 cm sections of red and blue so that they take on the numerical values 1–10. The touchboards, which consist of alternate strips of sandpaper and smooth paper for the child to feel, are preparation for the sandpaper globe in geography—a globe where the land masses are made of rough sandpaper but the oceans and seas are smooth. The touchboards are also preparation for the sandpaper letters in literacy and sandpaper numerals in mathematics, which the child learns to trace with his index and middle fingers.

Key elements of the literacy curriculum include the introduction of writing before reading, the breaking down of the constituent skills of writing (pencil control, letter formation, spelling) before the child actually writes words on paper, and the use of phonics for teaching sound-letter correspondences. Grammar—parts of speech, morphology, sentence structure—are taught systematically through teacher and child-made materials.

In the mathematics curriculum, quantities 0–10 and their symbols are introduced separately before being combined, and large quantities and symbols (tens, hundreds and thousands) and fractions are introduced soon after, all through concrete materials. Operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, the calculation of square roots) are again introduced using concrete materials, which the child can choose to stop using when he is able to succeed without that concrete support.

Principles running throughout the design of these learning materials are that the child learns through movement and gains a concrete foundation with the aim of preparing him for learning more abstract concepts. A further design principle is that each piece of learning material has a 'control of error' which alerts the child to any mistakes, thereby allowing self-correction with minimal teacher support.

Self-directed engagement with the materials

Important though the learning materials are, 8 they do not, in isolation, constitute the Montessori method because they need to be engaged with in a particular way. Montessori observed that the young child is capable of concentrating for long periods of time on activities that capture his spontaneous interest. 2 , 3 , 4 There are two features of the way that children engage with the learning materials that Montessori claimed promoted this concentration. The first is that there is a cycle of activity surrounding the use of each piece of material (termed the 'internal work cycle ' 9 ). If a child wishes to use the pink tower, for example, he will have to find a space on the floor large enough to unroll the mat that will delineate his work area, carry the ten cubes of the pink tower individually to the mat from where they are stored, then build the tower. Once he has built the tower he is free to repeat this activity as many times as he likes. Other children may come and watch, and if he wishes they can join in with him, but he will be able to continue on his own if he prefers and for as long as he likes. When he has had enough, he will dismantle the pink tower and reassemble it in its original location, ready for another child to use. This repeated and self-chosen engagement with the material, the lack of interruption, and the requirement to set up the material and put it away afterwards, are key elements aimed at developing the child’s concentration. 10

The second feature which aims to promote concentration is that these cycles of activity take place during a 3-h period of time (termed the 'external work cycle' 9 ). During those 3 h children are mostly free to select activities on their own and with others, and to find their own rhythm of activity, moving freely around the classroom as they do so. One might wonder what the role of the teacher is during this period. Although the children have a great deal of freedom in what they do, their freedom is not unlimited. The teacher’s role is to guide children who are finding it hard to select materials or who are disturbing others, to introduce new materials to children who are ready for a new challenge, and to conduct small-group lessons. Her decisions about what to teach are made on the basis of careful observations of the children. Although she might start the day with plans of what she will do during the work cycle, she will be led by her students and their needs, and there is no formal timetable. Hence the Montessori classroom is very different to the teacher-led conventional classroom with its highly structured day where short timeslots are devoted to each activity, the whole class is engaged in the same activities at the same time, and the teacher instructs at the front of the class.

In summary, there are two aspects of Montessori classrooms that are very different to conventional classrooms: the learning materials themselves, and the individual, self-directed nature of the learning under the teacher’s expert guidance. All the elements described here—the features of the learning materials themselves (e.g., each piece of material isolates just one concept, each contains a control of error that allows for self-correction, learning proceeds from concrete to abstract concepts) and the child-led manner of engagement with those materials (e.g., self-selection, repeated and active engagement, tidying up afterwards, freedom from interruption, lack of grades and extrinsic rewards) might potentially benefit development and learning over the teaching of the conventional classroom. We will return to many of the elements discussed here in the following two sections. (This has necessarily been only a brief survey of some of the most important elements of the Montessori method. Readers wanting to find out more are again directed to refs. 2 , 3 , 4 ).

Evaluations of Montessori education

There are few peer-reviewed evaluations of Montessori education, and the majority have been carried out in the USA. Some have evaluated children’s outcomes while those children were in Montessori settings, and others have evaluated Montessori-educated children after a period of subsequent conventional schooling. As a whole this body of research suffers from several methodological limitations. Firstly, few studies are longitudinal in design. Secondly, there are no good quality randomised control trials; most researchers have instead tried to match participants in Montessori and comparison groups on as many likely confounding variables as possible. Thirdly, if children in the Montessori group do score higher than those in the non-Montessori group on a particular outcome measure, then assuming that that effect can be attributed to being in a Montessori classroom, what exactly is it about Montessori education that has caused the effect? Montessori education is a complex package—how can the specific elements which might be causing the effect be isolated? At a very basic level—and drawing on two of the main aspects of Montessori education outlined above—is the effect due to the learning materials or to the self-directed way in which children engage with them (and can the two be separated)? Fourthly, there are presumably differences between Montessori schools (including the way in which the method is implemented) that might influence children’s outcomes, but studies rarely include more than one Montessori school, and sometimes not more than one Montessori class. Fifthly, and relatedly, there is the issue of 'treatment fidelity'—what counts as a Montessori classroom? Not all schools that call themselves 'Montessori' adhere strictly to Montessori principles, have trained Montessori teachers, or are accredited by a professional organisation. A sixth, and again related, point is that children’s experiences in Montessori education will vary in terms of the length of time they spend in Montessori education, and the age at which they attend. Finally, the numbers of children participating in studies are usually small and quite narrow in terms of their demographics, making generalisation of any results problematic. These methodological issues are not limited to evaluations of Montessori education, of course—they are relevant to much of educational research.

Of these, the lack of randomised control trials is particularly notable given the recognition of their importance in education. 11 , 12 Parents choose their child’s school for a host of different reasons, 13 and randomisation is important in the context of Montessori education because parents who choose a non-conventional school for their child might be different in relevant ways from parents who do not, for example in their views on child-rearing and aspirations for their child’s future. This means that if a study finds a benefit for Montessori education over conventional education this might reflect a parent effect rather than a school effect. Furthermore, randomisation also controls for socio-economic status (SES). Montessori schools are often fee-paying, which means that pupils are likely to come from higher SES families; children from higher SES families are likely to do better in a variety of educational contexts. 14 , 15 , 16 A recent report found that even public (i.e., non-fee-paying) Montessori schools in the USA are not representative of the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the neighbourhoods they serve. 17 However, random assignment of children to Montessori versus non-Montessori schools for the purposes of a randomised control trial would be very difficult to achieve because it would take away parental choice.

Arguably the most robust evaluation of the Montessori method to date is that by Lillard and Else-Quest. 18 They compared children in Montessori and non-Montessori education and from two age groups—5 and 12-year olds—on a range of cognitive, academic, social and behavioural measures. Careful thought was given to how to overcome the lack of random assignment to the Montessori and non-Montessori groups. The authors’ solution was to design their study around the school lottery that was already in place in that particular school district. All children had entered the Montessori school lottery; those who were accepted were assigned to the Montessori group, and those who were not accepted were assigned to the comparison (other education systems) group. Post-hoc comparisons showed similar income levels in both sets of families. Although group differences were not found for all outcome measures, where they were found they favoured the Montessori group. For 5-year olds, significant group differences were found for certain academic skills (namely letter-word identification, phonological decoding ability, and math skills), a measure of executive function (the card sort task), social skills (as measured by social reasoning and positive shared play) and theory of mind (as measured by a false-belief task). For 12-year olds, significant group differences were found on measures of story writing and social skills. Furthermore, in a questionnaire that asked about how they felt about school, responses of children in the Montessori group indicated that they felt a greater sense of community. The authors concluded that 'at least 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'. 18

Their study has been criticised for using just one Montessori school, 19 but Lillard and Else-Quest’s response is that the school was faithful to Montessori principles, which suggests that the results might be generalisable to other such schools. 20 That fidelity might impact outcomes has long been of concern, 21 and was demonstrated empirically in a further, longitudinal, study, 6 that compared high fidelity Montessori classes (again, from just one school), 'supplemented' Montessori classes (which provided the Montessori materials plus conventional activities such as puzzles, games and worksheets), and conventional classrooms. Children in these classes were 3–6 years old, and they were tested at two time-points: towards the beginning and towards the end of the school year. Although the study lacked random assignment of children to groups, the groups were matched with respect to key parent variables such as parental education. As in Lillard and Else-Quest’s earlier study, 18 outcome measures tapped a range of social and academic skills related to school readiness (i.e., children’s preparedness to succeed in academic settings). There were two research questions: firstly, do preschool children’s school readiness skills change during the academic year as a function of school type, and secondly, within Montessori schools, does the percentage of children using Montessori materials in a classroom predict children’s school readiness skills at the end of the academic year? Overall, the answer to both questions was “yes”. Children in the high-fidelity Montessori school, as compared with children in the other two types of school, showed significantly greater gains on measures of executive function, reading, math, vocabulary, and social problem-solving. Furthermore, the degree to which children were engaged with Montessori materials significantly predicted gains in executive function, reading and vocabulary. In other words, treatment fidelity mattered: children gained fewer benefits from being in a Montessori school when they were engaged in non-Montessori activities.

This study does not demonstrate definitively that the Montessori materials drove the effect: there might have been other differences between the high and lower fidelity classrooms—such as the teachers’ interactions with their pupils—that were responsible for the difference in child outcomes. 6 In a move to explore the role of the Montessori materials further, a more recent experimental study 22 removed supplementary materials, to leave just the Montessori materials, from two of the three classrooms in a Montessori school that served 3–6-year olds. Over a period of 4 months children in the classrooms from which supplementary materials were removed made significantly greater gains than children from the unchanged classroom on tests of letter-word identification and executive function, although not on measures of vocabulary, theory of mind, maths, or social problem-solving. The authors acknowledge weaknesses in the study design, including the small number of participants (just 52 across the three classrooms) and the short duration. Nevertheless, the study does provide a template for how future experimental manipulations of fidelity to the Montessori method could be carried out.

Fidelity is important because variation in how faithful Montessori schools are to the 'ideal' is likely to be an important factor in explaining why such mixed findings have been found in evaluations of the Montessori method. 6 For example, two early randomised control trials to evaluate Head Start in the USA did not find any immediate benefit of Montessori preschool programmes over other types of preschool programmes. 23 , 24 In both programmes, only 4-year olds were included, whereas the ideal in Montessori preschool programmes is for 3–6 year olds to be taught in the same class in order to foster child-to-child tutoring. 6 Furthermore, in one of the programmes 23 the ideal 3-h work cycle was reduced to just 30 min. 6 A more recent study of older children compared 8th grade Montessori and non-Montessori students matched for gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status. 25 The study found lower scores for Montessori students for English/Language Arts and no difference for maths scores, but the participating Montessori school altered the “ideal” by issuing evaluative grades to pupils and introducing non-Montessori activities. 6

These same limitations then make it difficult to interpret studies that have found 'later' benefits for children who have been followed up after a subsequent period of conventional education. In one of the studies discussed earlier, 23 social and cognitive benefits did emerge for children who had previously attended Montessori preschools and then moved to conventional schools, but these benefits did not emerge until adolescence, while a follow-up study 26 found cognitive benefits in Montessori males only, again in adolescence. Although such 'sleeper effects' have been widely reported in evaluations of early years interventions, they may be artefacts of simple measurement error and random fluctuations. 27 Importantly, if the argument is that lack of fidelity to the Montessori method is responsible for studies not finding significant benefits of Montessori education at younger ages, it is not logical to then credit the Montessori method with any benefits that emerge in follow-up studies.

Some studies report positive outcomes for certain curricular areas but not others. One, for example, investigated scores on maths, science, English and social studies tests in the final years of compulsory education, several years after children had left their Montessori classrooms. 28 Compared to the non-Montessori group (who were matched for gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity and high school attended), the Montessori group scored significantly higher on maths and science, but no differences were found for English and social studies. What might explain this differential effect? The authors suggested that the advantages for maths might be driven by the materials themselves, compared to how maths is taught in conventional classes. 28 Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, children in Montessori classrooms might spend more time engaged in maths and science activities compared to children in conventional classes, with the amount of time spent on English and social studies not differing. However, the authors were unable, within the design of their study, to provide details of exactly how much time children in the Montessori school had spent doing maths, science, English and social studies, in comparison to the time that children in conventional classes were spending on those subjects.

Just as knowing what is going on in the Montessori classroom is vital to being able to interpret the findings of evaluations, so is knowing what is going on in the comparison classrooms. One of the earliest evaluations of Montessori education in the USA 29 speculated that Montessori would have found much to appreciate in one of the non-Montessori comparison classes, including its 'freedom for the children (moving about; working alone); its planned environment (innovative methods with tape recorder playback of children’s conversations; live animals, etc.); its non-punitive character (an “incorrect” answer deserves help, not anger; original answers are reinforced, but other answers are pursued); and its emphasis on concentration (the children sustained activity without direct supervision for relatively long periods of time)'. In some evaluations, the differences between Montessori and conventional classrooms might not actually be so great, which might explain why benefits of being educated in a Montessori classroom are not found. And even if the Montessori approach to teaching a particular curriculum area is different to those used in conventional classrooms, there are likely to be different, equally-effective approaches to teaching the same concepts. This is a suggested explanation for the finding that although children in Montessori kindergartens had an advantage relative to their conventionally-educated peers for base-10 understanding in mathematics, they did not maintain this advantage when tested 2 years later. 30

While most evaluations are interested in traditional academic outcomes or factors related to academic success such as executive functions, a small number have investigated creativity. For example, an old study 31 compared just 14 four and five-year-old children who attended a Montessori nursery school with 14 four and five-year olds who attended a conventional nursery school (matched for a range of parental variables, including attitudes and parental control). In a non-verbal creativity task, involving picture construction, they were given a blank sheet of paper, a piece of red gummed paper in the shape of a curved jellybean, and a pencil. They were then asked to think of and draw a picture in which the red paper would form an integral part. Each child’s construction was rated for originality, elaboration, activity, and title adequacy, and these ratings were then combined into a 'creativity' score. The group of conventionally-schooled children scored almost twice as high as the Montessori group. A second task involved the child giving verbal descriptions of seven objects: a red rubber ball, a green wooden cube, a short length of rope, a steel mirror, a piece of rectangular clear plastic, a piece of chalk, and a short length of plastic tubing. Each description was scored as to whether it was functional (i.e., focused on the object’s use) or whether it was a description of the object’s physical characteristics (i.e., shape, colour, etc.). Like the non-verbal creativity task, this task differentiated the two groups: whereas the conventionally educated children gave more functional descriptions (e.g., for the cube: “you play with it”), the Montessori children gave more physical descriptions (e.g., “it’s square, it’s made of wood, and it’s green”). A third task, the Embedded Figure Test, involved the child first being presented with a stimulus figure and then locating a similar figure located in an embedding context. Both accuracy and speed were measured. While the two groups did not differ in the number of embedded figures accurately located, the Montessori group completed the task significantly more quickly. The fourth and final task required children to draw a picture of anything they wanted to. Drawings were coded for the presence or absence of geometric figures and people. The Montessori group produced more geometric figures, but fewer people, than the conventional group.

The authors were careful not to cast judgement on the performance differences between the two groups. 31 They wrote that 'The study does, however, support the notion that differing preschool educational environments yield different outcomes' and 'Montessori children responded to the emphasis in their programme upon the physical world and upon a definition of school as a place of work; the Nursery School children responded on their part to the social emphasis and the opportunity for spontaneous expression of feeling'. They did not, however, compare and contrast the particular features of the two educational settings that might have given rise to these differences.

Creativity has been studied more recently in France. 32 Seven to twelve-year olds were tested longitudinally on five tasks tapping different aspects of creativity. 'Divergent' thinking tasks required children to (1) think of unusual uses for a cardboard box, (2) come up with ideas for making a plain toy elephant more entertaining, and (3) make as many drawings as possible starting from pairs of parallel lines. 'Integrative' thinking tasks required children to (1) invent a story based on a title that was provided to them, and (2) invent a drawing incorporating six particular shapes. Their sample was bigger than that of the previous study, 31 comprising 40 pupils from a Montessori school and 119 from two conventional schools, and pupils were tested in two consecutive years (no information is provided about whether pupils from different schools were matched on any variable other than age). For both types of task and at both time-points the Montessori-educated children scored higher than the conventionally-educated children. Again, the authors made little attempt to pinpoint the precise differences between schools that might have caused such differences in performance.

None of the studies discussed so far has attempted to isolate individual elements of the Montessori method that might be accounting for any of the positive effects that they find. There are several studies, however, that have focused on the practical life materials. A quasi-experimental study 33 demonstrated that the practical life materials can be efficacious in non-Montessori classrooms. More than 50 different practical life exercises were introduced into eight conventional kindergarten classes, while five conventional kindergarten classes were not given these materials and acted as a comparison group. The outcome measure was a fine motor control task, the 'penny posting test', whereby the number of pennies that a child could pick up and post through a one-inch slot in a can in two 30 s trials was counted. At pre-test the treatment and comparison groups did not differ in the number of pennies posted, but at post-test 6 months later the treatment group achieved a higher score than the comparison group, indicating finer motor control. A nice feature of this study is that teachers reported children in both groups spending the same amount of time on tasks designed to support fine motor control development, suggesting that there was something specific to the design of the practical life materials that was more effective in this regard than the conventional kindergarten materials on offer. And because the preschools that had used the practical life activities had introduced no other elements of the Montessori method, the effect could be confidently attributed to the practical life materials themselves.

An extension of this study 34 investigated the potential benefits of the practical life materials for fine motor control by comparing 5-year olds in Montessori kindergarten programmes with 5-year olds in a conventional programme (reported to have similarities in teaching mission and pupil background characteristics) on the 'flag posting test'. In this task, the child was given a solid hardwood tray covered with clay in which there were 12 pinholes. There were also 12 paper flags mounted on pins, six to the right of the tray and six to the left, and the child’s task was to place the flags one at time in the holes. The child received three scores: one for the amount of time taken to finish the activity, one for the number of attempts it took the child to put each flag into the hole, and one for hand dominance (to receive a score of 1 (established dominance) the child had to consistently use the same hand to place all 12 flags, whereas mixed dominance received a score of 0). Children were pre-tested at the beginning of the school year and post-tested 8 months later. Despite the lack of random assignment to groups, the two groups did not differ on pre-test scores, but they did at post-test: at post-test the Montessori group were significantly faster and significantly more accurate at the task, and had more established hand dominance. However, no attempt was made to measure how frequently children in both groups engaged with materials and activities that were designed to support fine motor control development. Furthermore, the children in the Montessori classrooms were at the age where they should also have been using the sensorial materials, some of which (for example, the 'knobbed cylinders' and 'geometric cabinet') are manipulated by holding small knobs, and whose use could potentially enhance fine motor control. At that age children would also have been using the 'insets for design', materials from the early literacy curriculum designed to enhance pencil control. Therefore, although the results of this study are consistent with the practical life materials enhancing fine motor control, the study does not securely establish that they do.

A further study 35 introduced practical life exercises into conventional kindergarten classes, while control kindergarten classes were not given these materials. 15 min were set aside in the experimental schools’ timetable for using the practical life materials, and they were also available during free choice periods. This time the outcome measure at pre-test and post-test was not fine motor skill but attention. There were benefits to attention of being in the experimental group, but only for girls—boys showed no such benefits. The differential gender impact of the practical life materials on the development of attention is puzzling. Girls did not appear to engage with the materials more than boys during the time that was set aside for using them, but no measure was taken of whether girls chose them more frequently than boys during the free choice periods. Similarly, there were no measurements of the time that children in both the experimental and control groups spent engaged in other activities that might have enhanced fine motor control. Nor is it clear whether it was the fine motor practice directly or rather the opportunity to select interesting activities (the teachers in the experimental schools commented on how interesting the children found the practical life activities) that was responsible for the benefits to attention that were recorded for girls.

Finally, it has been found that young adolescents in Montessori middle schools show greater intrinsic motivation than their peers in conventional middle schools (matched for an impressive array of background variables, including ethnicity, parental education and employment, home resources, parental involvement in school, and number of siblings). 36 The authors did not establish exactly which elements of the Montessori method might be responsible for this finding, but they did speculate that the following might be relevant: “students were provided at least 2 h per day to exercise choice and self-regulation; none of the students received mandatory grades; student grouping was primarily based on shared interests, not standardised tests; and students collaborated often with other students”. The authors did not evaluate the Montessori and non-Montessori groups on any measures of academic outcomes, but given the links between academic success and motivation at all stages of education (they provide a useful review of this literature), this link would be worth investigating in Montessori schools.

This section has discussed studies that have evaluated the Montessori method directly. To date there have been very few methodologically robust evaluations. Many suffer from limitations that make it challenging to interpret their findings, whether those findings are favourable, neutral or unfavourable towards the Montessori method. However, while randomised control trials could (and should) be designed to evaluate individual elements of the Montessori method, it is difficult to see how the random assignment of pupils to schools could work in practice (hence the ingenuity of the study reported in ref. 18 ). Nor could trials be appropriately blinded—teachers, and perhaps parents and pupils too, would know whether they were in the Montessori arm of the trial. In other words, although random assignment and blinding might work for specific interventions, it is hard to see how they could work for an entire school curriculum. Furthermore, given the complexity of identifying what it is that works, why it works, and for whom it works best, additional information, for example from observations of what children and teachers are actually doing in the classroom, would be needed for interpreting the results.

Evaluations of key elements of Montessori education that are shared with other educational methods

This final section examines studies that have not evaluated the Montessori method directly, but have evaluated other educational methods and interventions that share elements of the Montessori method. They, together with our growing understanding of the science underpinning learning, can add to the evidence base for Montessori education. Given the vast amount of research and the limited space in which to consider it, priority is given to systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

One of the best-researched instructional techniques is the use of phonics for teaching children to read. Phonics is the explicit teaching of the letter-sound correspondences that allow the child to crack the alphabetic code. Montessori’s first schools were in Italy, and Italian orthography has relatively transparent one-to-one mappings between letters and sounds, making phonics a logical choice of method for teaching children the mechanics of reading and spelling. English orthography is, however, much less regular: the mappings between letters and sounds are many-to-many, and for this reason the use of phonics as a method of instruction has been challenged for English. 37 Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness despite English’s irregularities. 38 , 39 , 40 At the same time, great strides have been made in elucidating the neural mechanisms that underlie early reading and reading impairments, and these too demonstrate the importance to successful reading of integrating sound and visual representations. 41

As always in education, the devil is in the detail. Importantly, phonics programmes have the greatest impact on reading accuracy when they are systematic. 39 , 40 By 'systematic' it is meant that letter-sound relationships are taught in an organised sequence, rather than being taught on an ad hoc as-and-when-needed basis. However, within systematic teaching of phonics there are two very different approaches: synthetic phonics and analytic phonics. Synthetic phonics starts from the parts and works up to the whole: children learn the sounds that correspond to letters or groups of letters and use this knowledge to sound out words from left to right. Analytic phonics starts from the whole and drills down to the parts: sound-letter relationships are inferred from sets of words which share a letter and sound, e.g., \(\underline{h}\) at , \(\underline{h}\) en , \(\underline{h}\) ill , \(\underline{h}\) orse . Few randomised control trials have pitted synthetic and analytic phonics against one another, and it is not clear that either has the advantage. 40

The Montessori approach to teaching phonics is certainly systematic. Many schools in the UK, for example, use word lists drawn from Morris’s 'Phonics 44'. 42 , 43 Furthermore, the Montessori approach to phonics is synthetic rather than analytic: children are taught the sound-letter code before using it to encode words (in spelling) and decode them (in reading). One of the criticisms of synthetic phonics is that it teaches letters and sounds removed from their meaningful language context, in a way that analytic phonics does not. 44 It has long been recognised that the goal of reading is comprehension. Reading for meaning requires both code-based skills and language skills such as vocabulary, morphology, syntax and inferencing skills, 45 and these two sets of skills are not rigidly separated, but rather interact at multiple levels. 46 Indeed, phonics instruction works best where it is integrated with text-level reading instruction. 39 , 40 The explicit teaching of phonics within a rich language context—both spoken and written—is central to the Montessori curriculum. No evaluations have yet pitted phonics teaching in the Montessori classroom versus phonics teaching in the conventional classroom, however, and so whether the former is differentially effective is not known.

Research into writing supports Montessori’s view that writing involves a multitude of component skills, including handwriting, spelling, vocabulary and sentence construction. 47 , 48 Proficiency in these skills predicts the quality of children’s written compositions. 49 , 50 In the Montessori classroom these skills are worked on independently before being brought together, but they can continue to be practised independently. A growing body of research from conventional and special education classrooms demonstrates that the specific teaching of the component skills of writing improves the quality of children’s written compositions. 51 , 52 , 53 , 54

With respect to teaching mathematics to young children, there are many recommendations that Montessori teachers would recognise in their own classrooms, such as teaching geometry, number and operations using a developmental progression, and using progress monitoring to ensure that mathematics instruction builds on what each child knows. 55 Some of the recommended activities, such as 'help children to recognise, name, and compare shapes, and then teach them to combine and separate shapes' 55 map exactly on to Montessori’s sensorial materials such as the geometric cabinet and the constructive triangles. Other activities such as 'encourage children to label collections with number words and numerals' 55 map onto Montessori’s early mathematics material such as the number rods, the spindle box and the cards and counters. The importance of conceptual knowledge as the foundation for children being able to understand fractions has been stressed. 56 The Montessori fraction circles—which provide a sensorial experience with the fractions from one whole to ten tenths—provide just such a foundation, as do practical life exercises such as preparing snacks (how should a banana be cut so that it can be shared between three children?) and folding napkins.

Finally in this section, it is worth returning to the sustained attention and self-regulation that have been argued to characterise children’s engagement with the learning materials in the Montessori classroom. 2 , 3 , 4 These are important parts of the complex cognitive construct of executive functions (EFs), which also include inhibition, working memory and planning. Put simply, EFs are the set of processes that allow us to control our thoughts and actions in order to engage in motivated, goal-directed behaviour. That EFs are critical for academic success is backed by a wealth of research evidence. 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 Given this key role, EFs have become the target for a number of individually-administered interventions, full curricula, and add-ons to classroom curricula, such as CogMed (Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ), Tools of the Mind, 62 PATHS (PATHS Training LLC, Seattle, WA), music, yoga and martial arts. A review study compared these, including Montessori education, and concluded that compared to interventions such as CogMed that solely target EFs, 'school curricula hold the greatest promise for accessibility to all and intervening early enough to get children on a positive trajectory from the start and affecting EFs most broadly'. 63

Conclusions

Montessori education has been in existence for over a hundred years. Such longevity could well be due, at least in part, to its adaptability. 6 However, by its very nature, of course, greater adaptability means lower fidelity. This paper has discussed evidence that children may benefit cognitively and socially from Montessori education that is faithful to its creator’s principles, but it is less clear that adapted forms—which usually result in children spending less time engaged with self-chosen learning materials—are as effective. Nevertheless, studies suggest that the practical life materials can be usefully introduced into non-Montessori classrooms to support the development of young children’s fine motor skills and attention, and there is ample evidence from the wider educational literature that certain elements of the Montessori method—such as teaching early literacy through a phonic approach embedded in a rich language context, and providing a sensorial foundation for mathematics education—are effective. It has not been possible in this paper to give an exhaustive discussion of all the elements of Montessori education that might be beneficial, for example the lack of extrinsic rewards, the reduced emphasis on academic testing and lack of competition between pupils, the 3-year age-banding that fosters cross-age tutoring, or the presence of a trained teacher in the early years classroom.

Where does this leave Montessori education more than 100 years after its birth, and more than 60 years after the death of its creator? As others have noted, Montessori was a scientist who truly valued the scientific method and would not have expected her educational method to remain static. 64 Yet Montessori teachers often feel fear or uncertainty about being able to apply Montessori’s theories in new and innovative ways while still adhering to her underlying philosophical principles. 65 Ultimately, only empirical research, undertaken by teachers and researchers working together, can be our guide, because the questions that need answering are empirical in nature. Neuroscientific research—using neuroimaging methods which were not available in Montessori’s day—might also play a guiding role. For example, Montessori was prescient in her views that adolescence was a special time in development where the individual required a specially-designed form of education to address their needs. 66 Recent neuroimaging evidence points to adolescence as indeed being an important period for neural development, particularly for areas involved in executive functions and social cognition. 67 , 68 Montessori did not fully develop her ideas for the education of 12–18-year olds during her lifetime, but it is an area where current Montessorians might be able to take over the reins. Although some Montessori schools take pupils up to the age of 18, they are few and far between, and to my knowledge there are no published evaluations of their effectiveness. Developing a Montessori education for this age group in conjunction with the best of our current knowledge of developmental cognitive neuroscience has the potential to make a very positive contribution.

Nor did Montessori consider using her method with the elderly. In the context of a rapidly aging population and increasing numbers of elderly adults with acquired cognitive impairments such as those that result from Alzheimer’s disease, 69 it is interesting to note that the Montessori method is now being adapted for use with dementia patients, with the aim of improving functioning in activities of daily living, such as feeding, and in cognition. There is strong evidence for a reduction in difficulties with eating, weak evidence for benefits on cognition, and mixed evidence for benefits on constructive engagement and positive affect. 70 However, the quality of studies varies across domains; those evaluating effects on cognition have been of rather poor quality so far, and they have not yet examined whether there might be long-term effects. Nevertheless, given the challenges to developing successful medication for patients with Alzheimer’s disease despite a detailed knowledge of changes in their neurobiology, it would be sensible to continue the search for successful behavioural interventions alongside that for medical interventions. 71 One method for delivering Montessori-based activities to the elderly is via inter-generational programmes, whereby older adults with dementia are supported in teaching Montessori-based lessons to preschool children. Benefits have been reported for the adults involved, 72 but whether the children also benefit in particular ways from such inter-generational teaching has not been evaluated. Nor is it known whether a Montessori education in childhood or Montessori-based activities experienced in later life can protect the executive control circuits of the brain, as has been proposed for bilingualism. 73 A lifespan approach to the evaluation of the Montessori method involving both behavioural and neuroimaging methods might be valuable.

In sum, there are many methodological challenges to carrying out good quality educational research, including good quality research on the Montessori method. Arguably the most obvious challenge to emerge from the literature reviewed here is the practical difficulty of randomly allocating pupils to Montessori and non-Montessori schools in order to compare outcomes. The majority of studies have relied instead on trying to match pupils and teachers in Montessori and non-Montessori schools on a number of different variables, with the concomitant danger that unidentified factors have contributed to any difference in outcomes. Even if randomisation is achievable, studies need to be conducted on a large enough scale to not only allow generalisations to be made beyond the particular schools studied, but to also allow investigation of which children the Montessori method suits best. On a more optimistic note, recent experimental studies—whereby features of existing Montessori classrooms are manipulated in some way, or features of the Montessori method are added to non-Montessori classrooms—hold promise for investigating the effectiveness of particular elements of the Montessori method. The evidence base can be strengthened yet further by drawing on research of educational interventions with which it shares certain elements, and by drawing on related research in the science of learning. National and regional education systems are beset by regular swings of the pendulum, for example towards and away from phonics, 74 and towards and away from children working individually. 75 This means that elements of the Montessori method will sometimes be in vogue and sometimes not. It is therefore particularly important that Montessori teachers understand the evidence base that supports, or does not support, their pedagogy.

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I dedicate this work to Sandra Nash Petrek (1939–2017), an inspiring Montessorian.

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The Montessori Movement in Interwar Europe pp 65–92 Cite as

Individual Work: British Montessorism

• Christine Quarfood 2  
• First Online: 06 November 2022

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This chapter reconstructs the British Montessori debate 1919–1923 as reflected in the Times Educational Supplement . Focus is on the reception within the teaching community from which the Montessori movement recruited most of its followers, as well as the response from leading educationalists. While the latter group embraced the Montessori principle of liberty, the teachers’ interest in this new method of individual work was more hands on, circling around the didactic materials. There were, however, controversies concerning the correct interpretation of Montessorism, which eventually led to the split of the British Montessori Society. The crucial issue was whether a unilateral methodological approach was compatible with the pluralistic freedom of choice of classical liberalism. Many British sympathisers believed that a liberal education ought to offer an eclectic combination of different stimulating educational methods. Whether day-care supplied by unqualified staff was sufficient for 5-year-olds was another debate topic in 1922, in the wake of the Geddes committee’s savings plan.

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Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978) 271, Sol Cohen, “The Montessori Movement in England: 1911–1952”, History of Education (2:2, 1973) 51–67.

Richard J. W. Selleck, English Primary Education and the Progressives, 1914–1939 (London: Routledge, 1972) 23–25.

Cohen, “The Montessori Movement”, 53–55, Claude A. Claremont, A Review of Montessori Literature (London: Dent & Sons, 1919) 16–17, 23–26, Kramer, Maria Montessori , 242, 244.

Kramer, Maria Montessori , 243, Cohen, “The Montessori Movement”, 57, 60, Selleck, English Primary Education , 44–46, Selleck, The New Education , 210–211.

Kramer, Maria Montessori , 244, Cohen, “The Montessori Movement”, 60.

Kramer, Maria Montessori , 244, 274, Anna Pallin, “Några intryck från en kurs i London hösten 1919”, Skola och samhälle (1:2, 1920) 93.

Kramer, Maria Montessori , 254–258, 264–265, Sheila Radice, The New Children: Talks with Dr Maria Montessori (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920) 40, 119–122, 154–161, Maria Montessori, Letter to Arturo Labriola 24 Sep. 1920, Il metodo del bambino e la formazione dell’uomo. Scritti e documenti inediti e rari , Augusto Scocchera (ed.), (Rome: Opera Nazionale Montessori, 2002) 258–260.

Radice, The New Children , 139.

Radice, The New Children , 5–9, Kramer, Maria Montessori , 264.

Radice, The New Children , ix-xiv, Kramer, Maria Montessori , 258.

Radice, The New Children , xi-xii, 34–35, 43–45, 49–51, 60, 75–80, 98, 100, 104.

Radice, The New Children , 67.

Radice, The New Children , 70.

Radice, The New Children , 95.

Radice, The New Children , 106.

Grazia Honegger Fresco, Maria Montessori, una storia attuale (Naples: L’Ancora, 2008) 109, Daniele Novara, “Educatori senza frontiere: un intervista a Renilde Montessori”, Montessori perché no? Una pedagogia per la crescita , Grazia Honegger Fresco (ed.) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000) 350–354.

Radice, The New Children , 42. For Bowlby’s theories see Denise Riley, War in the Nursery (London: Virago, 1983). For Anna Freud and pedagogy inspired by child psychoanalysis, see Sol Cohen, “In the name of the prevention of Neurosis: the search for psychoanalytic pedagogy in Europe 1905–1938”, Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective , Barbara Finkelstein (ed.) (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979) 184–217, Nicola Palumbo, Maria Montessori e Anna Freud. Una storia femminile della psicologia del bambino (Rome: Edizioni Universitarie Romane, 2019).

Radice, The New Children, 78–79, 97, 139, 147. For Dubois and Déjerine, see Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (London: Basic Books, 1970) 791, 793, 795, 797, 800.

Radice, The New Children , x, xiii, 5, Claremont, A Review of Montessori Literature , 20.

Radice, The New Children , 37, 82, 86, 92–99, 103, 144.

Maria Montessori, L’Autoeducazione nelle scuole elementari: continuazione del volume Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile nelle Case dei Bambini (1916) (Milan: Garzanti,1992) 151.

Cohen, “The Montessori Movement” (1973) 63.

Kramer, Maria Montessori , 276–277.

Selleck, English Primary Education , 29, 61, 63–67.

Selleck, English Primary Education , 30.

“Conference Week, Reports and Summaries” TES (6/1, 1921) 7, “Joint Conference of Educational Associations” TES (6/1, 1921) 8, “Froebel Society, 46:th Annual Meeting, Individual Occupations” TES (13/1, 1921) 21, “The Montessori Method” TES (10/2, 1921) 62, “The New Era” TES (31/3, 1921) 145, “The Future of the Class” TES (14/4, 1921) 165, “Child Study Society, Individual Training” TES (19/5, 1921) 227. For The New Era , see Kevin J Brehony, “A New Education for a New Era: Creating International Fellowship through Conferences 1921–1938”, Paedagogica Historica (40:5–6, 2004) 733–755.

“Joint Conference of Educational Associations” TES (6/1, 1921) 8, “Conference Week, Montessori Society” TES (13/1, 1921) 21, “The Montessori Method, Address by Miss Drummond” TES (17/2, 1921) 71.

“Conference week, Montessori Society” TES (13/1, 1921) 21.

Bang, “The Montessori Method” TES (20/1, 1921) 29, Cohen , “The Montessori Movement” 61.

“The ‘New’ Psychology” TES (13/1, 1921) 17.

Herbert M. Beatty, “Montessori Principles” TES ( 3/2, 1921) 48.

“Dr Montessori on Behavior” TES (21/4, 1921) 179.

“Culture or Anarchy?” TES (28/4, 1921) 195.

Alfred Hutton Radice, “The Montessori Method” TES ( 5 /5, 1921) 204.

Maria Montessori, “Dr Montessori on Mental Tests” TES (11/6, 1921) 261.

Maria Montessori, “Dr Montessori’s First Lecture: Theory and Reality” TES ( 7 /4, 1921) 159.

Montessori, “Dr Montessori’s First Lecture”, 160.

Radice, The New Children , 163, Cohen, “The Montessori Movement” , 61.

Kramer, Maria Montessori , 272–277, “The Montessori Society” TES (21/1, 1922) 32.

Kramer, Maria Montessori , 272–273, Claremont, A Review of Montessori Literature , 23, “Notes”, TES (10/3, 1921), 10, “Infant Teaching, the Children’s Part”, TES (27/5, 1922) 243.

“Educational Apparatus” TES (28/1, 1922) 41, “Infant Teaching, the Children’s Part” TES (27/5, 1922) 243.

Selleck, English Primary Education, 43, Claremont, A Review of Montessori Literature , 12–13.

Individual Work” TES (4/2, 1922) 51, “Individual Work” TES (1/3, 1922) 110, “Individual Work” TES (15/4, 1922) 169, “Teaching Appliances” TES (6/5, 1922) 212, “Infant Teaching, the Children’s Part” TES (27/5, 1922) 243, “Individual Work, The Montessori Method” TES (10/6, 1922) 267.

“The Montessori Method”, TES (8/4, 1922) 161, “Individual Work, the Montessori Method” TES (3/6, 1922) 255, “Methods Compared”, TES (25/11, 1922) 511.

Jessie White, “Letters to the Editor, Teaching Apparatus”, TES (12/5, 1923) 228.

Selleck, English Primary Education, 22, 130–131, “Cuts in Education, Unanimous Protests”, TES (11/2, 1922) 66, “Teachers on the Geddes Proposals”, TES (4/3, 1922) 102.

“Mr Fisher at Birmingham”, TES (4/3, 1922) 103, “The Education Cuts, Mr. Fishers’s Statement”, TES (11/3, 1922), 114, “Mr. Fisher’s Apologies”, TES (11/3, 1922) 115.

“Children Under Six”, TES (18/3, 1922) 128, “Individual Work”, TES (15/4, 1922) 169.

Maria Montessori, “Letters to the Editor, Children Under Six”, TES (24/6, 1922) 295.

Belle Rennie and Helen Parkhurst, “Letters to the Editor, Staffing of Infant Schools”, TES (1/7, 1922) 307, Lily Hutchinson, “A Review of the Montessori Movement in England”, The Call of Education (1:1, 1924) 68–73.

“New Books”, TES (4/8, 1923) 363.

“Teaching Material, New Devices”, TES (20/10, 1923) 464.

“English Montessori Schools”, TES (7/4, 1923) 163. Lawrence’s lecture was entitled “How the Montessori Class Develops True Individual Work”.

Martin Lawn, “A Pedagogy for the Public: the place of objects, observation, mechanical production and cupboards”, Materialities of Schooling, Design – Technology – Objects – Routines , Ian Grosvenor (ed.) (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2005) 145–162.

Anna Maria Maccheroni, A True Romance, Doctor Maria Montessori As I Knew Her (Edinburgh: The Darien Press, 1947) 105–107.

Selleck, English Primary Education, 136–150.

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13 Best Montessori Books for Parents and Educators

We’re sharing our favorite literature on the world renowned Montessori Method. Find 13 best Montessori books for parents and educators.

Disclosure : This site contains affiliate links for products and services I recommend. When you make a purchase through an affiliate link, at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission. Read our full disclosure here.

It’s no secret that I absolutely adore the Montessori method of learning.

Rooted in the idea that children learn by doing, Montessori teaches discovery of the natural world through play and interaction. The signature method also provides a solid work ethic and a sense of individuality. You’ve probably heard the phrase: teach me to teach myself.

If you’re looking to learn more about the Montessori method, or adopt some tried and true Montessori style techniques you can repeat at home, you might love this round up of the Montessori books for parents and educators.

Learn more about Maria Montessori’s specific method of learning, what “works” are best for classrooms and at home, and how to use Montessori for childhood transitions, such as behavior challenges, potty training, sharing, and more.

Read up on some of the best Montessori books and research by Maria Montessori, herself, or snag a modern title that blends millennial parenting with her groundbreaking education style.

Best Montessori Books for Parents and Educators

The Montessori Toddler by Simone Davies

One of the absolute best Montessori books for parents, The Montessori Toddler marries traditional elements of Montessori education with modern parenting struggles and child development.

Davies will help you turn your home into a Montessori home and change the way you see your toddler. Be more mindful and attentive to your toddler and reframe difficult stages, like the terrible twos and potty training, into magnificent transition stages. Through curiosity, learning, respect, and wonderment, learn to truly love every stage of parenting toddlers. // Get a copy here.

The Montessori Baby is expected out in March of 2021.

Montessori: A Modern Approach by Paula Polk Lillard

Montessori: A Modern Approach is considered one of the best Montessori books for parents, teachers, childcare professionals, and just about anyone curious about the Montessori method.

She answers many common questions, including is Montessori relevant today and is it right for your child ? Most importantly, she considers Montessori in the context of modern families with two working parents. // Get a copy here.

Montessori From the Start by Lynn Lillard Jessen and Paula Polk Lillard

Jessen and Lillard answer one of many parents’ most pressing questions: how does hands on learning relate to infants? Based on Maria Montessori’s instructions for infant rearing, Lillard delivers a comprehensive blueprint in all of her Montessori books for parents – this one specifically for the first three year’s of a child’s life.

From furniture and room layout, to clothing and toys, learn everything necessary to create the perfect Montessori environment from day one. Also learn about “sensitive periods” – or specific areas of learning, like dressing oneself – and how Montessori can guide parents appropriately. // Get a copy here.

How To Raise An Amazing Child the Montessori Way by Tim Seldin

How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way is one of the top best selling Montessori books for parents. This guide enables parents in helping their children build independence, confidence, and creativity through Montessori techniques.

Seldin adapts traditional Montessori classroom methods to bring them into the home. You’ll also find preschool activities, games, and checklists for learning and development. The 2017 edition (linked) also includes updates in neuroscience and child development, as well as advice on screen time and digital devices. // Get a copy here.

Teach Me to Do it Myself: Montessori Activities for You and Your Child by Maja Pitamic

Based on Maria Montessori’s observations that children learn best while doing, Teach Me to do it Myself offers simple activities to help children learn. Areas of focus include sensory, coordination, language, numbers, and movement.

Though this is one of the oldest Montessori books for parents that we will highlight, the classic activities features are timeless. Skills that are automated as adults, such as using a scissor or pouring from a cup, are broken down with checklists so children can feel a sense of accomplishment. // Get a copy here.

Montessori Madness by Trevor Eissler

Different from many other Montessori books for parents and teachers, Montessori Madness delves into the struggles of a modern education system and begs us to look at an alternative solution. The answer isn’t more homework, more teacher qualifications, longer school days, testing, or funding, but Montessori!

Eissler makes a firm but humorous argument for the under represented Montessori method. Furthermore, he dares to claim that it’s revolutionary and dangerous for modern education because of one thing: children actually love to learn. // Get a copy here.

Practical Guide to the Montessori Method at Home by Julia Palmarola

One of the best Montessori books for parents looking to bring Montessori home, this guide covers a basic introduction to Montessori, Montessori “works” or materials worth purchasing, and specific activities by subject and age (0-6).

Parents short on time, or looking for an inexpensive approach, will appreciate how accessible and affordable the author’s blueprint it. // Get a copy here.

Montessori Lab at Home by Chiara Piroddi

What are the best methods and materials for child development and education? How can we unleash our child’s unlimited potential? The Montessori Lab provides activities, routines, strategies to make Montessori accessible to everyone.

Create games and toys, learn subjects like math and science through hands on activities, and help your children master life skills like getting dressed through fine and gross motor skills. // Get a copy here.

The Montessori Home by Olivia Orlando

One of the best Montessori books for parents, The Montessori Home helps readers thoughtfully curate routine, build self confidence, and turn a home into a little explorer’s Montessori paradise.

Whether you know a lot or a little about Montessori, you’ll discover unique ways to set up an appropriate environment and rethink your role as a parent. // Get a copy here.

Where Can You Get These Montessori Books for Parents at a Discounted Price?

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More of the Best Montessori Books by Maria Montessori

Without a doubt, some of the best Montessori books are by Maria Montessori, herself. Read up on her research and reframe the way you view children, their potential, and the way they learn.

The Montessori Method

Montessori is founded in self direction, on the part of the child, and observation, on the part of the educator. Learn how to structure the child’s learning environment, based on development, to absorb abstract skills. Teachers, in particular, will consider her findings eye-opening. // Get a copy here.

Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook

One of the best Montessori books for teachers to read, Maria Montessori’s handbook is her response to thousands of questions from American educators. Learn about the theory and science behind Maria Montessori’s educational method and, in her own words, how to “free a child to learn through his own efforts.” // Get a copy here.

The Secret of Childhood

Maria Montessori believes that children have exceptional learning potential; we just need to unleash it. Through the eyes of a scientist, discover materials and techniques needed to achieve this. // Get a copy here.

The Absorbent Mind

Maria Montessori’s most in depth work, The Absorbent Mind is rooted in decades of observing childhood and education. Montessori began an educational revolution with her groundbreaking model of teaching. Since, numerous scientific and pedagogical studies have confirmed Montessori’s findings. // Get a copy here.

Which of these popular and best Montessori books for parents and teachers are you eyeing?

Have you read any books by Maria Montessori? What about others? If there’s anything you’d add to this list, let us know in the comments. What are some of the best Montessori books that have helped you as a parent or teacher?

Save These Best Montessori Books for Parents and Teachers to Pinterest:

More Montessori Posts You Might Enjoy:

• 100 Best Wooden and Montessori Toys by Age

These are by far the most helpful Montessori books internationally. The author has 50 years of experience and 30 countries. You might want to share them. http://www.michaelolaf.net/firstmontessoribooks.html

You might want to have a look at these books

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Montessori education: a review of the evidence base

Chloë marshall.

Department of Psychology and Human Development, UCL Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK

The Montessori educational method has existed for over 100 years, but evaluations of its effectiveness are scarce. This review paper has three aims, namely to (1) identify some key elements of the method, (2) review existing evaluations of Montessori education, and (3) review studies that do not explicitly evaluate Montessori education but which evaluate the key elements identified in (1). The goal of the paper is therefore to provide a review of the evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective.

Introduction

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was by any measure an extraordinary individual. She initially resisted going into teaching—one of the few professions available to women in the late 19th century—and instead became one of the very first women to qualify as a medical doctor in Italy. As a doctor she specialised in psychiatry and paediatrics. While working with children with intellectual disabilities she gained the important insight that in order to learn, they required not medical treatment but rather an appropriate pedagogy. In 1900, she was given the opportunity to begin developing her pedagogy when she was appointed director of an Orthophrenic school for developmentally disabled children in Rome. When her pupils did as well in their exams as typically developing pupils and praise was lavished upon her for this achievement, she did not lap up that praise; rather, she wondered what it was about the education system in Italy that was failing children without disabilities. What was holding them back and preventing them from reaching their potential? In 1907 she had the opportunity to start working with non-disabled children in a housing project located in a slum district of Rome. There, she set up her first 'Casa dei Bambini' ('children’s house') for 3–7-year olds. She continued to develop her distinctive pedagogy based on a scientific approach of experimentation and observation. On the basis of this work, she argued that children pass through sensitive periods for learning and several stages of development, and that children’s self-construction can be fostered through engaging with self-directed activities in a specially prepared environment. There was international interest in this new way of teaching, and there are now thousands of Montessori schools (predominantly for children aged 3–6 and 6–12) throughout the world. 1 – 4

Central to Montessori’s method of education is the dynamic triad of child, teacher and environment. One of the teacher’s roles is to guide the child through what Montessori termed the 'prepared environment, i.e., a classroom and a way of learning that are designed to support the child’s intellectual, physical, emotional and social development through active exploration, choice and independent learning. One way of making sense of the Montessori method for the purposes of this review is to consider two of its important aspects: the learning materials, and the way in which the teacher and the design of the prepared environment promote children’s self-directed engagement with those materials. With respect to the learning materials, Montessori developed a set of manipulable objects designed to support children’s learning of sensorial concepts such as dimension, colour, shape and texture, and academic concepts of mathematics, literacy, science, geography and history. With respect to engagement, children learn by engaging hands-on with the materials most often individually, but also in pairs or small groups, during a 3-h 'work cycle' in which they are guided by the teacher to choose their own activities. They are given the freedom to choose what they work on, where they work, with whom they work, and for how long they work on any particular activity, all within the limits of the class rules. No competition is set up between children, and there is no system of extrinsic rewards or punishments. These two aspects—the learning materials themselves, and the nature of the learning—make Montessori classrooms look strikingly different to conventional classrooms.

It should be noted that for Montessori the goal of education is to allow the child’s optimal development (intellectual, physical, emotional and social) to unfold. 2 This is a very different goal to that of most education systems today, where the focus is on attainment in academic subjects such as literacy and mathematics. Thus when we ask the question, as this review paper does, whether children benefit more from a Montessori education than from a non-Montessori education, we need to bear in mind that the outcome measures used to capture effectiveness do not necessarily measure the things that Montessori deemed most important in education. Teachers and parents who choose the Montessori method may choose it for reasons that are not so amenable to evaluation.

Despite its existence for over 100 years, peer-reviewed evaluations of Montessori education are few and they suffer from a number of methodological limitations, as will be discussed in Section 3. This review has three aims, namely to (1) identify some key elements of the Montessori educational method, (2) review existing evaluations of Montessori education, and (3) review studies that do not explicitly evaluate Montessori education but which evaluate the key elements identified in (1). My goal is to provide a review of the scientific evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective.

Some key elements of the Montessori educational method

The goal of this section is to isolate some key elements of the Montessori method, in order to better understand why, if Montessori education is effective, this might be, and what elements of it might usefully be evaluated by researchers. These are important considerations because there is considerable variability in how the Montessori method is implemented in different schools, and the name, which is not copyrighted, is frequently used without full adherence. 5 , 6 Nevertheless, some elements of the method might still be beneficial, or could be successfully incorporated (or, indeed, are already incorporated) into schools that do not want to carry the name 'Montessori' or to adhere fully to its principles. Pinpointing more precisely what—if anything—about the Montessori method is effective will enable a better understanding of why it works. Furthermore, it has been argued that there might be dangers in adopting wholesale and uncritically an educational method that originated over 100 years ago, in a world that was different in many ways to today’s. 7 If the method is to be adopted piecemeal, which pieces should be adopted? As outlined previously, two important aspects of Montessori’s educational method are the learning materials, and the self-directed nature of children’s engagement with those materials. Some key elements of each of these aspects will now be considered in turn.

The learning materials

The first learning materials that the child is likely to encounter in the Montessori classroom are those that make up the practical life curriculum. These are activities that involve pouring different materials, using utensils such as scissors, tongs and tweezers, cleaning and polishing, preparing snacks, laying the table and washing dishes, arranging flowers, gardening, doing up and undoing clothes fastenings, and so on. Their aims, in addition to developing the child’s skills for independent living, are to build up the child’s gross and fine motor control and eye-hand co-ordination, to introduce them to the cycle of selecting, initiating, completing and tidying up an activity (of which more in the next section), and to introduce the rules for functioning in the social setting of the classroom.

As the child settles into the cycle of work and shows the ability to focus on self-selected activities, the teacher will introduce the sensorial materials. The key feature of the sensorial materials is that each isolates just one concept for the child to focus on. The pink tower, for example, consists of ten cubes which differ only in their dimensions, the smallest being 1 cm 3 , the largest 10 cm 3 . In building the tower the child’s attention is being focused solely on the regular decrease in volume of successive cubes. There are no additional cues—different colours for example, or numbers written onto the faces of the cube—which might help the child to sequence the cubes accurately. Another piece of sensorial material, the sound boxes, contains six pairs of closed cylinders that vary in sound from soft to loud when shaken, and the task for the child is to find the matching pairs. Again, there is only one cue that the child can use to do this task: sound. The aim of the sensorial materials is not to bombard the child’s senses with stimuli; on the contrary, they are tools designed for enabling the child to classify and put names to the stimuli that he will encounter on an everyday basis.

The sensorial materials, are, furthermore, designed as preparation for academic subjects. The long rods, which comprise ten red rods varying solely in length in 10 cm increments from 10 cm to 1 m, have an equivalent in the mathematics materials: the number rods, where the rods are divided into alternating 10 cm sections of red and blue so that they take on the numerical values 1–10. The touchboards, which consist of alternate strips of sandpaper and smooth paper for the child to feel, are preparation for the sandpaper globe in geography—a globe where the land masses are made of rough sandpaper but the oceans and seas are smooth. The touchboards are also preparation for the sandpaper letters in literacy and sandpaper numerals in mathematics, which the child learns to trace with his index and middle fingers.

Key elements of the literacy curriculum include the introduction of writing before reading, the breaking down of the constituent skills of writing (pencil control, letter formation, spelling) before the child actually writes words on paper, and the use of phonics for teaching sound-letter correspondences. Grammar—parts of speech, morphology, sentence structure—are taught systematically through teacher and child-made materials.

In the mathematics curriculum, quantities 0–10 and their symbols are introduced separately before being combined, and large quantities and symbols (tens, hundreds and thousands) and fractions are introduced soon after, all through concrete materials. Operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, the calculation of square roots) are again introduced using concrete materials, which the child can choose to stop using when he is able to succeed without that concrete support.

Principles running throughout the design of these learning materials are that the child learns through movement and gains a concrete foundation with the aim of preparing him for learning more abstract concepts. A further design principle is that each piece of learning material has a 'control of error' which alerts the child to any mistakes, thereby allowing self-correction with minimal teacher support.

Self-directed engagement with the materials

Important though the learning materials are, 8 they do not, in isolation, constitute the Montessori method because they need to be engaged with in a particular way. Montessori observed that the young child is capable of concentrating for long periods of time on activities that capture his spontaneous interest. 2 – 4 There are two features of the way that children engage with the learning materials that Montessori claimed promoted this concentration. The first is that there is a cycle of activity surrounding the use of each piece of material (termed the 'internal work cycle ' 9 ). If a child wishes to use the pink tower, for example, he will have to find a space on the floor large enough to unroll the mat that will delineate his work area, carry the ten cubes of the pink tower individually to the mat from where they are stored, then build the tower. Once he has built the tower he is free to repeat this activity as many times as he likes. Other children may come and watch, and if he wishes they can join in with him, but he will be able to continue on his own if he prefers and for as long as he likes. When he has had enough, he will dismantle the pink tower and reassemble it in its original location, ready for another child to use. This repeated and self-chosen engagement with the material, the lack of interruption, and the requirement to set up the material and put it away afterwards, are key elements aimed at developing the child’s concentration. 10

The second feature which aims to promote concentration is that these cycles of activity take place during a 3-h period of time (termed the 'external work cycle' 9 ). During those 3 h children are mostly free to select activities on their own and with others, and to find their own rhythm of activity, moving freely around the classroom as they do so. One might wonder what the role of the teacher is during this period. Although the children have a great deal of freedom in what they do, their freedom is not unlimited. The teacher’s role is to guide children who are finding it hard to select materials or who are disturbing others, to introduce new materials to children who are ready for a new challenge, and to conduct small-group lessons. Her decisions about what to teach are made on the basis of careful observations of the children. Although she might start the day with plans of what she will do during the work cycle, she will be led by her students and their needs, and there is no formal timetable. Hence the Montessori classroom is very different to the teacher-led conventional classroom with its highly structured day where short timeslots are devoted to each activity, the whole class is engaged in the same activities at the same time, and the teacher instructs at the front of the class.

In summary, there are two aspects of Montessori classrooms that are very different to conventional classrooms: the learning materials themselves, and the individual, self-directed nature of the learning under the teacher’s expert guidance. All the elements described here—the features of the learning materials themselves (e.g., each piece of material isolates just one concept, each contains a control of error that allows for self-correction, learning proceeds from concrete to abstract concepts) and the child-led manner of engagement with those materials (e.g., self-selection, repeated and active engagement, tidying up afterwards, freedom from interruption, lack of grades and extrinsic rewards) might potentially benefit development and learning over the teaching of the conventional classroom. We will return to many of the elements discussed here in the following two sections. (This has necessarily been only a brief survey of some of the most important elements of the Montessori method. Readers wanting to find out more are again directed to refs. 2 – 4 ).

Evaluations of Montessori education

There are few peer-reviewed evaluations of Montessori education, and the majority have been carried out in the USA. Some have evaluated children’s outcomes while those children were in Montessori settings, and others have evaluated Montessori-educated children after a period of subsequent conventional schooling. As a whole this body of research suffers from several methodological limitations. Firstly, few studies are longitudinal in design. Secondly, there are no good quality randomised control trials; most researchers have instead tried to match participants in Montessori and comparison groups on as many likely confounding variables as possible. Thirdly, if children in the Montessori group do score higher than those in the non-Montessori group on a particular outcome measure, then assuming that that effect can be attributed to being in a Montessori classroom, what exactly is it about Montessori education that has caused the effect? Montessori education is a complex package—how can the specific elements which might be causing the effect be isolated? At a very basic level—and drawing on two of the main aspects of Montessori education outlined above—is the effect due to the learning materials or to the self-directed way in which children engage with them (and can the two be separated)? Fourthly, there are presumably differences between Montessori schools (including the way in which the method is implemented) that might influence children’s outcomes, but studies rarely include more than one Montessori school, and sometimes not more than one Montessori class. Fifthly, and relatedly, there is the issue of 'treatment fidelity'—what counts as a Montessori classroom? Not all schools that call themselves 'Montessori' adhere strictly to Montessori principles, have trained Montessori teachers, or are accredited by a professional organisation. A sixth, and again related, point is that children’s experiences in Montessori education will vary in terms of the length of time they spend in Montessori education, and the age at which they attend. Finally, the numbers of children participating in studies are usually small and quite narrow in terms of their demographics, making generalisation of any results problematic. These methodological issues are not limited to evaluations of Montessori education, of course—they are relevant to much of educational research.

Of these, the lack of randomised control trials is particularly notable given the recognition of their importance in education. 11 , 12 Parents choose their child’s school for a host of different reasons, 13 and randomisation is important in the context of Montessori education because parents who choose a non-conventional school for their child might be different in relevant ways from parents who do not, for example in their views on child-rearing and aspirations for their child’s future. This means that if a study finds a benefit for Montessori education over conventional education this might reflect a parent effect rather than a school effect. Furthermore, randomisation also controls for socio-economic status (SES). Montessori schools are often fee-paying, which means that pupils are likely to come from higher SES families; children from higher SES families are likely to do better in a variety of educational contexts. 14 – 16 A recent report found that even public (i.e., non-fee-paying) Montessori schools in the USA are not representative of the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the neighbourhoods they serve. 17 However, random assignment of children to Montessori versus non-Montessori schools for the purposes of a randomised control trial would be very difficult to achieve because it would take away parental choice.

Arguably the most robust evaluation of the Montessori method to date is that by Lillard and Else-Quest. 18 They compared children in Montessori and non-Montessori education and from two age groups—5 and 12-year olds—on a range of cognitive, academic, social and behavioural measures. Careful thought was given to how to overcome the lack of random assignment to the Montessori and non-Montessori groups. The authors’ solution was to design their study around the school lottery that was already in place in that particular school district. All children had entered the Montessori school lottery; those who were accepted were assigned to the Montessori group, and those who were not accepted were assigned to the comparison (other education systems) group. Post-hoc comparisons showed similar income levels in both sets of families. Although group differences were not found for all outcome measures, where they were found they favoured the Montessori group. For 5-year olds, significant group differences were found for certain academic skills (namely letter-word identification, phonological decoding ability, and math skills), a measure of executive function (the card sort task), social skills (as measured by social reasoning and positive shared play) and theory of mind (as measured by a false-belief task). For 12-year olds, significant group differences were found on measures of story writing and social skills. Furthermore, in a questionnaire that asked about how they felt about school, responses of children in the Montessori group indicated that they felt a greater sense of community. The authors concluded that 'at least 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'. 18

Their study has been criticised for using just one Montessori school, 19 but Lillard and Else-Quest’s response is that the school was faithful to Montessori principles, which suggests that the results might be generalisable to other such schools. 20 That fidelity might impact outcomes has long been of concern, 21 and was demonstrated empirically in a further, longitudinal, study, 6 that compared high fidelity Montessori classes (again, from just one school), 'supplemented' Montessori classes (which provided the Montessori materials plus conventional activities such as puzzles, games and worksheets), and conventional classrooms. Children in these classes were 3–6 years old, and they were tested at two time-points: towards the beginning and towards the end of the school year. Although the study lacked random assignment of children to groups, the groups were matched with respect to key parent variables such as parental education. As in Lillard and Else-Quest’s earlier study, 18 outcome measures tapped a range of social and academic skills related to school readiness (i.e., children’s preparedness to succeed in academic settings). There were two research questions: firstly, do preschool children’s school readiness skills change during the academic year as a function of school type, and secondly, within Montessori schools, does the percentage of children using Montessori materials in a classroom predict children’s school readiness skills at the end of the academic year? Overall, the answer to both questions was “yes”. Children in the high-fidelity Montessori school, as compared with children in the other two types of school, showed significantly greater gains on measures of executive function, reading, math, vocabulary, and social problem-solving. Furthermore, the degree to which children were engaged with Montessori materials significantly predicted gains in executive function, reading and vocabulary. In other words, treatment fidelity mattered: children gained fewer benefits from being in a Montessori school when they were engaged in non-Montessori activities.

This study does not demonstrate definitively that the Montessori materials drove the effect: there might have been other differences between the high and lower fidelity classrooms—such as the teachers’ interactions with their pupils—that were responsible for the difference in child outcomes. 6 In a move to explore the role of the Montessori materials further, a more recent experimental study 22 removed supplementary materials, to leave just the Montessori materials, from two of the three classrooms in a Montessori school that served 3–6-year olds. Over a period of 4 months children in the classrooms from which supplementary materials were removed made significantly greater gains than children from the unchanged classroom on tests of letter-word identification and executive function, although not on measures of vocabulary, theory of mind, maths, or social problem-solving. The authors acknowledge weaknesses in the study design, including the small number of participants (just 52 across the three classrooms) and the short duration. Nevertheless, the study does provide a template for how future experimental manipulations of fidelity to the Montessori method could be carried out.

Fidelity is important because variation in how faithful Montessori schools are to the 'ideal' is likely to be an important factor in explaining why such mixed findings have been found in evaluations of the Montessori method. 6 For example, two early randomised control trials to evaluate Head Start in the USA did not find any immediate benefit of Montessori preschool programmes over other types of preschool programmes. 23 , 24 In both programmes, only 4-year olds were included, whereas the ideal in Montessori preschool programmes is for 3–6 year olds to be taught in the same class in order to foster child-to-child tutoring. 6 Furthermore, in one of the programmes 23 the ideal 3-h work cycle was reduced to just 30 min. 6 A more recent study of older children compared 8th grade Montessori and non-Montessori students matched for gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status. 25 The study found lower scores for Montessori students for English/Language Arts and no difference for maths scores, but the participating Montessori school altered the “ideal” by issuing evaluative grades to pupils and introducing non-Montessori activities. 6

These same limitations then make it difficult to interpret studies that have found 'later' benefits for children who have been followed up after a subsequent period of conventional education. In one of the studies discussed earlier, 23 social and cognitive benefits did emerge for children who had previously attended Montessori preschools and then moved to conventional schools, but these benefits did not emerge until adolescence, while a follow-up study 26 found cognitive benefits in Montessori males only, again in adolescence. Although such 'sleeper effects' have been widely reported in evaluations of early years interventions, they may be artefacts of simple measurement error and random fluctuations. 27 Importantly, if the argument is that lack of fidelity to the Montessori method is responsible for studies not finding significant benefits of Montessori education at younger ages, it is not logical to then credit the Montessori method with any benefits that emerge in follow-up studies.

Some studies report positive outcomes for certain curricular areas but not others. One, for example, investigated scores on maths, science, English and social studies tests in the final years of compulsory education, several years after children had left their Montessori classrooms. 28 Compared to the non-Montessori group (who were matched for gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity and high school attended), the Montessori group scored significantly higher on maths and science, but no differences were found for English and social studies. What might explain this differential effect? The authors suggested that the advantages for maths might be driven by the materials themselves, compared to how maths is taught in conventional classes. 28 Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, children in Montessori classrooms might spend more time engaged in maths and science activities compared to children in conventional classes, with the amount of time spent on English and social studies not differing. However, the authors were unable, within the design of their study, to provide details of exactly how much time children in the Montessori school had spent doing maths, science, English and social studies, in comparison to the time that children in conventional classes were spending on those subjects.

Just as knowing what is going on in the Montessori classroom is vital to being able to interpret the findings of evaluations, so is knowing what is going on in the comparison classrooms. One of the earliest evaluations of Montessori education in the USA 29 speculated that Montessori would have found much to appreciate in one of the non-Montessori comparison classes, including its 'freedom for the children (moving about; working alone); its planned environment (innovative methods with tape recorder playback of children’s conversations; live animals, etc.); its non-punitive character (an “incorrect” answer deserves help, not anger; original answers are reinforced, but other answers are pursued); and its emphasis on concentration (the children sustained activity without direct supervision for relatively long periods of time)'. In some evaluations, the differences between Montessori and conventional classrooms might not actually be so great, which might explain why benefits of being educated in a Montessori classroom are not found. And even if the Montessori approach to teaching a particular curriculum area is different to those used in conventional classrooms, there are likely to be different, equally-effective approaches to teaching the same concepts. This is a suggested explanation for the finding that although children in Montessori kindergartens had an advantage relative to their conventionally-educated peers for base-10 understanding in mathematics, they did not maintain this advantage when tested 2 years later. 30

While most evaluations are interested in traditional academic outcomes or factors related to academic success such as executive functions, a small number have investigated creativity. For example, an old study 31 compared just 14 four and five-year-old children who attended a Montessori nursery school with 14 four and five-year olds who attended a conventional nursery school (matched for a range of parental variables, including attitudes and parental control). In a non-verbal creativity task, involving picture construction, they were given a blank sheet of paper, a piece of red gummed paper in the shape of a curved jellybean, and a pencil. They were then asked to think of and draw a picture in which the red paper would form an integral part. Each child’s construction was rated for originality, elaboration, activity, and title adequacy, and these ratings were then combined into a 'creativity' score. The group of conventionally-schooled children scored almost twice as high as the Montessori group. A second task involved the child giving verbal descriptions of seven objects: a red rubber ball, a green wooden cube, a short length of rope, a steel mirror, a piece of rectangular clear plastic, a piece of chalk, and a short length of plastic tubing. Each description was scored as to whether it was functional (i.e., focused on the object’s use) or whether it was a description of the object’s physical characteristics (i.e., shape, colour, etc.). Like the non-verbal creativity task, this task differentiated the two groups: whereas the conventionally educated children gave more functional descriptions (e.g., for the cube: “you play with it”), the Montessori children gave more physical descriptions (e.g., “it’s square, it’s made of wood, and it’s green”). A third task, the Embedded Figure Test, involved the child first being presented with a stimulus figure and then locating a similar figure located in an embedding context. Both accuracy and speed were measured. While the two groups did not differ in the number of embedded figures accurately located, the Montessori group completed the task significantly more quickly. The fourth and final task required children to draw a picture of anything they wanted to. Drawings were coded for the presence or absence of geometric figures and people. The Montessori group produced more geometric figures, but fewer people, than the conventional group.

The authors were careful not to cast judgement on the performance differences between the two groups. 31 They wrote that 'The study does, however, support the notion that differing preschool educational environments yield different outcomes' and 'Montessori children responded to the emphasis in their programme upon the physical world and upon a definition of school as a place of work; the Nursery School children responded on their part to the social emphasis and the opportunity for spontaneous expression of feeling'. They did not, however, compare and contrast the particular features of the two educational settings that might have given rise to these differences.

Creativity has been studied more recently in France. 32 Seven to twelve-year olds were tested longitudinally on five tasks tapping different aspects of creativity. 'Divergent' thinking tasks required children to (1) think of unusual uses for a cardboard box, (2) come up with ideas for making a plain toy elephant more entertaining, and (3) make as many drawings as possible starting from pairs of parallel lines. 'Integrative' thinking tasks required children to (1) invent a story based on a title that was provided to them, and (2) invent a drawing incorporating six particular shapes. Their sample was bigger than that of the previous study, 31 comprising 40 pupils from a Montessori school and 119 from two conventional schools, and pupils were tested in two consecutive years (no information is provided about whether pupils from different schools were matched on any variable other than age). For both types of task and at both time-points the Montessori-educated children scored higher than the conventionally-educated children. Again, the authors made little attempt to pinpoint the precise differences between schools that might have caused such differences in performance.

None of the studies discussed so far has attempted to isolate individual elements of the Montessori method that might be accounting for any of the positive effects that they find. There are several studies, however, that have focused on the practical life materials. A quasi-experimental study 33 demonstrated that the practical life materials can be efficacious in non-Montessori classrooms. More than 50 different practical life exercises were introduced into eight conventional kindergarten classes, while five conventional kindergarten classes were not given these materials and acted as a comparison group. The outcome measure was a fine motor control task, the 'penny posting test', whereby the number of pennies that a child could pick up and post through a one-inch slot in a can in two 30 s trials was counted. At pre-test the treatment and comparison groups did not differ in the number of pennies posted, but at post-test 6 months later the treatment group achieved a higher score than the comparison group, indicating finer motor control. A nice feature of this study is that teachers reported children in both groups spending the same amount of time on tasks designed to support fine motor control development, suggesting that there was something specific to the design of the practical life materials that was more effective in this regard than the conventional kindergarten materials on offer. And because the preschools that had used the practical life activities had introduced no other elements of the Montessori method, the effect could be confidently attributed to the practical life materials themselves.

An extension of this study 34 investigated the potential benefits of the practical life materials for fine motor control by comparing 5-year olds in Montessori kindergarten programmes with 5-year olds in a conventional programme (reported to have similarities in teaching mission and pupil background characteristics) on the 'flag posting test'. In this task, the child was given a solid hardwood tray covered with clay in which there were 12 pinholes. There were also 12 paper flags mounted on pins, six to the right of the tray and six to the left, and the child’s task was to place the flags one at time in the holes. The child received three scores: one for the amount of time taken to finish the activity, one for the number of attempts it took the child to put each flag into the hole, and one for hand dominance (to receive a score of 1 (established dominance) the child had to consistently use the same hand to place all 12 flags, whereas mixed dominance received a score of 0). Children were pre-tested at the beginning of the school year and post-tested 8 months later. Despite the lack of random assignment to groups, the two groups did not differ on pre-test scores, but they did at post-test: at post-test the Montessori group were significantly faster and significantly more accurate at the task, and had more established hand dominance. However, no attempt was made to measure how frequently children in both groups engaged with materials and activities that were designed to support fine motor control development. Furthermore, the children in the Montessori classrooms were at the age where they should also have been using the sensorial materials, some of which (for example, the 'knobbed cylinders' and 'geometric cabinet') are manipulated by holding small knobs, and whose use could potentially enhance fine motor control. At that age children would also have been using the 'insets for design', materials from the early literacy curriculum designed to enhance pencil control. Therefore, although the results of this study are consistent with the practical life materials enhancing fine motor control, the study does not securely establish that they do.

A further study 35 introduced practical life exercises into conventional kindergarten classes, while control kindergarten classes were not given these materials. 15 min were set aside in the experimental schools’ timetable for using the practical life materials, and they were also available during free choice periods. This time the outcome measure at pre-test and post-test was not fine motor skill but attention. There were benefits to attention of being in the experimental group, but only for girls—boys showed no such benefits. The differential gender impact of the practical life materials on the development of attention is puzzling. Girls did not appear to engage with the materials more than boys during the time that was set aside for using them, but no measure was taken of whether girls chose them more frequently than boys during the free choice periods. Similarly, there were no measurements of the time that children in both the experimental and control groups spent engaged in other activities that might have enhanced fine motor control. Nor is it clear whether it was the fine motor practice directly or rather the opportunity to select interesting activities (the teachers in the experimental schools commented on how interesting the children found the practical life activities) that was responsible for the benefits to attention that were recorded for girls.

Finally, it has been found that young adolescents in Montessori middle schools show greater intrinsic motivation than their peers in conventional middle schools (matched for an impressive array of background variables, including ethnicity, parental education and employment, home resources, parental involvement in school, and number of siblings). 36 The authors did not establish exactly which elements of the Montessori method might be responsible for this finding, but they did speculate that the following might be relevant: “students were provided at least 2 h per day to exercise choice and self-regulation; none of the students received mandatory grades; student grouping was primarily based on shared interests, not standardised tests; and students collaborated often with other students”. The authors did not evaluate the Montessori and non-Montessori groups on any measures of academic outcomes, but given the links between academic success and motivation at all stages of education (they provide a useful review of this literature), this link would be worth investigating in Montessori schools.

This section has discussed studies that have evaluated the Montessori method directly. To date there have been very few methodologically robust evaluations. Many suffer from limitations that make it challenging to interpret their findings, whether those findings are favourable, neutral or unfavourable towards the Montessori method. However, while randomised control trials could (and should) be designed to evaluate individual elements of the Montessori method, it is difficult to see how the random assignment of pupils to schools could work in practice (hence the ingenuity of the study reported in ref. 18 ). Nor could trials be appropriately blinded—teachers, and perhaps parents and pupils too, would know whether they were in the Montessori arm of the trial. In other words, although random assignment and blinding might work for specific interventions, it is hard to see how they could work for an entire school curriculum. Furthermore, given the complexity of identifying what it is that works, why it works, and for whom it works best, additional information, for example from observations of what children and teachers are actually doing in the classroom, would be needed for interpreting the results.

Evaluations of key elements of Montessori education that are shared with other educational methods

This final section examines studies that have not evaluated the Montessori method directly, but have evaluated other educational methods and interventions that share elements of the Montessori method. They, together with our growing understanding of the science underpinning learning, can add to the evidence base for Montessori education. Given the vast amount of research and the limited space in which to consider it, priority is given to systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

One of the best-researched instructional techniques is the use of phonics for teaching children to read. Phonics is the explicit teaching of the letter-sound correspondences that allow the child to crack the alphabetic code. Montessori’s first schools were in Italy, and Italian orthography has relatively transparent one-to-one mappings between letters and sounds, making phonics a logical choice of method for teaching children the mechanics of reading and spelling. English orthography is, however, much less regular: the mappings between letters and sounds are many-to-many, and for this reason the use of phonics as a method of instruction has been challenged for English. 37 Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness despite English’s irregularities. 38 – 40 At the same time, great strides have been made in elucidating the neural mechanisms that underlie early reading and reading impairments, and these too demonstrate the importance to successful reading of integrating sound and visual representations. 41

As always in education, the devil is in the detail. Importantly, phonics programmes have the greatest impact on reading accuracy when they are systematic. 39 , 40 By 'systematic' it is meant that letter-sound relationships are taught in an organised sequence, rather than being taught on an ad hoc as-and-when-needed basis. However, within systematic teaching of phonics there are two very different approaches: synthetic phonics and analytic phonics. Synthetic phonics starts from the parts and works up to the whole: children learn the sounds that correspond to letters or groups of letters and use this knowledge to sound out words from left to right. Analytic phonics starts from the whole and drills down to the parts: sound-letter relationships are inferred from sets of words which share a letter and sound, e.g., h at , h en , h ill , h orse . Few randomised control trials have pitted synthetic and analytic phonics against one another, and it is not clear that either has the advantage. 40

The Montessori approach to teaching phonics is certainly systematic. Many schools in the UK, for example, use word lists drawn from Morris’s 'Phonics 44'. 42 , 43 Furthermore, the Montessori approach to phonics is synthetic rather than analytic: children are taught the sound-letter code before using it to encode words (in spelling) and decode them (in reading). One of the criticisms of synthetic phonics is that it teaches letters and sounds removed from their meaningful language context, in a way that analytic phonics does not. 44 It has long been recognised that the goal of reading is comprehension. Reading for meaning requires both code-based skills and language skills such as vocabulary, morphology, syntax and inferencing skills, 45 and these two sets of skills are not rigidly separated, but rather interact at multiple levels. 46 Indeed, phonics instruction works best where it is integrated with text-level reading instruction. 39 , 40 The explicit teaching of phonics within a rich language context—both spoken and written—is central to the Montessori curriculum. No evaluations have yet pitted phonics teaching in the Montessori classroom versus phonics teaching in the conventional classroom, however, and so whether the former is differentially effective is not known.

Research into writing supports Montessori’s view that writing involves a multitude of component skills, including handwriting, spelling, vocabulary and sentence construction. 47 , 48 Proficiency in these skills predicts the quality of children’s written compositions. 49 , 50 In the Montessori classroom these skills are worked on independently before being brought together, but they can continue to be practised independently. A growing body of research from conventional and special education classrooms demonstrates that the specific teaching of the component skills of writing improves the quality of children’s written compositions. 51 – 54

With respect to teaching mathematics to young children, there are many recommendations that Montessori teachers would recognise in their own classrooms, such as teaching geometry, number and operations using a developmental progression, and using progress monitoring to ensure that mathematics instruction builds on what each child knows. 55 Some of the recommended activities, such as 'help children to recognise, name, and compare shapes, and then teach them to combine and separate shapes' 55 map exactly on to Montessori’s sensorial materials such as the geometric cabinet and the constructive triangles. Other activities such as 'encourage children to label collections with number words and numerals' 55 map onto Montessori’s early mathematics material such as the number rods, the spindle box and the cards and counters. The importance of conceptual knowledge as the foundation for children being able to understand fractions has been stressed. 56 The Montessori fraction circles—which provide a sensorial experience with the fractions from one whole to ten tenths—provide just such a foundation, as do practical life exercises such as preparing snacks (how should a banana be cut so that it can be shared between three children?) and folding napkins.

Finally in this section, it is worth returning to the sustained attention and self-regulation that have been argued to characterise children’s engagement with the learning materials in the Montessori classroom. 2 – 4 These are important parts of the complex cognitive construct of executive functions (EFs), which also include inhibition, working memory and planning. Put simply, EFs are the set of processes that allow us to control our thoughts and actions in order to engage in motivated, goal-directed behaviour. That EFs are critical for academic success is backed by a wealth of research evidence. 57 – 61 Given this key role, EFs have become the target for a number of individually-administered interventions, full curricula, and add-ons to classroom curricula, such as CogMed (Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ), Tools of the Mind, 62 PATHS (PATHS Training LLC, Seattle, WA), music, yoga and martial arts. A review study compared these, including Montessori education, and concluded that compared to interventions such as CogMed that solely target EFs, 'school curricula hold the greatest promise for accessibility to all and intervening early enough to get children on a positive trajectory from the start and affecting EFs most broadly'. 63

Conclusions

Montessori education has been in existence for over a hundred years. Such longevity could well be due, at least in part, to its adaptability. 6 However, by its very nature, of course, greater adaptability means lower fidelity. This paper has discussed evidence that children may benefit cognitively and socially from Montessori education that is faithful to its creator’s principles, but it is less clear that adapted forms—which usually result in children spending less time engaged with self-chosen learning materials—are as effective. Nevertheless, studies suggest that the practical life materials can be usefully introduced into non-Montessori classrooms to support the development of young children’s fine motor skills and attention, and there is ample evidence from the wider educational literature that certain elements of the Montessori method—such as teaching early literacy through a phonic approach embedded in a rich language context, and providing a sensorial foundation for mathematics education—are effective. It has not been possible in this paper to give an exhaustive discussion of all the elements of Montessori education that might be beneficial, for example the lack of extrinsic rewards, the reduced emphasis on academic testing and lack of competition between pupils, the 3-year age-banding that fosters cross-age tutoring, or the presence of a trained teacher in the early years classroom.

Where does this leave Montessori education more than 100 years after its birth, and more than 60 years after the death of its creator? As others have noted, Montessori was a scientist who truly valued the scientific method and would not have expected her educational method to remain static. 64 Yet Montessori teachers often feel fear or uncertainty about being able to apply Montessori’s theories in new and innovative ways while still adhering to her underlying philosophical principles. 65 Ultimately, only empirical research, undertaken by teachers and researchers working together, can be our guide, because the questions that need answering are empirical in nature. Neuroscientific research—using neuroimaging methods which were not available in Montessori’s day—might also play a guiding role. For example, Montessori was prescient in her views that adolescence was a special time in development where the individual required a specially-designed form of education to address their needs. 66 Recent neuroimaging evidence points to adolescence as indeed being an important period for neural development, particularly for areas involved in executive functions and social cognition. 67 , 68 Montessori did not fully develop her ideas for the education of 12–18-year olds during her lifetime, but it is an area where current Montessorians might be able to take over the reins. Although some Montessori schools take pupils up to the age of 18, they are few and far between, and to my knowledge there are no published evaluations of their effectiveness. Developing a Montessori education for this age group in conjunction with the best of our current knowledge of developmental cognitive neuroscience has the potential to make a very positive contribution.

Nor did Montessori consider using her method with the elderly. In the context of a rapidly aging population and increasing numbers of elderly adults with acquired cognitive impairments such as those that result from Alzheimer’s disease, 69 it is interesting to note that the Montessori method is now being adapted for use with dementia patients, with the aim of improving functioning in activities of daily living, such as feeding, and in cognition. There is strong evidence for a reduction in difficulties with eating, weak evidence for benefits on cognition, and mixed evidence for benefits on constructive engagement and positive affect. 70 However, the quality of studies varies across domains; those evaluating effects on cognition have been of rather poor quality so far, and they have not yet examined whether there might be long-term effects. Nevertheless, given the challenges to developing successful medication for patients with Alzheimer’s disease despite a detailed knowledge of changes in their neurobiology, it would be sensible to continue the search for successful behavioural interventions alongside that for medical interventions. 71 One method for delivering Montessori-based activities to the elderly is via inter-generational programmes, whereby older adults with dementia are supported in teaching Montessori-based lessons to preschool children. Benefits have been reported for the adults involved, 72 but whether the children also benefit in particular ways from such inter-generational teaching has not been evaluated. Nor is it known whether a Montessori education in childhood or Montessori-based activities experienced in later life can protect the executive control circuits of the brain, as has been proposed for bilingualism. 73 A lifespan approach to the evaluation of the Montessori method involving both behavioural and neuroimaging methods might be valuable.

In sum, there are many methodological challenges to carrying out good quality educational research, including good quality research on the Montessori method. Arguably the most obvious challenge to emerge from the literature reviewed here is the practical difficulty of randomly allocating pupils to Montessori and non-Montessori schools in order to compare outcomes. The majority of studies have relied instead on trying to match pupils and teachers in Montessori and non-Montessori schools on a number of different variables, with the concomitant danger that unidentified factors have contributed to any difference in outcomes. Even if randomisation is achievable, studies need to be conducted on a large enough scale to not only allow generalisations to be made beyond the particular schools studied, but to also allow investigation of which children the Montessori method suits best. On a more optimistic note, recent experimental studies—whereby features of existing Montessori classrooms are manipulated in some way, or features of the Montessori method are added to non-Montessori classrooms—hold promise for investigating the effectiveness of particular elements of the Montessori method. The evidence base can be strengthened yet further by drawing on research of educational interventions with which it shares certain elements, and by drawing on related research in the science of learning. National and regional education systems are beset by regular swings of the pendulum, for example towards and away from phonics, 74 and towards and away from children working individually. 75 This means that elements of the Montessori method will sometimes be in vogue and sometimes not. It is therefore particularly important that Montessori teachers understand the evidence base that supports, or does not support, their pedagogy.

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this work to Sandra Nash Petrek (1939–2017), an inspiring Montessorian.

Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing financial interests.

Publisher's note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Is the LRB the best magazine in the world?

T he offices of the London Review of Books are situated on the top two floors of a Georgian townhouse in the shadow of the British Museum. To reach them, you either brave the claustrophobically small lift or walk up five flights of brown-carpeted stairs, before emerging in a light-filled room containing a scattering of terrifically bright people sitting at computers, surrounded by piles of books and an air of quiet industry.

The windows on one side of the large open-plan room overlook the nurses' accommodation for the nearby University College Hospital, where someone has left a carton of orange juice to chill on a window ledge. The LRB 's editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, likes this view. She enjoys "seeing what the nurses get up to". On the other side, the windows overlook a fine Hawksmoor church spire, with carved heraldic symbols of a lion and a unicorn at its base. Wilmers doesn't have as much time for this. Most people would proffer some admiring blandishment about architectural style – but not Wilmers. "They're too fat," she sniffs at the stonework animals. And looking at them, it's hard not to concede that they are, indeed, a bit flabby.

The opposing London vistas, and Wilmers' reaction to them, seem to sum up her approach to editing what is now deemed to be the most successful literary publication in Europe. At 75, Wilmers retains both an insatiable curiosity about people (the nurses) and a healthy disregard for received opinion (the church). Both qualities course through the pages of the London Review of Books which, under her 22-year editorship, has become a highly regarded publication with an influence that extends far beyond the rarefied world of small-circulation literary magazines.

Founded in 1979, after the Times Literary Supplement was closed by a year-long industrial dispute, the LRB has a circulation of 64,038 (by comparison, according to 2013 Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, the Spectator has a circulation of 62,581 and the New Statesman of 28,495). The website attracts 575,000 visitors a month and there are a further 2,000 Kindle subscribers. At a time when most print publications are losing readers, the LRB 's circulation is going up.

Partly, this is to do with the commissions. Alongside the usual run of densely typed book reviews, arts criticism, authors' diaries and classified advertisements offering writers' retreats in the Peloponnese, Wilmers has made a feature of the long-form essay. The essay, usually penned by a leading author and often running to well over 10,000 words, with barely a concession to the fanciful modern desire for accompanying photographs or illustration, has become the LRB 's forte. These are the pieces that consistently challenge orthodoxy and take delight in a well-constructed argument; that dare to say things the rest of us might be thinking or that simply reveal something interesting or curious.

One of her recent favourites, says Wilmers, was a piece on "the language of bribery". At its best, the LRB long-form essay is clever, mischievous, fascinating and fluent. At its worst, it might go on a bit.

"I think there's an awful lot of short opinion around," says Wilmers, "and it's quite nice to find an argument in a piece that isn't just stated."

She is sitting in a small corner room on a sofa upholstered in countrified pale-green and red stripes. For unexplained reasons, there is an abandoned iron and an Anglepoise lamp on the floor that Wilmers had to step over, somewhat shakily in ballet pumps, to get to her seat. She is a small woman with a striking face and shrewd eyes. Her physical appearance is elegant but economical, crafted with the same precision as a judiciously edited sentence.

Does she think, in a modern, media-driven world where opinions are increasingly reduced to soundbites of 140 characters or fewer, that there is a thirst for longer-form writing?

"I think that must, to some extent, be the case because otherwise, why would we be doing so much better than other papers?" And it is true that, over the past year, the London Review of Books has found itself in the unusual position of being the centre of rather a lot of attention. There was a recent public spat concerning the lack of female reviewers in its pages , but much of the interest has been generated by the introduction of a Winter Lecture series – speeches delivered by writers in person on a particular topic and then printed at full-length as an essay in the magazine.

Hilary Mantel did one in February 2013, in which she called the Duchess of Cambridge "a shop-window mannequin" . The Daily Mail promptly featured the "attack" on its front page and David Cameron was moved to comment that Mantel was "completely misguided and completely wrong".

When James Meek analysed the housing market in the pages of the LRB in January ("A housing shortage that has been building up for the past 30 years is reaching the point of crisis"), it triggered a national debate. The current issue carries an extraordinary 26,000-word piece by Andrew O'Hagan on his failed attempt to ghost the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's memoir , which was trending on Twitter before copies even hit the news-stands. The next issue features classicist Mary Beard's lecture on "the public voice of women", which has already caused a splash following her assertion that women who speak up in the public sphere are "treated as freakish androgynes".

Does she enjoy the controversies generated by the magazine? Her lips twitch into an almost-smile. Her eyes, below the silver fringe of her bobbed hair, crinkle at the corners. "I don't un-enjoy it," she replies carefully. She says she "never, ever would have predicted" the fall-out generated by the Hilary Mantel piece. "If you read the whole thing, it's really not… there's not much of an issue there. She was feeling sorry for her [the Duchess of Cambridge] more than anything."

What about the piece written in 2007 by Booker-prize winner Anne Enright concerning the parents of Madeleine McCann ("I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve") or Mary Beard writing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that America "had it coming"?

"'People will say America had it coming' is what she said!" Wilmers corrects impatiently. "Well, everybody said we would have bombs put through our letterbox." And did they? "No. It just caught on and it obviously touched a nerve because there were people who presumably did think that."

This is, in many respects, a key part of the LRB 's ethos: it provides a space in which intelligent people can think differently; in which discomfiting thoughts can be voiced and provoking arguments can be aired with enough room to breathe.

The writer Marina Warner, who is one of the magazine's contributing editors, compares the LRB 's pages to "a lively discussion among engaged people… I like its range – and its boldness in allowing different views and strong opinions, and the length of the pieces allows for developing arguments and laying out evidence." Andrew O'Hagan agrees: "The paper is enquiring, funny, political, ambivalent, and filled with a sense of risk."

Wilmers sees the LRB as an antidote to the sameness of opinion in the rest of the media. "Newspapers say the same thing over and over again and we're all horrified and collectively up in arms and there's normally more than one side to something," she says. "So if you hear somebody saying something coherent and intelligent that's not totally out of order, it's interesting to read it."

Twitter, with its emphasis on instant reaction and opinion-forming cliques is, she thinks, part of the problem. "Why do people feel compelled to agree with everybody? It would be quite nice if there was slightly less outrage about the same things all the time."

Is Wilmers on Twitter? "No," she says and then immediately contradicts herself: "I mean, yes, I am. I've only ever been on once, when Jenny Diski asked me to do something."

Her Twitter avatar, rather confusingly, is the image of a fresh-faced young woman. "That's my god-daughter, Flora Neve," she says sternly. No further explanation is forthcoming and I suddenly feel rather foolish for asking.

For all its success, the London Review of Books struggles to make money. It owes its continued existence to the generosity of Wilmers herself, who regularly siphons in cash from a family trust fund. Her German father was the founder of a multinational utilities company and her ancestors on her mother's side were Russian Jews who included the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon and Leonid Eitingon, a Stalinist agent responsible for masterminding the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Wilmers was born in Chicago, raised in New York, then moved with her family to Brussels aged nine and was sent to boarding school in England.

Did she like boarding school?

[Deadpan] "It was better than Brussels."

Having grown up abroad, does she feel like an outsider?

"You mean, do I feel foreign?" A pause. "When it suits me."

The family money means the LRB never has to worry about paying back its loans – in January 2010, the magazine was estimated to be £27m in debt to the trust. And yet it still manages to pay its writers at a base-rate of 30p a word (rising by a considerable margin if the article is longer than average). The fee for O'Hagan's piece on Assange was rumoured to be in five figures. Marina Warner says that payment is always processed quickly "and generously, by comparison with other papers".

Is it sustainable, I ask the LRB 's publisher, Nicholas Spice? He looks vaguely shocked at the suggestion. "Oh no, it's not sustainable in financial terms," he says.

Spice has a pleasantly straightforward manner and a faintly military demeanour. He is the kind of man you suspect would be incapable of telling a lie, even though sometimes he probably should. "It loses a lot of money," he continues cheerfully. "The most important thing is that it has always had very generous support from its shareholders. And we've had the same shareholders since 1980, which is very unusual – I should think unprecedented – for a literary publication or arts organisation. The great thing is that we have been able to invest in creating a market for a very good editorial product."

The LRB has made inroads in other areas – there is a nearby London Review of Books bookshop, and a popular cake-shop that serves rosebud tea and gluten-free pistachio cakes – but even these, according to Spice, are only "near to breaking even".

"The great thing about the bookshop is it gives the magazine a location," Spice says, still looking on the brightest possible side, "and it's very good for our relations with publishers."

The seeming lack of financial constraint means that the LRB can be run in a charmingly old-fashioned, semi-shambolic manner. There is, admits Wilmers, "an element of whim" to each issue. Writers are not given much of a deadline – "we're not too fussy about time, then after a few months the piece comes in" – and the editors take a great deal of care over the copy. Every fact is checked and proofs are sent back to the writer with suggestions and queries and then, says Wilmers: "there's all that awful stuff about spacing and line-breaks, which I'm sure nobody notices, but we do".

Many of the writers have never met the staff and Wilmers herself has acquired a healthy degree of mystique.

"I've never met Mary-Kay Wilmers," says Adam Mars-Jones , a regular contributor, "and by the end of last year had come to think that was a good thing. If she liked my writing it seemed a bit rash to think she might like me as well."

The magazine goes to press on Friday night and the staff are often there into the early hours. Until recently, they ordered in supper from a local Indian restaurant much favoured by Wilmers. But she went on holiday a few weeks ago and returned to find that her staff had staged a silent coup and were getting their food from Ottolenghi instead. She doesn't like it as much. "Perhaps," she says, fiddling with the hem of her silk blouse, "it's just because I think, 'How dare they!'"

She's joking. I think.

One of the criticisms levelled at the LRB is that it can occasionally seem cosseted from the real world, run by an exclusive coterie of literary-minded north Londoners who don't have to worry about anything so vulgar as the bottom line. Wilmers is an established part of the liberal-leaning Primrose Hill intelligentsia: she was married to the film director Stephen Frears (the couple divorced in the 70s and have two sons, Sam and Will) and used to live next door to the biographer Claire Tomalin and her husband, the writer Michael Frayn. The playwright Jonathan Miller was down the road. Her best friend from Oxford (where she read modern languages) is Alan Bennett.

When I put this to her, Wilmers blinks. "Does everybody live in north London?" she asks herself, before going through a mental checklist of contributors and staff. "John Lanchester doesn't," she announces triumphantly. Spice says that most of their readers come from N and NW postcodes. Anywhere else?

"Clapham," he replies briskly.

But the LRB 's tendency to pluck writers from the same limited pool of contributors has a more serious knock-on effect: they have consistently struggled to publish as many women as men, for instance. In 2013, they used 43 female book reviewers compared to 195 male, according to figures compiled by the American literary organisation Vida . The Paris Review , by contrast, achieved a 50/50 parity of men and women, while the New York Times book review published 725 women and 894 men. It is not just the review pages: over its history, the LRB has published 82% of articles by men and just 18% by women.

The issue was recently aired in a discussion on Open Book on Radio 4. The LRB declined to participate and issued a rather imperious statement claiming that the inequality in their pages was regrettable but reflected a wider discrimination in an imperfect world. The statement included a quote from Wilmers, given in a 2001 interview on the same subject: "I think women find it difficult to do their jobs, look after their children, cook dinner and write pieces," Wilmers said at the time. "They just can't get it done. And men can… They're not so frightened of asserting themselves. And they're not so anxious to please."

Listeners were duly enraged by the intimation that female writers were too busy scrubbing dishes to use their critical faculties. When I ask Wilmers about the episode, she visibly braces. "Obviously, over the years I've been discriminated against plenty," she says. "It started when I finished university and was told to go and learn to write shorthand by the Oxford 'head of women's appointments'. So, obviously, I know what it's like. I know what the problem is. And all I can say is that we hope to do better, we hope to get more female reviewers, blah blah blah."

But how exactly do they hope to do better? "Well, we hope we will find more women writers. We will look for more women." She glances anxiously towards the closed door that leads into the office and starts mouthing to me that she's been told not to say anything by her colleagues and they don't want her stirring it all up again. And yet, being of a naturally honest disposition, Wilmers can't help herself.

Surely that comment about women being too busy doing the household chores to write was spectacularly misguided? "Yes," she concedes. "I think the situation has changed because, certainly, when I was married, I did the washing up, I did the cooking, I looked after the children… I think that's much less the case now. Men do much more so women have less to do. So I think there has been a change but I do think men are more inclined to say 'Oh fuck it. I'll do whatever I want to do now. My career matters. I'll go and write a novel', whereas women are a bit more ho-hummy about their careers.

"All that has really changed since I've been working. When I was at Oxford, there was one woman for every 10 men. Imagine that. I mean, that's quite a statistic. So yes, it's changed a lot and there are many more women writers now in the LRB than there were 40, 50 years ago."

The irony is that Wilmers did end up becoming a secretary. After peripatetic upbringing that took her from America to Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium and England, Wilmers read French and Russian at Oxford. She had ambitions to be a simultaneous interpreter but ended up as a secretary at the offices of Faber & Faber. At the time, T S Eliot was director. "I was quite disappointed with him," she says. "He'd thank people for their 'gracious' letter and I though 'Gosh, what a terrible word.'"

She left Faber and had spells at the Listener magazine and the Times Literary Supplement before co-founding the LRB in 1979, originally as an offshoot of the New York Review of Books .

And all the while, she was coping with single motherhood and the emotional grind of raising a sick child. Wilmers's youngest son, Sam, was born with Riley-Day syndrome, a rare condition that affects the development of the nervous system. Sam was subject to seizures, poor co-ordination, failing eyesight and breathing issues. Today, in his 40s, he is almost blind but "thriving" , Wilmers says fondly, "because he's got such a good character".

Her work, she says, was an integral part of keeping her sane. "I think I found it easier with the job than I would have without. I would have been that much more anxious about my son had I been at home watching him all the time."

She sees her role as editor in the same terms as the simultaneous interpreter she once wanted to be; they are both, she says, "ventriloquial occupations. It's speaking through other people. It's not that I'm not as egomaniacal as everyone else. It's just that I say a bit less."

She has written an acclaimed volume of family history, The Eitingons , but says she lacks the "inventiveness" to write a novel. I mention to her that I recently read Love, Nina , a delightful collection of letters written by Wilmers's former nanny, Nina Stibbe, while she was living with the family in the 80s. In it, Stibbe writes about Wilmers's habit of "piping up with a defining two words" while "everyone else [is] yakking and being boring and pointless".

Does she recognise that in herself? "Yes!" she says. "It's not what I most like about myself but I have to say, yes I do. But… um… it's that I don't necessarily have all the interim sentences. Those words are the two words I have. It's a bit of a defect."

But her facility for distilling a sentence makes her, according to Andrew O'Hagan, one of the great editors. "She and Karl Miller have done more for the British essay than anyone in the past 150 years," he says. "Mary-Kay works harder than any editor I know. And if this were France, they'd be posting the Légion d'honneur through her door every morning."

I wonder whether, at the age of 75, having lived through an era of unequal pay and endemic discrimination, part of Wilmers's attitude to the lack of female reviewers in the LRB is explained by a belief that people should just get on and do things rather than waste time complaining about them? "Yes, absolutely." Her feminism is, she concedes, "old-fashioned… I tend to take exception to men in a big way, but that's a slightly outmoded form of feminism."

Men as a general concept or men as individuals? "Men as a general concept, and individual men when they're behaving like men."

Is that why her marriage failed? "No. I mean, it was probably a foolish idea in the first place. I don't feel antipathy [towards men], I just am inclined to think that…" She breaks off. "It happened earlier this morning. You're talking to a male colleague, trying to get your point of view across, and then another male colleague walks across and agrees sagaciously with what the other man is saying. That always happens."

Does she say anything?

"Yes!"

I can't imagine, given her innate need to get on and do things, that she has altogether embraced the ageing process. "I feel appalled," she admits. "I keep thinking I'll wake up and find I'm not 75 any more." She has noticed a certain stickiness in the whirring of the mental cogs – when trying to convert dollars into sterling, for instance, or when she makes mistakes on the computer "and there's quite a lot of groaning" from her colleagues.

How will she give up this job, I wonder, when the time comes? "With difficulty," she says. "But the editor of the New York Review of Books is 10 years older than me. That's what I cling to."

The London Review of Books might not feature enough women in its pages. But there's no doubt that the one at its helm is pretty formidable.

• London Review of Books
• The Observer
• Julian Assange
• Hilary Mantel
• Anne Enright

More on this story

The LRB is 40. We never thought it would last this long

Sam Miller: ‘What we had felt stronger than most father-son relationships’

WB Yeats, the art teacher and a night at the sexologist’s

Karl Miller: a man of distinction

Karl Miller, founding editor of London Review of Books, dies at 83

London Review of Books: all hail this splendid magazine that reveres the written word

Why the LRB should stop cooking up excuses over lack of women reviewers

Should we celebrate scathing book reviews?

Peter Campbell's London Review of Books covers

Peter Campbell obituary

Comments (…), most viewed.

The 1946 London Lectures

Maria montessori.

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

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Best 8 Montessori Books for Parents in 2024

If you are interested in learning more about Montessori and guiding your child in this fashion, there are some Montessori books for parents you need to read.

Lucky for you, I've done my fair share of reading on this topic and reading her books, and I've got some reviews for you on which Montessori books for parents that are looking to learn more about her method and the advice she had to give on guiding your child.

There are many books written by Dr. Montessori , about Dr. Montessori, and modern-day take on Dr. Montessori's thoughts and methods.

Along with each book review, I've included an inspirational excerpt from the book that I've found helpful in my Montessori journey. I hope you find these quotes as helpful as I have!

It can be difficult to find books written by her that are easy to read and easy to apply to our everyday lives. She was quite an intelligent woman, thus the challenge of her reads!

Even the tedious books are great to keep around for reference, though!

(This post contains affiliate links. Purchasing from these links costs you nothing extra, but helps with our website upkeep.)

Montessori books for parents: written by Dr. Montessori

1. the secret of childhood.

This is one of my favorite Montessori books for parents to read. It's chock full of great information on childhood development and how Montessori incorporated it into the development of her methods.

Dr. Montessori also writes about some of the materials and approaches she used.

Not only is this book extremely helpful in understanding a child's growth and development, but I found it to be one of the easiest to read.

Many of her books simply can't be read cover-to-cover due to the complexity of the language and the depth of the material. This book is not one of them.

For someone who is just starting to learn about Montessori, this book is a great place to start.

“A child is an eager observer and is particularly attracted by the actions of adults and wants to imitate them.

In this regard, an adult can have kind of a mission. He can be an inspiration for the child's actions, a kind of open book wherein a child can learn to direct his own movements.

But an adult, if he is afforded the proper guidance, must always be calm and act slowly so that the child who is watching him can clearly see his actions and their particulars.”

Montessori, Maria. The Secret of Childhood. New York: Fides Publishers, Inc, 1966. Print.

The reason this quote struck resonance with me is that, in Montessori, modeling is often in the place of teaching.

In order to model a task or an activity, your child needs to be able to clearly see the steps you are taking or they will not be able to mimic them.

• Montessori, Maria (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 240 Pages – 01/12/1982 (Publication Date) – Ballantine Books…

2. The Montessori Method

This is one of Maria Montessori's most famous works and for good reason. It's comprehensive in explaining her pedogeological methods.

She also goes into matters of diet, discipline, and childhood behaviors. This is one of the most important Montessori books for you to read, in my opinion.

“The domineering and tyrannical behavior with examples of which we are all too familiar. The domineering habit develops side by side with helplessness.

It is the outward sign of the state of feeling of him who conquers through the work of others. Thus it often happens that the master is a tyrant toward his servant.

It is the spirit of the taskmaster toward the slave”. (p. 87)

Montessori, Maria. The Montessori Method. Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2008. Print.

This is so true. Helplessness is often the cause of bossy, domineering behavior from children.

If they can't do things for themselves if they don't have access to the things they need to care for themselves, or if they aren't given the opportunity to function independently, what other choice do they have but to be the boss of the adult?

All too often, I've seen parents, in an attempt to keep their child their “baby”, spoon-feed, dress, and cater to their child's every whim.

This is the master/servant relationship addressed in this quote.

• 258 Pages – 06/26/2008 (Publication Date) – CreateSpace…

3 . The D iscovery of the Child

This is a book that focuses on a child's nature and urges. This is one of her more challenging reads. It's not one you'll want to sit and read cover-to-cover.

She goes into great depth about her observations of how children learn and the benefit of the application of her methods and how these methods of learning elevate children.

“Anyone who has seen these children set a table must have become increasingly apprehensive and surprised. Little four-year-old waitresses set the table with knives, forks, and plates.

They carry as many as five glasses of water and pass from table to table bearing large tureens of hot soup. No one cuts himself, breaks a glass, or spills a drop of soup”. (p. 304)

Montessori, Maria. The Discovery of the Child. New York. Fides: 1967. Print.

I love this quote. As most of us know, Montessori schools and homes allow children to use glass dishes and metal utensils. Some say, “ That's all that was available back in her day. ” Fair enough.

While that may be true, it doesn't negate the fact that these children she is speaking about were actually doing the things in her books. ( Read about control of error here .)

What would be the reason that we shouldn't continue modeling, then trusting our children to use these items and perform tasks such as the ones in this excerpt?

• 339 Pages – 05/12/1986 (Publication Date) – Ballantine Books…

4. The Absorbent Mind

Passionately written, this book is all about childhood development and a child's psychic needs at different stages. This is an easy read – and an important read.

“Nothing is more astonishing than to see one of the children engaged in a so-called “exercise of practical life”: completely absorbed, for example, in polishing a brass vessel and carefully following his instructions till it shines brilliantly; then without pause beginning all over again, and repeating every detain till he has polished the already shining pot several times over!

This proves that the external aim was only a stimulus. The real aim was to satisfy an unconscious need, and this is why the operation is formative, for the child's repetition was laying down in his nervous system an entirely new system of controls, in other words, establishing fresh co-ordinations between his muscles, co-ordinations not given by nature, but having to be acquired”. (p.180)

Montessori, Maria. The Absorbent Mind. New York: Holt, 1967. Print.

There is nothing I love to see more than my children completely absorbed in a task; no interruptions, and no stopping to ask for assistance.

Washing dishes, cleaning a table, scrubbing potatoes, practicing the Dressing Frames, over and over again.

These tasks hold minimal value to us, as parents. The value to the child is immense, though!

• 320 Pages – 10/15/1995 (Publication Date) – Holt Paperbacks…

5. Dr . Montessori's Own Handbook

This is a short handbook that features many Montessori activities and the reasoning behind them.

As with all of her books, she delves into child psychology, which is a critical part of her methods.

“The tendencies which we stigmatize as evil in little children three to six years of age are often merely those which cause an annoyance to us adults when, not understanding their needs, we try to prevent their every movement, their every attempt to gain experience for themselves in the world (by touching everything, etc..).

The child, however, through this natural tendency, is led to coordinate his movements and to collect impressions, especially sensations of touch, so that when prevented he rebels, and this rebellion forms almost the whole of his “naughtiness.””(p. 81)

Montessori, Maria. Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook. South Carolina: Unknown Publisher. 2017. Print.

This quote draws attention to our role as adults, as a potential cause of our children's untoward behavior.

We have all heard the phrase “the terrible twos”, as well as other child-unfriendly phrases.

Understanding what children are needing during these trying times is important when raising small children.

Following Dr. Montessori's methods can really help parents out in the toughest years.

• Used Book in Good Condition

6 . A Child in the Family

I was hesitant to give this Montessori parenting book a chance.

There are certain passages cited often in Montessori Facebook groups from the book, particularly about a child's sleep, that I have issues with.

I read it, though, and I absolutely love it. Dr. Montessori discusses how adults and children are often at odds with each other due to our misunderstanding of our children's needs and our need to control; our need for obedience without question.

Dr. Montessori was on a quest to humanize children and this book helps us do just that.

“Certainly there is something that compels a teacher to advise very young students continually, to correct them, to show them that she is superior in experience or culture; ultimately she must be resigned to quelling every bit of vanity, or she will obtain no results”. (p. 75,76)

Montessori, Maria. The Child in the family. New York: Avon, 1970. Print.

An important quote for those parents who tend to hover and instruct .

I've done this in the past and I can't deny that my own vanity had something to do with it.

Not “vanity” as in how I appear as a parent, but how I wanted some of the credit for my child's learning. “ I know something about this, so I'm going to teach you what I know.”

And when a child makes a mistake, we correct them, as if we don't trust them to not only know they've made an error but that they don't know how to correct it.

We want them to need us wholly in their activities.

This is the “vanity” she is referring to.

• Maria Montessori (Author)
• 75 Pages – 12/06/2023 (Publication Date) – Montessori-Pierson…

Montessori books for parents: written by others

7. how to raise an amazing child the montessori way.

This book is awesome. The author breaks down Montessori into bite-size pieces and gives great tips on how to apply Montessori to your everyday life.

It's easy to understand and is full of visual representations and photographs to help guide you.

This is a popular book among parents new to Montessori and there is a very good reason why! I recommend it!

“If you create a welcoming but orderly space for your children and allow them to work and play freely, their confidence and independence will blossom”. (p. 22)

Seldin, Tim. How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way, 2nd Edition. Print.

This is just plain true! Setting up a space just for my children has been key in their independence and confidence. It doesn't have to be grand or Pinterest perfect; it just has to be for them .

• Seldin, Tim (Author)
• 208 Pages – 06/13/2017 (Publication Date) – DK (Publisher)

London Review of Education

An open-access journal publishing rigorous, theoretically based research into contemporary education.

Journal aims and scope

The  London Review of Education  (LRE) is a fully open-access, peer-reviewed journal that provides a diversity of perspectives on all types, sectors and phases of education. It is free to read and free to write for; there are no article processing charges.  

We welcome and publish contributions from across the world, with an editorial perspective inspired by London’s status as a global city. Founded in 2003 by the  UCL Institute of Education (IOE) , but independent from it, LRE maintains the Institute’s principled concern for social justice. We encourage interdisciplinary collaborations and international co-authorship.

LRE is a wide-ranging journal that features rigorous analysis and significant research using a variety of methodologies across key themes in education. For example, we cover but are not limited to: assessment; curriculum; educational improvement; equalities and human rights; institutional effectiveness; language, literacy and numeracy; lifelong learning; organization; pedagogy; public goals and policies; resources and technology; teacher education; widening participation. We particularly welcome articles that cross disciplines and interrogate links between research, policy and practice.

We ensure the highest quality of reporting and presentation through an independent, anonymised peer-review process. Once accepted, articles appear in the next available issue, eliminating delays in publication. As an entirely web-based open-access journal, LRE provides opportunities  for including illustrative video clips, colour photos and illustrations.   

Editor-in-Chief

Professor Hugh Starkey,  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK

Assistant Editors

Dr Celia Whitchurch , IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK Dr Denise Miller,  University of Greenwich, UK

Book Reviews Editor

Shone Surendran,  Qualitative Research Associate/ Research Consultant, Imperial College London, UK, and Research Consultant/ Honorary Lecturer, King's College London, UK

Editorial Board Members

IOE Director (Executive Chair),  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK Professor Lynn Ang (Chair),  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK Dr Vincent Carpentier , IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK Professor Julie Dockrell,  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK Dr Wilton Lodge, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK Professor Gary McCulloch,  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK Dr Tamjid Mujtaba , IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK Dr Richard Race,  University of Roehampton, London, UK Dr Leena Robertson , Middlesex University London, UK Dr Becky Taylor , IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK Dr Emma Towers , Kings College London, UK  

Student Members

Grace Healy,  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL UK

External Advisory Board

Professor Li-Ching Ho,  Department of Curriculum and Instruction, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Professor Claus Holm,  Head of Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark Dr Catherine Kell,  School of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa Professor Normand Labrie,  Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada Dr Liu Woon Chia,  National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Professor Yasushi Maruyama,  Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University, Japan Dr Larissa McLean Davies,  University of Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Australia Professor Yu Kai,  Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, China

Submission and Reviews Manager

Cecile Berbesi

Journal information

ISSN: 1474-8479 Homepage:  https://www.uclpress.co.uk/pages/london-review-of-education

Published by: UCL Press University College London (UCL) Gower Street London WC1E 6BT

UCL Press website: https://www.uclpress.co.uk UCL Press email: [email protected] UCL Press twitter: @uclpress UCL Press Journals Editorial Policy:  https://www.uclpress.co.uk/pages/journals-editorial-policy

Publication frequency:  London Review of Education publishes articles continuously (as and when articles are ready for publication).

Contact the journal

All general enquiries should be made to the Editor-in-Chief at [email protected] .

Open-access policy

All articles published in the  London Review of Education  are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 international license agreement and published open access, making them immediately and freely available to read and download. The CC BY license agreement allows authors to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of the work. Further information regarding this can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0  and licensing terms and conditions can be found in our  Journals Editorial Policy .

Abstracting & Indexing

UCL Press works with subject specific indexers to deposit published articles in relevant repositories and search databases. Articles published in the  London Review of Education  are indexed in:

• Dimensions   
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Google Scholar
• UCL Discovery
• Web of Science: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)

Peer review

Articles submitted to   LRE   are   subject to double-blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Authors will submit an anonymous pdf version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review (see the ‘Submission’ tab for more details). LRE's academic peer reviewers also refer to this  guide . Further information about peer review can be found in our  journals Peer Review Policy.   

Book reviews are subject to editorial review by the Book Reviews Editor, Janice Tripney:  janice.tripney [at] ucl.ac.uk .

Article publication charges (APC)

UCL Press journals do not levy an article-processing charge (APC) for submission or publication in this journal. Contributors to LRE will not be required to make an APC payment for submission or publication of their article.

How to submit

The  London Review of Education  (LRE) invites papers on research and analysis related to education in any context. We publish general articles continuously, and papers responding to special calls for papers. Please see details of open calls for papers below.

We welcome articles of around 6,000 words that reveal links between research, policy, and practice, and which analyse key themes in education, including public goals and policies, pedagogy, curriculum, organization, resources and technology, and institutional effectiveness. We also consider some other types of content (see ‘Article types’, below)

LRE considers manuscripts on condition that they have not been published already and are not under consideration for publication or in press elsewhere. Contributions to the journal must report original research and will be subjected to review by referees at the discretion of the Editor(s).

Before submitting to the journal, all authors must read and agree to the UCL Press  Journals Editorial Policy  and the  journal contributor agreement .   To submit articles and book reviews, click ‘SUBMIT TO JOURNAL’ below. You will need to register and/or log in to the online submission system.

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT TO THE JOURNAL

Please read the following notes in full.  Manuscripts that are not formatted appropriately for the journal will be returned for reformatting before peer review.

All submissions to the journal should be made by clicking ‘SUBMIT TO JOURNAL’ above. Details of what to submit and how to format your work follow shortly.

• For  pre-submission enquiries  only: General papers – contact the Editor-in-Chief, Hugh Starkey:  h.starkey [at] ucl.ac.uk
• Contributions to special features  – Most special features invite pre-submission abstracts. Please consult special calls for papers for information and contact emails.
• Book reviews (please see below section) – contact the Book Reviews Editor, Shone Surendran at s.surendran.14 [at] ucl.ac.uk  

Article types 

Original research article Detailed studies reporting original research classified as primary literature. Length: 6,000 words.

Review article Provide critical and systematic appraisal of the current research to provide authoritative judgement to its particular context, topic, and field. Up to 8,000 words.

Commentary LRE considers different sorts of content under this heading. This might be a research ‘conversation’ between two or more academics, succinct analysis of a current issue in education, or a report about ongoing research. These pieces are usually 2,000-3,000 words. Please send enquiries to the Editor-in-Chief .

Book reviews

Book reviews are concise articles that provide an evaluation of a published scholarly book. Book reviews are often invited but suggestions are welcome and should be sent to the Book Reviews Editor, Shone Surendran at s.surendran.14 [at] ucl.ac.uk .

A book review might assess the importance of a book's contribution to a particular field covered by the journal’s aims and scope and should aim to objectively review the strengths and weaknesses that concern the journal’s audience. Please read our detailed  guidance for book reviewers  and refer to the journal's aims and scope before submitting a review.

You can also view the list of book reviews publsihed in journal here .

Preparing your manuscript

All authors submitting to LRE must read and accept the UCL Press  Journals Editorial Policy , and consent to the  Journal Author Contributor Agreement . The notes here offer additional guidance.

LRE is committed to upholding the integrity of the work published. Papers may be reporting empirical research, or practice papers reporting practice-based evidence. Authors submitting research papers are required to follow best ethical practice for research as outlined in the  British Educational Research Association  or similar professional body (please indicate this clearly in your submission). Authors are required to show in their papers that they have received ethical approval for their research from all relevant institutional review boards and that they have followed General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in the handling of personal data. Where such committees do not operate, authors are responsible for providing evidence of their adherence to relevant ethical guidelines (please indicate this clearly in your submission). We offer a simple questionnaire to help authors deal with this. This can be found under ‘Declarations and conflicts of interest’ in the ‘Formatting your submission’ section below.

English language All publications are in English (UK). In order to facilitate rigorous and high-quality peer review, all manuscripts should be written in good and coherent English. Should you require help when writing your manuscript, a native English-speaking colleague may be well suited to help edit the level of English language in the manuscript. You may also want to consider using a professional English language editing service to improve the level of English language. Please note that using professional English language editing services does not guarantee manuscript acceptance in the journal, and you may be charged for these services.

Covering letter Authors are welcome to submit a covering letter with the manuscript, for the Editors’ reference. Should you wish to provide one, please briefly summarise your manuscript, its findings, major themes, relevant discussion points and any disclosures including conflicts of interest the Editor(s) should be aware of.

ORCiD ORCiD helps researchers record and report their work by providing researchers with a personal unique identifier that can be kept throughout their career. UCL Press journals now implement ORCiD in publications and authors are encouraged to register with ORCiD and enter their ORCiD details on submission. To register, follow the instructions on the ORCiD web pages at  https://orcid.org/ , or for UCL authors please visit the UCL Open Access pages  http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-access/ORCID .

Originality of article All submitted articles must not be under consideration for publication anywhere else, nor have been published in any form prior to submission to any UCL Press journal. By submitting, authors are agreeing that the submission is original except for material in the public domain and such excerpts of other works have written permission of the copyright owner. Where there is potential for duplication authors must correctly reference and cite the work. Co-publication of an article, as agreed with the publisher and journal, may be considered in accordance with the  ICMJE guidelines  on overlapping publication, at the discretion of the Editor.

Data and materials The  London Review of Education  encourages authors to either deposit any datasets on which conclusions in their manuscript rely in publicly available repositories or to present them in the main paper or additional supporting files, in machine-readable format (such as spread sheets rather than PDFs) whenever possible. UCL Press journal authors are encouraged to follow the FAIR data principles - to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable. Further information and guidance on these principles are outlined at  https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples.

Formatting your submission

All manuscript text should be Times New Roman 12-point font and be double spaced. UCL Press’s style preferences are outlined in our  Author Guidelines . These are written to support book authors, but the guidance on text styles is also appropriate for journal articles. 

Versions for peer review The journal operates double-blind peer review, in which authors and reviewers are anonymised to keep their identity hidden from each other. Authors should submit two versions of the manuscript:

• The complete manuscript not blinded, as a Word file (.doc/.docx, etc.). Please include the following biographical information: full names of contributing authors including their institutions/affiliation and address, their institutional email address, and their  ORCiDs . The corresponding author should be identified.
• An anonymous PDF version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review (anonymisation includes biographical information, acknowledgements, self references, electronic author identification and all publication references). Manuscripts will be returned before peer review if manuscripts are not blinded.

Article content Please prepare your manuscript under the following headings, and in the order given.

Title   Your title  should succinctly reflect the article’s content, using key words that are most likely to draw interested readers to the content through a search engine. Titles that accurately communicate article content in a few careful words are more effective than catchy phrases that require a subtitle for explanation. Please use the guidelines below as closely as possible. You may be asked to rework you title if it does not follow them effectively.

• Titles should be accessible for all   -  Be direct, transparent and use keywords so your content is more likely to be found and read by a range of readers.
• Titles should fill less than 2 of manuscript.
• Use a single-sentence title, where possible  – A clear, succinct description that does not require an explanatory subtitle is the best option.
• Where ‘Title: subtitle’ is unavoidable:
• The main title (text before colon) will be used for the running head throughout the paper - consider length and whether the title can be understood alone.
• Avoid using a quote in/for the main heading – these always need explanation in the subtitle and will not be understood in the running head.
• If the main title is too long or opaque, the explanatory subtitle may be used as a running head.

Biographical information  (Word document only) : See point 1 above.

Abstract Present an abstract of 150 to 200 words. This should reflect the entire content of the submission. It should cover the key steps in your article, probably including the genesis of your project/research/theorising, research questions/hypotheses, the research design and methods, findings and outcomes, a discussion of these including limitations, and any indications offered for future action or research. Your abstract will ultimately be used by search engines, and it will form part of the meta-data that will be seen first by people searching your article.

Keywords List up to 10 keyword terms that accurately reflect the article.

Article text Please refer to the ‘General notes for submission’ at the top of this page and to the article type descriptions above when preparing the main body of text.

Abbreviations If any abbreviations have been used, please define and list them accordingly under this heading.

Funding Any sources of funding for the research reported should be declared, including any project codes.

Acknowledgements Mention everyone whose contribution to the work you wish to recognise in this section. Those that contributed to the paper but are not listed as authors can be acknowledged here.

Declarations and conflict of interests Include the following statements that are relevant for type of paper you are submitting and for your work. Where there are bulleted choices, please include the one that is appropriate to you and provide any information required:

Research ethics statement (for articles reporting on original research with human participants; choose the correct statement where appropriate, and provide any additional information required)

• The author/s declare/s that research ethics approval for this article was provided by ___________________ ethics board. /
• The author/s declare/s that research ethics approval for this article was waivered by ____________________ ethics board. /
• The author/s conducted the research reported in this article in accordance with _________________ standards.

Consent for publication statement (for articles reporting on original research or any activity involving human participants)

The author declares that research participants’ informed consent to publication of findings – including photos, videos and any personal or identifiable information – was secured prior to publication.

Conflict of interest statement  (for all articles; delete as appropriate)

• The author/s declare/s no conflict of interest with this work.
• The author/s declare/s the following interests: ___________________________
• The author is a current editor for this journal.

All efforts to sufficiently blind the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.

References A full reference list should contain all the sources cited in the text. Any source not cited in text should not be included. The journal uses an author, date style of referencing. Please refer to this  guide .

Note on appendices Articles in LRE do not feature end-article appendices. All illustrative matter should be included in the body of the text or as a table/figure.

Preparing tables and figures

Authors are responsible for determining the copyright status of illustrations or other material they wish to reproduce in their article and, if necessary, obtaining permission to reproduce it. This applies both to direct reproduction and to ‘derivative reproduction’ (where authors create a new figure or table which derives substantially from a copyrighted source). By including such material in their submission, authors warrant that it may be reproduced or adapted under the terms of the CC BY licence in the same way as their own work. Please note that short extracts of copyright text (excluding poetry and song lyrics) for the purposes of criticism, discussion, or review may be reproduced without formal permission assuming that the quotation is reproduced accurately and full attribution is given.

All tables and figures should be numbered sequentially (Table 1, Table 2, etc) and have a short, clear title or caption. Each one should be tagged in the correct place in the manuscript, e.g. <Insert Table 1 near here>, even if the table or illustration has been placed in the manuscript in its final position.

All tables and figures should cite a source. Where the source is the author, please add ‘Source: Author’ at the end of the caption.

Tables and author-generated line diagrams These should be incorporated into the text at their final position. Please supply tables formatted in Word.

Graphs Please submit these as separate, editable documents accompanied by the original Excel spreadsheet from which they were generated.

Illustrations, photographs Please submit images both within the article text  and  as separate image files (jpg, tiff, eps).

Revisions 

Should your manuscript need revision to meet the journal’s requirements, or following peer review, please attend to the following points when revising your manuscript.

Provide your timely revisions along with a response letter to any reviewer reports, within the specified revision period to the handling editor.

• Clearly show and/or highlight the revisions you have made in the text. This can be accommodated by making use of either a different colour text, highlighting the text, or by using Microsoft Word's Track Changes function.
• In your response letter, address all points raised by the editor and reviewers, preferably sequentially and in a bullet point list.
• Outline the revisions you have made to your manuscript.
• Where applicable, perform any additional analyses or experiments the reviewers recommend (unless you feel that they would not make your paper better; if this is the case, explain why in your response letter).
• Provide a polite objective rebuttal to any points or comments you disagree with.

Referencing Style

The journal uses an author, date style of referencing. Please refer to this  guide .

Special series and features

The  London Review of Education  regularly publishes special features that are edited either by guest editors or by the Editor-in-Chief. These features focus on a theme, subject or area of discourse in education research that fit within the overarching remit of the journal. 

Below readers will find a list of published special series in the journal. Special series (perhaps more traditionally known as a special issue) are a collection of articles on a particular theme and each special series is typically guest edited.

Proposals are welcome from guest editors with a specialism in any field of education research. Please consult our  guide for guest editors . All general enquiries should be made to the Editor-in-Chief .

Culturally responsive STEAM education

Edited by: Wilton Lodge,  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK Alexis Stones,  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK

Belonging and home-making in the internationalised campus

Edited by: Bojana Petrić,  Birkbeck, University of London, UK Cristina Ros i Solé,  Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Prue Holmes,  Durham University, UK

Rising to the challenge of teacher education to prepare teachers for today’s world

Edited by: Becky Taylor IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK Gracy Healy IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK

Colleges as Anchor Institutions in their Local Community

Edited by: Lynne Rogers IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK

IOE@120: Critical Engagement with Educational and Social Thought, Practice and Development

Edited by: Li Wei,  IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK Hugh Starkey, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK

Decolonising the School Curriculum

Edited by: Denise Miller,  University of Greenwich, UK Emma Towers,  King's College London, UK Shone Surendran,  University College London, UK

Decolonizing the Higher Education Curriculum

Edited by: Karen Schucan Bird, UCL, UK Ludovic Coupaye,  UCL, UK

Developing an Empowering School Curriculum: A renewed focus on action research

Edited by: Pete Wright,  UCL Institute of Education, UK

AI and the Human in Education

Guest edited by: Sandra Leaton Gray,  UCL Institute of Education, UK Natalia Kucirkova,  University of Stavanger, Norway

Europe and Education

Edited by: Hugh Starkey,  UCL Institute of Education, UK

Methodological Innovations in Qualitative Educational Research

Edited by: Charlotte Vidal-Hall,  UCL Institute of Education, UK Nozomi Sakata,  UCL Institute of Education, UK Rob Higham,  UCL Institute of Education, UK

New Directions in Lifelong Learning

Guest edited by: Lorena Sanchez Tyson,  UCL Institute of Education, UK Valerie Watson Vega,  UCL Institute of Education, UK

Knowledge and Subject-Specialist Teaching

Guest edited by: David Lambert, UCL Institute of Education, UK

Lessons Learned From Professional Doctorates

Guest edited by: enise Hawkes,  UCL Institute of Education, UK Sridevi Yerrabati,  Sohar University, Oman Susan Taylor,  UCL Institute of Education, UK

Music Education in Context

Guest edited by: Hilary McQueen,  UCL Institute of Education, UK Maria Varvarigou,  UCL Institute of Education, UK

Negotiating the Nation: Young people, national narratives and history education

Guest edited by: Jocelyn Létourneau,  Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada Arthur Chapman,  UCL Institute of Education, UK

Open calls for papers

Below readers will find all open calls for papers to the journal.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Systematic reviews in education: Producing and acquiring knowledge in times of crisis and social change.  

For publication from winter 2023. See link for information, contact and deadlines.  

CALL FOR PAPERS: Culturally responsive STEAM education.  

Call for papers: third space roles and identities in educational settings.  .

For publication from summer 2024. See link for information, contact and deadlines.  

• Volume 21, Issue 1 (04 January 2023)
• Volume 20, Issue 1 (05 January 2022)
• Volume 19, Issue 1 (13 January 2021)
• Volume 18, Issue 3 (13 November 2020)
• Volume 18, Issue 2 (21 July 2020)
• Volume 18, Issue 1 (01 March 2020)
• Volume 17, Issue 3 (01 November 2019)
• Volume 17, Issue 2 (18 July 2019)
• Volume 17, Issue 1 (14 March 2019)
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• Volume 16, Issue 1 (27 March 2018)
• Volume 15, Issue 3 (15 November 2017)
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• Volume 14, Issue 3 (28 November 2016)
• Volume 14, Issue 2 (15 September 2016)
• Volume 14, Issue 1 (18 April 2016)
• Volume 13, Issue 3 (01 December 2015)
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• Volume 13, Issue 1 (01 March 2015)
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• Volume 10, Issue 3 (01 November 2012)
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• Volume 10, Issue 1 (01 March 2012)
• Volume 9, Issue 3 (01 November 2011)
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• Volume 8, Issue 2 (01 July 2010)
• Volume 8, Issue 1 (01 February 2010)
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• Volume 2, Issue 1 (01 March 2004)
• Volume 1, Issue 3 (01 November 2003)
• Volume 1, Issue 2 (01 July 2003)
• Volume 1, Issue 1 (01 March 2003)

Collection Information

Latest issue.

• Learning to think, perform and act with integrity: does teacher education have a signature pedagogy, and why does this matter?
• The 120th anniversary of IOE: critical engagement with educational and social thought, practice and development
• Decolonising the school curriculum: a special feature
• Ann Oakley: new learning and global influence from working across conventional boundaries
• The role of mathematics teacher educators in preparing teachers of mathematics to respond to global challenges within their classrooms
• The Worlds of UCL: teaching, learning and institutional histories
• The master’s element in initial teacher training: what is its value?
• The university role in new teacher learning – why it matters: Teach First trainee perspectives
• Supporting teachers in safeguarding against harmful sexual behaviour: service providers’ perspectives on transformative practices
• Are our further education colleges still an anchor in our society?
• Leading undergraduate provision in further education colleges: the experiences of BA Education programme leaders
• The prestige economy of elite education: a Baudrillardian analysis of an aspirational English school
• Research-informed teacher education, teacher autonomy and teacher agency: the example of Finland
• The internationalisation process: an opportunity for meaningful intercultural interaction or segregation in one UK university?
• Libyan teachers as transitionalist pragmatists: conceptualising a path out of the peacebuilding narrative in conflict-affected contexts
• Choice of international branch campus: a case study
• Making community-based learning and teaching happen: findings from an institutional study
• Defying grand narratives of ‘being an international student’: finding ‘home’ in the Other
• Continuity and churn: understanding and responding to the impact of teacher turnover
• A critical review of international research into pre-service teachers’ beliefs and practices when teaching migrant learners
• Book review: Digital Agency in Higher Education: Transforming teaching and learning , by Toril Aagaard and Andreas Lund
• Scarcely visible? Analysing initial teacher education research and the Research Excellence Framework
• Policy in the pandemic: lost opportunities, returning to ‘normal’ and ratcheting up control
• A reply to ‘Education, decolonisation and international development at the Institute of Education (London): a historical analysis’ by Elaine Unterhalter and Laila Kadiwal
• All carrot – no stick: an alternative award framework to enhance ‘international’ students’ sense of belonging and engagement in the extracurricular
• Searching for belonging: learning from students’ photographs about their higher education experiences
• ‘Dear Epsom’: a poetic autoethnography on campus as home of an international doctoral student in Aotearoa New Zealand
• Socioscientific modelling as an approach towards justice-centred science pedagogy
• The educational process of Ukrainian university students following the full-scale Russian invasion
• ‘STEAM success stories’: refocusing the framework of intersectionality
• 19 Navigating old and new terrains of academic practice in higher education: indelible and invisible marks left from the Covid-19 lockdown
• 29 Developing trauma-informed teacher education in England
• 33 (Un)doing home: exploring home-making and identity – an example of a project in a London higher education classroom
• 34 Narratives of home-making on a Colombian intercultural campus
• 35 Challenging times: a contribution to the history of ‘Education, decolonisation and international development at the Institute of Education (London)’
• 36 Beliefs and understandings of assessment theories and terminologies by university lecturers
• 37 Towards justice-oriented science teaching: examining the impact of the science capital teaching approach on teachers

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Montessori-Friendly Books: Great Options for Developing Your Child’s Reading Skills

• By MontsAdm
• July 21, 2021
• No Comments

Teaching a child to read is one of the great things you can do for them as teachers and a parent. It can help them develop their language and learning skills and expand their mind beyond the boundaries of a traditional classroom setting. So it is essential to provide your child the best books to develop these important skills.

However, some children find it challenging to develop reading skills. It is because they do not have a lot of interest in books as compared to other children. They may find these books tedious or too complicated to understand; this makes it difficult for them to read effectively.

Thus, it is essential to pick child-friendly books that can spark interest in young children to love reading. Montessori-Friendly books are the best options for young children because they have simple words and pictures that are easy for them to understand. They don’t include complicated language or overly complicated concepts that will only hinder the development of reading skills. Montessori-friendly books can help form their thoughts and allow them to understand what they read. These are the best choices because they will provide your child with knowledge and stimulate their imagination and creativity. The right kind of Montessori-friendly books can enhance the formation and development of your child’s reading skills, knowledge, concentration, memory, and speed in reading.

How to Choose Montessori-Friendly Books?

It is essential to choose Montessori-Friendly books that will engage and appeal to your child’s interest. It is where you need some guidelines to select the right books to help develop their reading skills.

Below are some of the essential guidelines to help you choose the perfect Montessori-friendly book for your child:

Choose the Right Book Cover: The right cover design is crucial because you want the book to be interesting enough so that your kids will be interested in reading it. Look for colors that attract kids’ attention and have eye-catching pictures. If possible, choose books with more than one color because children prefer colorful books over dull ones.

Choose the Right Size of the Book: The size of the book is a significant consideration. It should be small enough so that your children will be able to handle it with ease. However, it should not be too small because they may have some difficulty handling it and may have problems reading.

Choose the Right Type: When choosing books for your kid, you should choose colorful and simple books to understand. You don’t want to select books with complicated words or concepts that might confuse your child while reading them; this will discourage them from reading again. If possible, avoid stories with very colorful pictures because they will attract attention and lack content and comprehension.

Choose the Right Content and Topics: The right Montessori-friendly book to use should have content that will interest your child. In addition, it should contain topics that your child will be able to relate to in their daily lives. It is the ideal way to help them develop their reading and comprehension levels.

Montessori-Friendly Books for Your Child

Here is the list of some recommended Montessori-friendly books that you can use in teaching your child to read.

1. Baby’s First Book of Birds & Colors

This book introduces your child to the colorful world of birds. This book teaches colors by introducing your child to different types of beautifully illustrated birds in their habitats. The color word appears bold and large for children to see, and it has a name and gender for kids to identify quickly. Baby’s First Book of Birds & Colors is excellent for your child.

2. One Gorilla: A Counting Book

It is a counting book that helps your child develop their beginning counting skills and remember the numbers. This book has colorful pictures of different gorillas that kids enjoy looking at as they count them. One Gorilla: A Counting Book has a page with each number, and it allows children to learn to count the various types of animals in their habitat.

3. Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes

This book is an essential book for baby playtime and an excellent gift for a new baby. It has simple rhyming text and beautiful illustrations that convey an important message. No matter what color you are, where you come from, and what you like, we are humans with the same worth. Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes is a book to treasure, an instantly lovable book.

4. Apples and Pumpkins

It is a timeless classic. It follows a story of a girl who shares the excitement and joy of the fall season. She comes along with her parents to a farm where they pick apples and choose the best pumpkin for Halloween. Apples and Pumpkins have realistic events that your child can relate to. It can spark his interest and will foster his love for reading.

5. Press Here 

It is an interactive Montessori-friendly book that helps a child to get more excited in reading. Its greatness lies in its simplicity that allows your child to feel like the one who creates the story. Press Here has series of instructions to follow that lead a child into a magical journey. Each page instructs your child to push the button, tilt the book, shake it up. Adults and their children will giggle with delight as the dots change direction, grown in size, and multiply. 

6. The Very Hungry Caterpillar

This book is an all-time classic and one of the best interactive books you can gift to your child. This book is the perfect size for little hands. It has artistically made illustrations of the life of a caterpillar and educational contents like counting days of the weeks and identifying colors. Make it a wonderful Montessori-friendly book for babies and toddlers.

7. Before After 

It is a unique children’s book that both adults and children love. It includes before and after pairs of beautiful illustrations that depict the link between the objects. Like a cow can result in both a painting of a cow and a bottle of milk. There are no words found in the book, but you can discuss what it is all about with your kids. This way, your child will use his imaginative mind to absorb the concept you discuss.

8. Shades of People

It will introduce your child to the importance of diversity. The book is filled with beautiful images of children being happy, playing, running, enjoying the world together. Shades of People conveys a message to your child about connecting and sharing the world despite our differences, race, and color.

9. My Heart Fills With Happiness

Reading this book to your child will nurture his reading and literacy skills and foster their sense of gratitude. My Heart Fills With Happiness allows children and adults to reflect on and cherish the moments in life that bring us happiness and excitement. 

10. Bee: A Peek-Through Picture Book

This book follows the life of a busy bee and her beehive through unique peekaboo holes that pass through each page. Each page shows new plants and flowers and a look inside a beehive as the bees helping and working together to help plants grow. Bee: A Peek-Through Picture Book has artistic illustrations that are soothing to your child’s eyes and very engaging to read since it uses simple words, so your child can understand it easily.

Reading these books simply and directly to your child may not significantly impact his reading skills. So, it is vital to consider the proper ways on how to read books to your toddlers effectively.

Ways on How to Read to Your Toddlers

1. Explain the context to a child: It is vital to explain the context to your child. It is essential because it will help him understand what he is going to read. A simple way to do this is by pointing to the pictures found in a book and talk about them. You can also ask the question if he knows what it is and then tells him about it. This way, you are helping your child develop his vocabulary skills, which is very important for literacy level development.

2. Keep it simple and easy-to-understand: Keep it simple and easy-to-understand when reading a book for toddlers so that they can fully understand the meaning of each word. Then, when he reads, success is determined by whether or not he comprehended the words independently.

3. Read Expressively: When you read with your child, try to express specific emotions. For example, when he reads a book about a sad boy or wants something for his birthday, you can be him by getting the same feeling when reading it. Also, when reading, try and make your voice sound like what you are reading about.

4. Read to your child out loud: Reading aloud is a beneficial skill to help your child read. You can start reading, and he can listen, and you can ask questions about the words uttered until he understands what you are saying.

Developing early literacy skills is a crucial part of a child’s development because it creates the foundation for future academic success and growth. To foster the early literacy skills in your baby, you need to read with him frequently and talk with him often.

As parents, we should make an effort to create a love for reading at an early age to enjoy reading as much as we do throughout their lives.

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Since 1979, London Review of Books has focused on protecting and promoting the tradition of the literary and intellectual essay in English. Each issue contains essays, book reviews, poems, an exhibition review, "short cuts," letters, and a diary. For book reviews, they look at both unsolicited submissions and proposals.

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The 1946 london lectures, maria montessori.

The 1946 London course was the first training course given in Europe by Maria Montessori when she and her son Mario returned from seven years of exile in India during World War II. In these 1946 Lectures, six years before her death, the reader can sense that Montessori has travelled the world and has observed, profoundly and scientifically, an immense amount of children. In these lectures, taken down in English by one of her assistants, Maria Montessori speaks with the mature wisdom of a lifetime spent studying, not just early childhood, but human development as a whole: infancy, the elementary-school years and adolescence. The typescript of this course was to have significant pedagogical consequences, since The 1946 Lectures became the foundation of AMI’s 3-6 courses.

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Review: In ‘The Witches’ Musical, the Playful and the Macabre

A new stage adaptation in London does justice to the dark, comic sensibility of Roald Dahl’s beloved book.

By Houman Barekat

The critic Houman Barekat saw “The Witches” in London.

Children, according to the old disciplinarian maxim, should be seen and not heard. The title characters of “The Witches,” Roald Dahl’s 1983 fantasy novel, would like to go one step further: They plan to exterminate every child in England by disseminating candy laced with a magic potion that will turn them into mice.

A charming and spirited musical adaptation of Dahl’s much-loved book — written by Lucy Kirkwood and directed by Lyndsey Turner — opened this month at the National Theater, in London, running through Jan. 27, 2024 . It’s a deftly rendered production, a high-quality piece of family entertainment that skilfully blends the playful and the macabre, and does justice to the author’s distinct comic style.

In “The Witches,” a precocious boy called Luke (Bertie Caplan) is taken under the wing of his eccentric Norwegian grandmother (Sally Ann Triplett) after his parents die in a car crash. While staying at a hotel in the British seaside resort of Bournemouth, they stumble across the witches — who have convened under the cover of a child-cruelty prevention charity — and get wind of their murderous conspiracy. Luke falls into their clutches, is forced to imbibe the potion and duly morphs into a rodent before scurrying back to his grandmother. He must somehow foil their plot while evading capture by hygienically conscientious hotel staff members.

Caplan delivers an outstanding performance as the young hero, as does Cian Eagle-Service in the role of his spoiled and supercilious pal, Bruno. And Triplett is winningly whimsical as the grouchy-but-kind oddball octogenarian, puffing on cigars and periodically engaging in an intense one-way conversation with a garden gnome.

Katherine Kingsley plays the Grand High Witch with a suitably maximalist, cartoon-villain energy. She’s a haughty and imperious figure, ruling her coven with a combination of charisma and terror. Her minions (including Chrissie Bhima and Tiffany Graves, both superb as Melanie and Kathy) are every bit as compelling in their sycophantic devotion to their crazed leader. Daniel Rigby as the hapless hotelier, Mr. Stringer, is a figure straight out of a Christmas pantomime, bumbling from one calamity to the next.

Although several reference points in the dialogue suggest a contemporary setting, the set (by Lizzie Clachan) evokes a mid-20th century aesthetic, with a color palette heavy on dusty pink and mint green. The seaside hotel, where most of the story unfolds, is sumptuously rendered, and the action is framed by a backdrop depicting the gnarly silhouettes of trees whose branches resemble clawing, spindly fingers. Throw in some remote-controlled mice, dazzling light effects (judiciously deployed by Bruno Poet) and some splendidly angular dance routines (stylishly choreographed by Stephen Mear) and the result is a vivid, intermittently chaotic tableau that is easy on the eyes but still captivating.

The songs, by Dave Malloy, are fairly standard musical fare — retro, cabaret-style crowd-pleasers — but the lyrics are well worked and on point. The Grand High Witch belts out a manifesto inviting parents in the auditorium to “Think of all the things you could do … without a child bursting through the door / You could be wild and free once more.” It’s an arch gambit in a play aimed at a family audience — a winking attempt at divide and rule.

The key number is “Get Up,” an uplifting anthem about the importance of grabbing life by the horns, delivered by a gaggle of children who have been transformed by the witches into inanimate objects — including a vase, a vacuum cleaner and an ornamental clock. The juxtaposition of cutesy, can-do vibes (the song is upbeat and the children look adorable in their costumes) and the inherently sinister scenario (they are trapped in an eternal purgatory) is delightfully perverse.

The playwright and director have been relatively faithful to the darkly comic sensibility that made Dahl so popular among adults and children alike. The makers of two movie adaptations of “The Witches” — Nicolas Roeg in 1990 and Robert Zemeckis in 2020 — both felt the need to rewrite the story’s somewhat discomfiting ending, which they presumably deemed too gloomy for a mainstream audience. (Dahl, who died in 1990, dismissed the Roeg film as “utterly appalling.” ) This adaptation doesn’t flinch: Young Luke accepts that he will see out his days in mouse form, but puts on a brave face, insisting that “It doesn’t matter what you are, or what you look like, as long as somebody loves you.”

It’s a strange resolution, for sure — particularly given the largely playful timbre of what has preceded — but that strangeness is integral to the spirit of the story, bearing out the promise (or was it a threat?) issued in the play’s opening lines: “This is not a fairy tale.”

The Witches Through Jan. 27, 2024, at the National Theater, in London; nationaltheatre.org .

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The actress Rebecca Frecknall steers Federico García Lorca’s play “The House of Bernarda Alba” to its tragic finish  in Alice Birch’s version at the National Theater in London.

The Reethaus, a new cultural venue in Berlin, inspires events that are immersive, experimental and surprisingly spiritual .

The newly renovated Notre-Dame isn’t scheduled to reopen to the public until 2024, but some of the cathedral’s oldest treasures are now on display at the Louvre .

The veteran actor Kenneth Branagh directs and plays the title role in a brisk and curiously weightless London production of “King Lear.”

Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production of the 1975 musical “Chicago” goes back to the original concept of the show  as a musical vaudeville.

For nearly 50 years, a room beneath the Medici Chapels in Florence where Michelangelo possibly hid and drew on the walls has been closed to the public. That will now change .

How I used to love and now hate the London Review of Books

Speaking words of wisdom, LRB

I would read the London Review of Books from front to back. I had to read it all, from front to back. I couldn’t miss any part of what I then saw as the absolute requirement of reading the London Review of Books and absorbing all of the information contained in the London Review of Book s (excluding classifieds and incidental advertising about books, copywriters, book-based dating etc). 

I certainly couldn’t dip in and out of the London Review of Books . The London Review of Books told me, so I thought, everything that I needed to know. The best people would provide me with the best information about what I needed to know. It was a joy and my mind expanded and my taste developed and I became a refined intellectual.

I couldn’t read fast enough to keep up

This reading of each and every London Review of Books ended up making me very anxious ; or perhaps, my latent anxiety overwhelmed my joy of reading the London Review of Books . I couldn’t read fast enough to keep up with the bi-weekly production of these reviews of books.

I was reading nothing other than reviews of books in the London Review of Books . I had no remaining time to read the books they were reviews of, nor any other book. I no longer took any joy in the London Review of Books; it simply became a task or duty to read each copy before the next was delivered , and I began to skim read and hated myself for skim reading the London Review of Books , because I loved the London Review of Books .

Copies of the London Review of Books in their cellophane wrapping piled up , and I began to be frightened of them, frightened of the reading demands the London Review of Books was placing on me. 

Eventually I had to stop reading the London Review of Books , and the pile of London Review of Books filled a drawer which I kept entirely for the London Review of Books . I terminated my subscription because I could not accept reading the London Review of Books without reading it front to back (excluding classifieds , and incidental advertising etc). I couldn’t touch a copy for years , and refused offers from friends of their (used and filthy) copies of the London Review of Books ; those friends who couldn’t throw away their own copies due to the high status of the London Review of Books , and its high cost.

This year, after having said how I used to love and now hated the London Review of Books and couldn’t handle my subscription to it and would never want another one, my neighbour subscribed me behind my back and for free to the London Review of Books ; a free gift subscription . They were delivered to my home, now sealed in a paper envelope rather than the cellophane ( environmental responsibility ).

I opened the London Review of Books , the first I had opened for ten years , and prepared myself for a front to back read. I liked how folded it was , and how much better it was to read a fresh copy than the used (filthy) copies which had been pushed on me by friends who primarily wanted to indicate to me that they read the London Review of Books by offering their (used and filthy) copies  — thinking that I respected the London Review of Books and its users. 

I began reading and my attention wouldn’t hold. I skipped ahead and read half of one article, a line of another, a title of another. I tried to read the poetry and I still couldn’t understand a single line of it , and had no will to try.

Whereas before I could only think TJClarkPerryAndersonTariqAliNealAscherson thoughts, now I could think of no such London Review of Book thoughts, not even Mar iaWarnerJohnLanchesterJamesButlerAdam Mar sJones thoughts could enter my brain. My brain could take in no London Review of Books information , and could form no London Review of Books thoughts.

All this learning was in two dimensions

I considered what was wrong. Part of it was that every article was written in a this is how things are tone, all so tasteful and knowledgeable and clever. Yes, I knew that I would learn a lot, but it felt like all this learning was in two dimensions. It was a very narrow field. 

I considered: I had read the London Review of Books in order to belong to the LRB club and the knowledge I had wanted to acquire was wholly in order to become a member of this club. And the way the London Review of Books reviewers write — their style — is that of the self-assurance of a certain sort of group of people who are self-assured , or who want to write and be read among — and be among — those who are self-assured.

I reflected that England is one big private members club , and the LRB is just a part of this club (the letters “ LRB ” being a spoken code to enter that club). I discovered that this LRB club wasn’t in Bloomsbury, but in Hampstead , and I discovered that having been invited to play croquet on Hampstead Heath, in the Hampstead Heath Croquet Association, in which the words “elle are bee” occurred frequently.

I don’t want someone writing to me as if I were a member of their club , or want to be a member of their club. Everything in this country is a private members club, in which cordial agreement, shared references , and a shared picture of the world is required. A shared belief in what are the right views about the right subjects is required. These people — you? — know the facts and know how to pronounce the facts in the right way. Each article, each sentence of the LRB asks: are you a member of our club? aren’t you a member of our club? Club members look down from their vast knowledge, supported by the vast institutions of their education and the vast institutions of their working life. LRB is a performance of Englishness, just as much as the Hampstead Croquet Association is — often attracting performances by those most insecure in their Englishness.

I reject this LRB club and I will not become a member of it and nor will I cancel my free subscription to the London Review of Books .

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