The Montessori pedagogy

Thanks to advances in neuroscience research, brain imaging tends to validate intuitions that Maria Montessori had in her time.

Indeed, neurosciences underline that several factors help learning. The fact of being an "actor of one's learning" helps to consolidate it. Thus, a passive child learns less well than an active child. But Giacomo Rizzolatti, in 1999, shows that "being active" does not necessarily mean "doing the action", in the concrete sense of the term. The attentive observer student works the same neuronal areas as the one who does the action. In fact, Rizzolatti refers to neurons that are activated when one does the action, but also when one sees someone else doing it. He specifies that: "mirror neurons play an important role in our ability to learn by imitation". Thus, "the ability to reproduce an observed action is the ability to learn a new action through observation."

In the Montessori pedagogy, the child observes the teacher making the presentations, but also the other children carrying out their activities. He has the opportunity to analyze the same action several times. All this is crucial. But beyond observation, the child also has the opportunity to repeat the activity many times. This repetition reinforces the neuronal connections that promote learning. Stanislas Dehaene identifies 4 factors that determine the speed and ease of learning which are "attention, active engagement, feedback and consolidation".

These 4 factors are naturally present in the Montessori pedagogy.

Science reveals and will continue to reveal many other ways to develop and strengthen the cognitive functions of the child. But Maria Montessori will have made the right proposals and this thanks to the attentive observation of the child following Itard and Seguin.