It is surprising to observe that even a complex social skill can be imparted to a child of less than 5 years in Montessori. And, considering the surprisingly naive manner in which training is conducted in companies, I thought it would be useful for training professionals to understand how it is done in a Montessori school.
Social skill is not sitting with someone else and listening others talk, joke, blabber, or patting each other’s back. Social skill is sitting with others to solve social problems and pursuing aims acceptable to all. Therefore social skill requires a skill to harmonise individual activities. If
the latter is social development, then fostering social development
requires developing five
traits: 1) Acquiring self discipline to speak what is necessary, 2) respecting
others time and presence, 3) taking care of common resources that belong
to all, 4) listening to others with patience, and 5) utilizing each others to ask for help or give help, when necessary.
Let
us see how these traits are developed indirectly
in a Montessori School. No scholastic material is prepared to
develop social skills of a child; instead, in Montessori, an environment is created, which invokes specific experiences in a
child, so that it enables the development of child’s social skills. Let us see how it is done.
For
instance, in a Montessori school, as many of the Montessori apparatus
are found in only single sets, the child, who does not find what he
wants to work with, needs to wait for it to come back to the shelf.
This fosters patience
and tolerance towards other children in the environment. The child
learns to control the urge to grab the material from others and has
to instead learn to live with others.
The
child in a Montessori school has the freedom to move and work
wherever he wants to. However, he quickly finds out that his freedom
is not limitless. Like others can disturb him, he also realizes that
he can be a source of disturbance to others. He has to therefore
learn to inhibit his impulse to disturb others if he has to enjoy his
own freedom of working himself. Unknowingly he learns to respect
others. A
child is not taught to respect others, instead he learns this through
experience in a Montessori.
In a Montessori, a child has to take care of the material
himself. Because everyone shares one set of material, the child
understands that the materials are common
resources
used by everyone. He not only has to take care of the material, but
also keep
it back in
the same state of preparedness and completeness that he got the
material, after he finishes his activity. This itself promotes
self-discipline
and acute awareness of other’s needs, an important trait for social
development
In
a Montessori, children with diverse and mixed
age group
work together. Infact, the diversity in a Montessori enables
child to experience different type of children: active, bubbly,
silent, demanding, whining, talkative etc. Older children become
heroes and teachers of the younger children, as younger children
intuitively understand that when they will become older they will be
able to do what older children can do. As a five year old child can
communicate with a three year old far more easily than adult, a
junior child often ‘ seeks help’ from the senior child about his
activity instead of adult. This social experience of helping
each other
in a Montessori strongly promotes social skill development.
In
other words, careful preparation of environment in a Montessori promotes social development better than any traditional
classrooms. It is not done through specific actions, but through
creating an environment, where a child learns through ‘experiencing’
instead of intellectual reasoning. As Paula Lillard mentions "Unlike
traditional classrooms the children speak to each other and initiate
activities together whenever they like. They are not forced, subtly
or otherwise to share themselves with others when they are not ready
or interested".
Amen !
Amen !