9 Best Systems for Student Independence in Montessori Classrooms

Building a culture of student independence is what leads to “normalization” of a Montessori classroom. “Normalization” is the translated (from Italian) term that Dr. Montessori used to describe a productive, happy classroom that functions independently with minimal teacher intervention needed. This allows the teacher to focus on giving lessons, scaffolding, observing and collecting data instead of explaining to children what they should be doing or managing behaviors. The key to building student independence in the classroom is to create systems collaboratively with children and reinforce them consistently. During the beginning of the year, this may even mean lightening plans for giving lessons and assessments. Investing the time early in the year to build student independence pays off ten-fold throughout the rest of the year, though, and will ultimately result in more learning. However, student independence also offers even greater benefits than those that emerge in the classroom. Dr. Montessori believed that helping children help themselves would create thriving adults later. As children grow, the focus on independence changes.

• Ages 0 to 6-functional independence (the ability to communicate and move, for example)
• Ages 6 to 12-intellectual independence (understanding the “whys” and beginning to question and disagree with presented information)
• Ages 12 to 18-social independence (finding one’s niche in the community)
• Ages 18 and older-moral independence (determining one’s values and sense of justice)

Designing systems collaboratively with children, whether it’s to build student independence or set behavioral expectations for the classroom community, is an important teacher skill. However, it is also a skill that can be tricky to master. Here are some steps to setting up collaborative conversations in elementary classrooms:

Preparing for Collaborative Conversations

• Gather supplies. I usually use a whiteboard and markers, or chart paper if I don’t have a whiteboard. I will use these to take notes during the conversation. This has three benefits-it is a teaching tool for visual learners, a record of our brainstorming and conversations that may need revised as a group, and also is modeling for notetaking (an invaluable skill to model and teach during the elementary years).
• Pick the time and space. The time of day and classroom or outdoor space used can have a big impact on the energy students bring to the conversation. I often scheduled important classroom conversations during our transition into the afternoon. The children had eaten, exercised, done their classroom jobs as a transition, and would be able to come to the meeting fresh and ready to listen and participate.
• Guide, don’t lead. The goal of the teacher is to guide the conversation to meet the stated goals, while holding back from giving his or her own ideas as much as possible. The balance is to help the conversation stay on-topic and productive, but also for the students to leave feeling ownership of the result so that they have genuine buy-in.
• Ask, don’t tell. A great way to guide the conversation is with questions. These might be questions asking a student to tell more about an idea they shared, a hypothetical situation to lead students to new ideas, or open-ended questions to process through an issue.

9 Best Systems for Student Independence

1. Building Agreements

Creating classroom behavior agreements collaboratively with students instead of dictating rules creates buy-in in the classroom community. Facilitate a classroom meeting asking what the students believe we need to agree to do to get along as a classroom. Use guiding questions to help them imagine scenarios and empathize with others to generate a thorough brainstorming list. Try not to exclude any ideas from the brainstorming list. Help children phrase ideas in the positive, such as “Walk” vs. “Don’t Run”. When they say something we shouldn’t do in a classroom community, validate the idea then ask, “So what should we do?”

A great tool for creating more concise agreements is to hone in on a focus word. For the classroom behavior agreement, “Respect” is a useful keyword. Begin asking children to create categories of brainstorm ideas that can be grouped together. Often a very long list of ideas can be whittled down to “respect for ourselves, each other, and the environment” and children feel that all of their ideas have been included. This provided a general peace-making framework that can be used to address almost any situation.

Other useful agreements to build in collaborative conversations are what work periods should look, sound, and feel like or how group game disagreements will be handled at recess. The possibilities are endless, and creating agreement-building as a common practice in your classroom culture engaged students in leadership and accountability.

2. Keeping portfolios

Meaningful student portfolios serve multiple vital purposes. They are an effective data collection tool for teachers, help students reflect on their own progress and build growth mindset, and build student self-awareness. Portfolios should include a regular guided reflection process to help students create meaning from the collection of work. The portfolio should not include every work a student has done. The thought process that goes into choosing works they feel best demonstrate their growth is part of the benefit of the portfolio. We hope they will include not only works at which they succeeded easily, but also challenges they overcame. Portfolios clearly draw the link for children between what they are demonstrating in their work, how they see themselves as students, and how others see them as students through their curated portfolio.

3. Classroom jobs

Classroom jobs for students help create a sense of ownership and investment in the classroom, create useful practical life movement activities, build stewardship values, and create a positive community culture. There are many lists available online to brainstorm ways to include your students in classroom jobs, and there are no right or wrong answers. Jobs time can often be incorporated into the school day as a valuable transition tool between activities, as well. Classroom jobs help give students a sense of purpose and belonging and create a culture of communal care in your classroom environment.

4. Portfolio sharing

Whether it is a Sharing Circle where students choose one work to show and explain to classmates or creating a culture of students guiding their parents through their portfolios every weekend, sharing is caring. The process of deciding what to share, what to say about it, and who to share it with is a deep self-reflective practice for students. See more about sharing portfolios with parents in my post 9 Keys to Effective Parent and Teacher Communication.

5. The “Four Part Question”

Helping children feel empowered through fostering growth mindset has the biggest impact on creating confident, independent students. Growth mindset is a way of viewing challenges as something that can be overcome with effort and time. Carol Dweck is the foremost expert on growth mindset, and I highly recommend her TED Talk to learn more about growth mindset and fixed mindset.

One way we can encourage growth mindset is by setting an expectation for help requests in the classroom. When a child says “I don’t get this assignment”, that is the end of the conversation. They want you to reteach the information (and maybe they need this) or give them the answer. We, as teachers, don’t have enough data to effectively respond. Therefore, I built into my classroom the “Four Part Question”. We did a series of lessons in class on the science of growth mindset, then role-played the “I don’t get it” response students sometimes present to teachers. As a group, we brainstormed what information the teacher needed to be able to help, and what steps the student should do to problem-solve for themselves. The kids generated the four parts of a help request that would demonstrate that a student had completed all of the steps.

I am working on…

I am struggling with…

I already tried…(a problem-solving strategy)

The specific help I would like is…

This is a sophisticated skill, broken down into concrete steps for the elementary mind. Students will struggle with it and it may sound or feel awkward at first, but the results were astonishing. Students were more likely to work through problems on their own before coming to a teacher, and those who needed help were primed for learning instead of hoping I would just tell them the answer. It became an integral part of our classroom. While the words sometimes changed and evolved, the expectation remained. I wrote an article home to parents explaining the four-part question, and a university professor parent asked if she could copy and paste the article into her syllabus for undergrad students! Last I heard, she was still using this with her college students six years later and was seeing results.

6. Peer mentoring opportunities

Within the classroom, pairing children to teach each other lessons or support each other through challenging works builds a sense of community and leadership. Additionally, finding opportunities for older students to work with younger students in other classrooms helps children feel “big” and take their leadership very seriously. For example:

First-grade emergent readers worked on rhymes and beginning sounds to take photos and create short poems through a shared writing activity. This was then bound into an “I Spy” activity book for the early childhood classrooms, and the students proudly read and shared their book with the younger students.

Upper elementary students still working on reading fluency read stories to early childhood students at their cots at naptime, practicing their intonation and phrasing while providing a service to the young, grateful child.

These opportunities to be seen as leaders in the classroom or school inspire students to reach for other big goals and have faith in their own abilities.

7. Effective work plans

Most Montessori elementary classrooms use work plans to help children organize and track their classroom goals. There are a lot of cute and creative ideas out there for work plans. I tended to use a simple document made in a spreadsheet program. The most important part of a work plan is not what it looks like or how many works it expects students to get done in a day. The most important aspect is the culture of productivity it fosters. The biggest mistake I see in classrooms is that the work plans are designed to measure if children complete a certain number of works per day in some given areas of the curriculum. Quality is not a focus and there is no clearly defined use of their time once they are “done” with their work. This causes children to rush, do sloppy work for the sake of getting it done, then try to do as little as possible or to focus on playing and being social once those works are done (which negatively impacts the rest of the class).

Alternatively, I recommend a work plan that sets some minimum requirements for productivity and work variety, but leaves the rest of the day open-ended. It expects children do required works, then their “reward” for completing their required works is that they have the freedom to choose “passion projects” and continue learning based on interests. This slows children down because they are not racing toward a “finish” line and helps them take pride in the quality of their work. It also builds higher expectations for how they will use their time once the minimum requirements are met. Work plans should be individually adjusted for children to find their “just right” level of challenge. In this zone, they will need to stretch themselves and exercise some self-discipline to meet the requirements, but will also have time for passion projects.

8. Use the engineering cycle

The engineering cycle is a more forgiving and fluid version of the scientific method. It can be applied to engineering experiments in the science curriculum, but it can also be used as a social-emotional learning tool. The engineering cycle asks us to:

• Identify a problem or question
• Research/collect information
• Brainstorm
• Plan
• Implement
• Test
• Improve
• Repeat

This worked for developing the telephone, and rockets, and cars…but it also is a great tool for kids to frame classroom issues, conflicts, fears, and more. It orients problems to a growth mindset and reduces feelings of failure by implying that problems take multiple tests and solutions to solve.

9. Student self-monitoring techniques

The more teachers can remove ourselves from student growth, the more they will own that growth and be empowered and motivated by it. Teachers often act as noise monitors, time keepers, and reminder lists for students. This outsources the skills needed to manage these tasks themselves and steals opportunities from them for becoming independent. Here are some tools students can use to monitor themselves:

• “Time Experiment” sheets-small slips of paper that ask what work the child is starting, what time it is, and asks them to estimate how long they think the work should take them. Then they record their finish time and reflect on why it might be different than their estimate (works great for daydreamers or overly-social students that just do not seem aware of how much time they are losing).
• Sand timers and other visual timers to help children begin to feel and notice the passage of time more accurately.
• Headphones for noticing and addressing one’s own distraction.
• Decibel counters for the classroom to help students notice their volume (useful when classroom agreements are in place about appropriate volume levels).
• Goal setting and tracking sheets.
• Planning sheets for breaking multi-step tasks into sub-tasks for those who might feel overwhelmed by larger assignments and have a hard time getting started. In extreme cases, these planning sheets can be cut into pieces that each have one sub-task on them, and the teacher or a friend can give the student one task at a time to focus on.

The more we can help students help themselves, the more powerful they become as students, leaders, and citizens. The investment in time and energy to create a classroom culture that values and fosters student independence will be well worth it as we watch the children thrive.