MONTESSORI’S METAPHOR FOR ASSESSMENT
Dr. Maria Montessori wrote and spoke often of the internal processes that take place within the learner. She described the act of teaching as the planting of seeds and the learner’s mind as a fertile field where those seeds germinate. Piaget advanced a similar internal model of learning with his concepts of assimilation and accommodation, internal processes whereby the learner takes in new bits and attaches them to existing schema or conceptual scaffolds, which in turn transform the schema.
Whereas Piaget’s model suggests a constantly changing mental landscape, Dr. Montessori insisted that deep learning often requires a long germination period. Like a seed, the new ideas that are planted (or received) must be given time to germinate, that they may require water and sun in the form of encouragement and reinforcement, but that the construction of new learning is necessarily a lengthy process. Moreover, it is an internal and therefore a hidden process. New learning emerges intact and integrated into the child’s mental landscape at surprising times, but not before it is complete in its formation within.
How poetic, how naturally sensible it seems, this Montessori metaphor for learning. The force of it, however, is the cautionary note that Dr. Montessori levels at those who hope to influence this internal learning process. You cannot pull up the seedling that you have planted, she writes, to examine the roots and find out how it is doing. That, we all know, would kill the plant. You cannot check every six weeks to see if the newly planted ideas have generated new leaves or flowers or fruit. Assessing that internal development could be fatal.
When we introduce a new concept to a student or add another layer to what we hope is an existing understanding, we hope that new learning will occur. Moreover, teachers are in the business of teaching “big ideas” like the decimal system and the Bill of Rights and the function of nouns and the Pythagorean Theorem. Dr. Montessori’s metaphor warns us not to try to measure our success in teaching these ideas too soon. The new idea may not have taken root, may not be assimilated into the existing schema, may not have matured into useful knowledge. Give it time, she exhorted teachers. It may take three years!
In fact, Montessori classrooms are organized in three-year cycles so that the student has three years to acclimate, assimilate and accommodate the full range of the three-year curriculum that is embodied in the environment. To allow the student the fullest possibility of mental transformation, the teacher must allow those internal processes of learning to occur without disturbing them or trying to measure their progress towards some arbitrary set of goals.
And therein lies the rub. The adults in charge are exhorted to go on faith in the child, to stand back and let the mystery unfold in the hidden recesses of the child’s mind. Not without constant nurturing, not without conversation, not without offering experiences to fertilize those internal plants that are surely growing in the minds of their students. Only if the adults can be patient long enough to witness the unfolding in its own time of students’ remarkable understandings can they tolerate this long period of ambiguity.
Assessment is for those who cannot wait, for those who must have answers NOW, for those who cannot appreciate the mystery of learning. Assessments are for the comfort of adults. It is time that we consider the price students pay for our lack of patience and our loss of appreciation for the great mystery that is learning.
