Provide a Nurturing Environment as a Montessori Teacher

Montessori teachers view children and classroom education differently than the common teacher-student relationship. Their focus shifted from academic education to encouraging each child’s individuality by providing nurturing environment to teach social interactions and emotional skills. In order to achieve this goal Montessori methods are often applied in class and thus bringing about overall development at early age of a child.

The Montessori Method was developed by Maria Montessori in the early 20th century, the educator and physician had altogether different outlook towards child growth and development.  The method focuses on each child’s internal guidance for self-directed development. Herein the teacher is like a monitor or guide keeping a watch at the classroom for smooth flow of learning and avoiding obstacles, without directly instructing or involving in the free ambience of the classroom. The lessons given by the teacher only revolves round helping the child with use or play with various instructional toys in the classroom.
Instead of instructing with lectures, handouts, worksheets and lesson plans, a Montessori teacher will offer guidance while the children themselves responsible for their own learning in individual or group. The classroom will contain several stations, each having different toy sets allowing the child to explore and learn. One station can have bucket of Lego blocks and several pictures of simple objects like an apple or a house which the children will build if they want. Other stations might have books, xylophone, pencils and crayons which will involve them in engaging activities. The idea behind this is that children will learn through playing.
Another interesting Montessori classroom is age grouping. Montessori classrooms often have mixed-age class, for example children ages ranging from three to six. This is important because children at different stages learn in their different pace. And younger children learn by watching older children play. This is also known as scaffolding, a method of social learning.
A Montessori classroom is completely different form typical classroom in a number of ways. This difference has to be considered by the teacher while providing a nurturing environment to develop children independently in a well-rounded manner. BY allowing them to play on their own and instead of letting them listen to lectures, classroom allows children develop the motivation to learn and explore.
If you are planning to be a Montessori teacher then training is absolutely is necessary to keep yourself updates with the Montessori approaches to needed to be applied in a classroom. There are different levels of Montessori Teachers Training- Certificate, Diploma and Post Graduate Diploma which will help you develop and prepare yourself in a Montessori environment.  Instead of information passing from teacher to student, herein the teacher is now skilled to put the children in an environment and help them to learn by making intelligent choices and carry out research in a prepared environment. The teacher constantly protects the student’s concentration from interruption. This fosters a love of learning in the students. There is in fact a triangle between- student, parent or teacher and the environment. It’s the role of the adult to prepare and continue preparing the environment to link the child to it through introductions of various learning inputs like- books and materials, projects and lessons. All this nurtures the child’s exploration and creative zeal. Hence, children often learn to surpass the level of education of their peers and knowledge of the adults around them and they learn to find answers by themselves.
The Montessori school environment is arranged according to subject area like cooking, cleaning, gardening, art and craft and caring for animals, library corner etc wherein the children move around the classroom instead of sitting at the desks. There is no limit posed on the child to their pace of learning. They can take longer time in learning things new to them. The mixed age groups of children learn from each other, facilitated by careful observation, individual lessons and keeping record by the teacher. All this help the teacher in developing a bonding with the students. This nurturing environment provides the base for complete growth and development of the children.