Montessori and Play-Based Learning

by Sarah Werner Andrews, AMI Director of Primary Training

A recent feature article in the Hechinger Report: Covering Innovation and Inequality in Education, describes how children learn more effectively from guided play than from direct instruction. The article highlights the difference between free play and guided play, and why guided play is so effective in early learning. This is no surprise to Montessori teachers.

Highly skilled Montessori educators understand that children learn best through exploration and self-discovery, using purposeful materials, with gentle guidance from a supportive adult - this is what it means to “guide” children in their development. It is also the definition of “guided play.”  

The book, A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool summarizes play in three different styles:

1. Object Play – in which children explore the characteristics and properties of objects, and often morph them into new functions

2. Pretend play – either alone or with others, where children explore different social roles

3. Physical play – which includes everything from “peek a boo” to free play at recess

Each of these variations of play has a legitimate place in Montessori education:  Children explore the characteristics and properties of objects, they explore different social roles, and they explore physical games and activities.  Exploration is a key element in play and is also recognized as a universal “Human Tendency” in Montessori theory.

Guided play actively engages children in pleasurable activities that encourage academic exploration and learning.  In the guided play model, the teachers have learning goals or purposes in mind and embed new learning into the context of previous knowledge and experiences.  The authors of A Mandate for Playful Learning use Montessori schools as an example of programs that utilize playful learning, citing the research of Angelina Lillard and Adele Diamond as support for their effectiveness.

Another fascinating book,  Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, by Stuart Brown, describes the voluntary nature of play as the essence of freedom.  When children voluntarily choose an activity they do so because of an inherent, personal interest.  They  become fully engaged, are fully in the moment, and experience what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls “flow.” Free choice is an essential element in Montessori education.

In this book,  Scott Eberle describes a wheel-shaped framework of play:  Anticipation, surprise, pleasure, understanding, strength, and poise.  This framework is strikingly similar to the cycle of activity that children experience when they work with any Montessori material: 

• Anticipation - The start of a presentation, wondering what will happen: “Have you ever peeked inside of this box…?”  

• Surprise - A discovery or change in perspective:  “Oh my!  Look at all the tarnish on this cloth!” 

• Pleasure - A good feeling: “Ha, ha, ha!  The Nine Chain has 108 and 180!”

• Understanding - Acquiring new knowledge or synthesis of ideas: “Teacher! Did you know that (insert Meaningful Discovery here)!”

• Strength - Mastery that comes from experience or practice:  “I can help you build that map of Asia!”

• Poise - Grace, contentment, and a sense of balance:  Think of the care that children take when they are finished and “make it ready for the next person,” or when after working with deep satisfaction they take that calm centeredness into their next activity.

Both Brown and Eberle describe the calming effects of play in a way remarkably like the “normalizing” effects of a Montessori activity when it is freely chosen, done by the hands, with real objects, and accompanied by mental concentration.  This is the work of childhood.

“Scientists who study play in animals and humans alike, are developing a consensus view that play is something more than a way for restless kids to work off steam, … more than a frivolous luxury.  Play… is a central part of neurological growth and development – one important way that children build complex skilled, responsive, socially adept and cognitively flexible brains.”

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