Technology and the Montessori Classroom

This upcoming September, many public school system districts will give each entering kindergarten student their iPad. It’s an interesting development to think that a five-year-old can log into a website to learn. But the real problem is how a five-year-old thinks—not if he can operate a computer. Let’s explore how technology and the Montessori classroom work.

A key component to your child’s growth is this: anyone under the age of 6 is a concrete learner—not an abstract learner. For example, a four-year-old cannot imagine what he or she cannot see—like a picture of a dragon. Only if they’ve seen a dragon can they imagine that.

However, if you take a seven-year-old, they can imagine a dragon without ever having seen one. That’s something a four-year-old cannot do.

This is a key difference between a child’s brain under the age of six—what they see and can apply to what’s around them.

In our Montessori school, children have organic experiences and learn to manipulate their environment. They learn how the world works by putting it together and taking it apart. 

Between Pre-K and the first or second grade, children’s understanding is a whole different animal. Kids may not bathe or care about their person but they want to learn, to know, and do so by asking questions. They learn to create an abstract mind and learn how to extrapolate answers without being told. A six- or seven-year-old can figure their world out on their own.

But today, in some schools they’re being given an iPad as early as five and looking up information. As a result, they are losing problem-solving and cognitive skills.

For example, in a ‘Technology in Montessori’ elementary school environment, children are taught the Dewey Decimal System and how to use a library. Once there, when they walk down the aisles, they’ll come across all different types of information on the shelves. So, if the topic is ‘The Sun,’ a child may find 20 different books about the sun as well as other books on the planets or solar system.

The Montessori student is responsible for annotating the books and authors of the topic. They are also responsible for interviewing an expert—a Montessori skill taught early on.

Our Montessori children are:

• asking an expert questions 
• taking a field trip to that expert’s office
• incorporating their parents in their learning, and 
• writing a full report about it all. 

Their experience is superseding their research.

Compare that with a one-page summary of the sun searched on Wikipedia.

That’s why we wait until the third grade to introduce computer use—children are just not prepared to think a certain way until they’ve had time to experience both the concrete and virtual worlds.

Once introduced, we teach each child how to:

• use it in a comprehensive manner
• use an application
• build an application. 

But, before we get to that point, children must experience and communicate. They need to be in a concrete reality until such a point as they are ready to enter a virtual one.

As educators, we’ve learned many things from our own Gen X education. Did our public school education prepare us for the world we live in today? That’s debatable—so much of our concrete environment (the world around us) has changed. 

We cannot predict what our children will need to know at age 40. But we can guarantee that our children will need to know how to:

• talk to someone
• communicate, and 
• how to think for themselves.

They won’t learn that on an iPad.

It’s worrisome that we’re handing out computers too soon to children who have yet to develop their abstract thought. So, when we in Montessori begin the process of computer teaching, it’s when children can understand and manipulate both their concrete and abstract worlds and environment. That’s when technology and the Montessori classroom can work together.  This is one key advantage of placing your child in a Montessori school.

We teach the whole child.