Yes Environment

Heba Torad Author

Jul 04, 2024 |

Explore the 'Yes Environment' in Montessori schools, where children thrive confidently, drawing parents to embrace this innovative approach.

Yes Environment

Although Montessori Method of Education is more than 100 years old, the number of Montessori schools in the states and the rest of the world has just started to increase significantly in the past few decades. Parents see Montessori Methods is complicated for them to understand how it works or how to apply the concept using all these unique tools. This mestery encourage some parents to know more about Montessori and even to let their kids to take the experience and join a Montessori school. The reason for why those parents took the decision even they are not totally aware by the practices and procedures followed in the montesorri class is unknown. But as a first indication something different in the classroom environment attracts them as they feel kids moving in a comfortable way within the classroom and acting with confident. 🡪 This what we call it a YES Environment

Montessori adminstators must invest in parental and public awareness for Montessori classromms environment.

declare the role of Montessori to provide a prospective future to their kids by working on a long-term outcomes for each student according to his individual intellectual and social skills.

To be able how to spread this awareness among parents and school administrators we first need to identify what usually attracts parents to Montessori schools and start our awareness from this point.

According to some studies have been done to serve this purpose, it seems that there are 4 main reasons make parent to take the decision to send their kids to a Montessori school.

What motivates parents’ decisions toward Montessori schools?

1. Attraction to Montessori principles

Montessori has many Nobel principles in which teacher work on them as stages according to the structure of the students at her class. Teacher chooses 3 to 5 principles to focus on at the beginning and after mastering them she chooses some more to add and so on.

But the main principle that is clear to everyone and always appear obviously to parents from the beginning is that the Montessori method is centralized around the STUDENT and his needs, unlike other educational systems the students must follow the system no matter what their case is.

1. Perceived fit with the Montessori philosophy or school

Once the parent decided to know more about Montessori and with litte explanation from the administration about Montessori principles, he will feel mandatory of raising up kids in such environment. This is a very good step now in which parent is convinced, but he still need to see results on the ground.

1. Anticipated outcomes

Anticipated out comes could be noticed by parent in either 3 ways:

• Noticing the impressive level of the kids inside the current classroom.

• Receiving a feedback from a known person who has experienced Montessori Method with his kids before.

• Sometimes both previeus points are not available at the current classroom, in this case only the child impression of statisfiction and spending good time will motivate the parent decision until he notice the skills improvement in a later stage.

1. Attraction to the Montessori classroom

In fact, this point is the most effective one because it depends on the first received by the parent when observing a Montessori classroom.

Montessori classes has very unique order and student work inside it to a specific virtual rules and arrengements. This impression usually capture parents and newcomers students. They feel like every thing is accepted in the class no boundaries or restricted rules.

N.B.: Montessori depends on rules, respecting others and, teacher – students agreements, but the magic is on how to apply them to seem like invisible, and student will just do the right thing because he feels that “This is what I have to do”.

So if we want to make students and parent fall in love with Montessori, we need to give high attention to the classroom Environment to enhance the feel of safety, acceptance and belonging. This will take place in 🡪 YES Environment

Go back by your memory and remember how often you were told ( No, Not allowed, Don’t Touch …….) and words with same meaning to limit your free space at home and school. Such an environment puts pressure and obstacles the growth mind thinking.

In Montessori Method the student work in a YES Environment which avoid negative energy and enhance creativity. In the rest of this blog will explain how to create a YES Environment for children not only at school but also at home. Where ever the child exists, he should be surrounded by a Yes more than NO!

How to create a YES Environment?

There are 4 main parts for YES Environment:

1. Respect for the child

What is meant by respect here is to respect the child abilities, respect the child needs, respect the developmental stage of the child, it also mean to respect the child disability in some areas.

*For example: showing respect to child abilities by designing the class room in which he can serve himself independently without the need to ask an adult for help every while to wash hands or open a door.

*Another example: to respect the child need to move freely according to his age while designing the class activities and organizing the schedule.

Always remember to flexible and do updates according to the structure of the students in the classroom.

1. Process instead of product

Most of the activities should be open ended activities, to allow children to experience more scenarios and conclude more properties about materials and environment surrounding him.

*For example, if the child drop a glass object and watched it broken he will recognize that it is different from plastic ones that doesn’t break!

1. Opportunities for risk taking

It is very important to provide some safe challenges in the child environment. Without challenges the child will not be able to develop his skills. Some tasks that may need an adult support in the beginning will give him the passion to keep trying until reach master’s in it. Keep in your mind that kids need to take a little safe risk to know their abilities and improve it, we can not guarantee at all that children would never fall down or get hurt a bit, but we can guide them through the situation so that they learn from their mistakes.

1. The teacher’s role

The teacher main role in a YES Environment is to be a “Facilitator”. Teacher need to facilitate the educational process to children each according to his own pace.Teacher has the ability to raise the self stem of the student, and enhance any limited social or mental skills by providing the proper challenge/activity to them after observing them closely. Every one in the class should spend good time including the teacher and all learning principles will be learned by internal interaction.

Last thing to mention is that creating a YES Environment doesn’t mean that teacher has to allow every thing for the students and always accept action, it does mean that teacher understand the needs of the students and match her targets with those needs. It also mean that when the teacher’s expectations doesn’t fit with the students’ developmental stage it is ok to reconsider expectation and edit the plan.

Categories: : Montessori