5 Tips for Montessori Curriculum Planning

How to Prepare Before Making Your 3-Year Plan

Montessori is designed to “follow the child”, which makes Montessori curriculum planning more challenging. Therefore, most Montessori schools do not have a curricular calendar that they expect each teacher to follow for lessons, assessments, etc. This helps give Montessori teachers the freedom and flexibility to be responsive to observed student needs. However, it also puts the chore of organizing and planning more fully on the teacher.

Montessori curriculum planning can be an even more daunting task because it is not a linear exercise. We plan for a three-year cycle, with at least three levels in each cycle, with many skill-based lessons being taught individually. Einstein theorized that there was a fourth dimension that needed taken into consideration as well: time. How do we get it all done?

This is the first in a series of articles about Montessori curriculum planning. This article will discuss what resources need gathered before we ever start planning our calendar or lessons. This may feel like a lot of work (and it is). However, laying this foundation of truly seeing the complete arc of your curriculum is a task that only needs done once. As we move forward, we will make minor tweaks as we learn and grow. In return for this invested effort, it sets us up for being empowered, informed, and organized classroom leaders.

Other articles in the series include:

• Exposure vs. Skill-based Lessons: Planning for Different Goals
• Montessori Curriculum Planning: The Rope Analogy
• 5 Layers of Montessori Curriculum Planning
• Montessori Curriculum Planning: Units Take Shape

Administrative Goals for Montessori Curriculum Planning

Depending on where you teach, educators will be guided by goals and expectations that administration has laid out for teachers. While some might feel restrictive, it is important that administrators can “compare apples to apples” within a school or district. This helps hold everyone accountable for the same standards and assessments of effectiveness. Goals and expectations you will need to be familiar with before planning your curriculum cycle:

1. Disciplinary policies within the school.

Whatever guidelines you hope to set for behavior, communication, and conflict resolution expectations in your classroom community must align with and fit inside the larger framework of school or district policies.

2. Mandatory assessments.

Your school or district may have required assessments that students take periodically. It is our responsibility as teachers to know:

• When are the assessments required to be administered? This allows us to “plan in four dimensions” by accounting for this lost teaching time in our annual calendar.
• What content will be covered in the assessment? Regardless of how we feel about a given content expectation, these assessments are how our schools have chosen to measure success. We want our children to feel successful, and therefore we want to prepare them well for the assessment. Create (if not provided) a list of all of the learner objectives reflected in the assessments. You will use this later to compare to your albums and other curricular resources. Hopefully, you will find that all of the assessed skills are naturally well-aligned with the Montessori curriculum. If not, this is an area that may warrant extra discussion as a school. In the short-term, though, it is important to teach your students these skills. It is natural to find some areas we want to supplement. For example, there are often a few math concepts that may or may not be reflected in our albums, but are easy to add. Another example is sight word practice. Maria Montessori spoke and taught in a very phonetic and easy-to-read language (Italian). Therefore, English-speakers often find they may need some supplemental teaching materials for teaching the convoluted rules of English to young readers.
• What daily or weekly assessment does your school require? Some schools need grades entered. Which assignments, how many assignments, etc. will be important expectations to understand, especially in an environment where we are trying to minimize grades. If some grades are required, the issue becomes a little tricky; we don’t want to only enter points for the fewest items possible if this means the few items will be very heavily rated. Discuss with your administrator how to balance grade/point requirements with the process-centered learning of Montessori to determine an appropriate balance that the administration can support.

3. Required Supplementary Curricula.

Are there any mandatory supplementary curricula? For example, some schools may use a supplementary reading or math program. If it is required that this be worked into your classroom, familiarize yourself with the program. Packaged programs often come with a quick at-a-glance planning matrix that lays out the lessons and learner objectives. Teachers can use this to compare content covered with their albums and look for lessons that are already covered in both.

• Do you have the flexibility to choose which of the two lessons or approaches you use? If so, plan which you will use.
• If you are required to use the supplementary material, will you not do the Montessori lesson? Is the concept vital enough to be taught twice, in two ways? Time is precious, too, so this is a balance you will need to determine.
• If the lesson is only in the supplementary curriculum, make note on your master list of concepts that need taught for time-planning purposes.

4. Montessori Curriculum.

What resource will you use to define “Montessori Curriculum”? This is often our albums. If you are still in training and do not yet have complete albums, do you have a peer who will share their albums? Does the school have a set you can use? Being a Lead Teacher before we have completed our training is hard, and having the broad vision of the curriculum needed to plan the year is one of the biggest challenges for new teachers. Hopefully you are not in this position, but if you are starting before you have completed albums, find some to use in the meantime. For planning purposes, copy the table of contents from each album so that you have a complete list of concepts covered. You may need to make a note next to some of the titles of the lessons with the concept they cover if the name does not explicitly list the concept.

5. Compare your lists.

Now you have a few different lists that together frame all of the concepts you will teach your class:

• Assessed concepts (if applicable)
• Supplementary curriculum concepts (if applicable)
• Montessori curriculum concepts

Compare these lists with each other and create one master list of concepts that your class covers over three years. This is your most valuable curriculum planning tool and is an investment of time and energy that will not be repeated each year. It will evolve over time, as we learn of great new lesson ideas or a new administrative expectation is added this. However, this “big work” of comparing your curricular resources is fairly static. You now understand your curriculum deeply and have a vision for not only what needs done next week, but also the arc your classroom will follow each three-year cycle as you move forward in your career.

There are some resources out there for planning that may be helpful, though I have never found one that I could just step into without needing to customize it quite a bit to meet my needs. Because every Montessori school is unique, I am dubious anyone will be able to create a one-size-fits-all tool that will work for all teachers. This list you have created of the concepts you will be teaching is unique to your school and your classroom. In our next articles of this series we will begin organizing these concepts into units and lessons. It may be useful to explore tools such as the Montessori Planning and Record Keeping Guide to see if they align with how your brain likes to visualize things. There are others out there as well, and if you have favorites please comment and share! And even after trying several commercially available tools, my favorite methods include a spreadsheet, wall calendar, and agenda book. Find what works for you, and read the next article in the series to move forward with your planning!