The students file in eagerly to start another day, but instead of heading for desks, they sit in a circle on the floor, their teacher among them. Ms. Delgado turns off the lights and leads these 6–7-, and 8-year-olds in a guided meditation. "Imagine the entire universe," she tells the students. "Now narrow your focus to our solar system … to the planet Earth … to the Caribbean … to Puerto Rico … to San Juan … and to our school. Think of this classroom and this new day we're going to start."
At the end of the meditation, Ms. Delgado makes an announcement or two, and students move away from the circle. They choose materials from low shelves that line the classroom walls and take them to small tables or mats on the floor to work independently.
After a while, Ms. Delgado tells some of the younger students to put away their materials and join her in a corner of the classroom for a geography lesson. She makes a depression in a ball of modeling clay and pours blue-tinted water into it. "This is called a lake," she explains. "It's water, surrounded by land." She places another lump of clay in a bowl and pours water around it. "This is called an island; it's land, surrounded by water."
After Ms. Delgado finishes, she asks whether any students want to work with the materials she has just demonstrated. Two do, and she leaves them to make lakes and islands of different sizes and shapes as the others return to the materials they'd been working with before. She goes back to observing. Noticing that Elena is having trouble placing a triceratops and a conifer on a time line of the Earth's history, Ms. Delgado sits beside her for a few minutes and then says, "Let me show you that again." She pulls out colorful cards that illustrate different epochs as she launches into another presentation, this time for an audience of one.
Scenes like this, which readers may recognize as the Montessori method in action, are becoming more common in Puerto Rican public schools. The infusion of Montessori into 18 public schools is one of the most innovative education initiatives Puerto Rico has undertaken since the mid-20th century.
Maria Montessori's ideas certainly aren't new; the venerable method has been taught all over the world for more than a century and in Puerto Rico for more than four decades. But the more widespread application of this method in Puerto Rico has transformed the professional lives of dozens of elementary teachers. Montessori has brought a much-needed sense of hope and autonomy to teachers and students in public schools, largely because the move to adopt Montessori came from teachers rather than being imposed from higher up.
A Community-Run School Emerges
Puerto Rico's public schools were central to both early-20th-century efforts to "Americanize" the island and the industrialization program carried out by the autonomous Commonwealth government after World War II. The public school system became highly centralized, with policies for Puerto Rico's 1,500 schools established by its Department of Education.
During the 1980s, a movement to decentralize school governance gained momentum. A 1993 law introduced teacher and community participation and decision making into formerly top-down governance.
One school showed particularly strong leadership. The Nueva Escuela Juan Ponce de León serves Juan Domingo, an old urban barrio in a San Juan suburb. Since the 1960s, Juan Domingo has been threatened by gentrification as dozens of upscale urbanizaciones(housing developments) have grown up around it. But the community is well organized. When the Department of Education closed its low-performing Juan Ponce de León school in the late 1980s, a community group that had successfully run programs at the school for years convinced the department to turn the school over to the community.
The Nueva Escuela Juan Ponce de León opened its doors in August 1990 as a community-run anomaly among the island's public schools. Throughout the 1990s, data showed improved attendance and graduation rates, increasing test scores, and a strong commitment to its community. Three years later, when a new Commonwealth administration sought to decentralize the school system, it looked to this school as a model.
Introducing Montessori
In the mid-1990s, the faculty of Juan Ponce de León decided to introduce the Montessori model, whose philosophy resonated with the school's values. Montessori-trained teachers were brought in, workshops were held for non-Montessori teachers who wanted to try the method, and slowly the school transformed itself. As often happens in school-level reforms, those teachers who did not want to adopt the new method chose to leave.
Teachers removed desks and brought in tables, rugs, and low shelves filled with hands-on learning materials. Ambientes(Montessori learning environments), with each class serving a three-year age range (ages 3–5, 6–8, or 9–11), replaced single-grade classrooms. Teachers spent more time sitting on the floor and letting students choose their own work. By 2000, the school was entirely organized around the method.
The school's success with Montessori—at a school serving 300 elementary and middle school students, 90 percent of whom were from low-income families— caught the attention of educators at other public schools seeking ways to improve student outcomes. These educators began to meet, first informally, then as a group called Escuelas Hermanas—sister schools whose teachers and administrators were committed to reform from within.
Eventually, leaders at many of these schools decided to introduce Montessori at their schools on a pilot basis, beginning with teachers who were willing to make a two-year commitment to study the method intensively. The Department of Education authorized release time and funding so that trainers from the New York-based Center for Montessori Teacher Education could train teachers every month, and San Juan's Sacred Heart University agreed to award a Master's in Education to teachers who completed the program.
In 2005, teachers from 11 public schools in eight towns across the island began taking monthly seminars, meeting Thursday through Sunday, eight hours each day. The Montessori method became part of their classrooms in the 2006–07 school year, with teachers receiving regular support from Center for Montessori Teacher Education trainers and experienced Puerto Rican Montessori teachers. A second cohort of 50 teachers began the workshop sequence in summer 2009. All the schools involved are elementary and offer both Montessori and traditional classrooms, except Nueva Escuela Ponce de León, which is all Montessori.
Overcoming Obstacles
Bringing the Montessori method into a traditional school is not easy. Some San Juan schools that incorporated Montessori in the 1990s have since eliminated it. The teachers I interviewed spoke of how they faced two main obstacles to reconfiguring their classrooms.
Meet Resistance with an Open Door
All the Montessori educators met resistance from other teachers or staff at their school who were suspicious of what was sometimes seen as the principal's pet project. Every site had critics, ready to pick on Montessori students' incorrect spelling or undisciplined behavior.
Some teachers thought the establishment of Montessori classes created within-school competition over scarce resources and even threatened teachers' jobs. (Multigrade ambientes draw students from regular classrooms or other schools, and when enrollment drops at a given school, positions may be cut.) "There was fear in my school … we had to tell everyone we weren't going to impose this method on anyone," one teacher recounted. Some parents also questioned the lack of homework and wondered whether the students were "learning anything."
Teachers noted that maintaining an open-door policy—allowing their colleagues and other adults to frequently watch the students working in the classroom— was essential in meeting such resistance. Many Montessori teachers and their students won the grudging respect of opponents in this way.
Ensure Support from the Top
The teachers all pointed to the crucial role of administrators in supporting the project or letting it fail. Financial and organizational constraints can threaten fledgling Montessori classrooms. Montessori materials are expensive, and combining multigrade with single-grade classrooms can be a considerable challenge for administrators. To embed Montessori successfully, the principal has to stand up for its value, recruit promising teachers to receive Montessori training, and raise funds. Two San Juan schools where the principal is especially pro-Montessori now have more ambientes than regular classrooms.
At another school, non-Montessori teachers fought against expanding the program to the 4th–6th grade level, arguing that this would eliminate a regular teacher position. A teacher at this school found her principal's support lukewarm: "I saw fear in her face when she saw my classroom [with its shelves and rugs rather than desks]." This was one of two schools that eliminated its Montessori classrooms in 2009–10.
A Radical Innovation
For the schools that did continue the innovation, two important factors contributed to their success. First, the change was bottom-up. Rather than high-level administrators presenting teachers with a reform plan they needed to buy into, a concerned group of teachers and administrators voluntarily began exploring how they might replicate the first school's success. They decided together to embark on Montessori training, and then requested support from the Department of Education. Teachers owned the process from the early planning stages.
The Montessori philosophy made sense to most initial participants. Teachers were attracted to both the concept that teachers should respect children's need to learn when they are ready and Montessori's pedagogical elegance; the method uses a series of presentations and activities that build on one another and special materials that appeal to children's innate sense of order. One teacher said, "When I started hearing those grand ideas of respect for the child and about how the child's mind works, I said, that's what the children of Puerto Rico need!"
Many of these first participants' colleagues, sold by the success they saw in Montessori classrooms, signed up enthusiastically for the second training cohort. The initiative is spreading, becoming more established in several sites, even as others drop out.
Second, this innovation has deeply changed teachers' traditional pedagogy and their curriculum. Adopting Montessori education entails a huge transformation in teachers' way of working and of seeing themselves and their students. It sends powerful ripples through schools and families. All the teachers who have reconfigured their classrooms along Montessori lines have noted the contrast between teaching with Montessori and their former approach, with students at desks in rows, all working on the same task and repeating that task for homework. One teacher noted,
I don't have that constant obsession with kids staying in their seats… [in the traditional approach, you get the message that] a teacher is good if she has "group control." … I used to feel tense in a regular classroom, but not anymore. … Now I can give the kids much more complex tasks, and I feel more confident.
Another teacher perceived that students were no longer limited by adults' conceptions of what is age-appropriate; students learn at their own pace and can move far ahead of a lockstep curriculum. Allowing students to determine what they're going to learn at any particular time—within broad limits—leads to learners spending more time on task and focusing their attention more clearly on each activity. One teacher told me, "I haven't had a single discipline problem since I started Montessori. … They don't want to leave the room, even at recess. … You can see what they've learned when they go to show it to other kids."
Making this transformation involved enormous effort on the teachers' part. Many used the term sacrificio (sacrifice) to describe their participation. Montessori training is rigorous. It involves a lot of writing and preparing large binders full of presentations geared to specific subjects and lesson materials, all of which teachers make and illustrate. As one teacher said, becoming Montessori trained "involves your whole life."
The Montessori method is expanding beyond its one-school foothold in Puerto Rican schools. How far and how fast it grows will depend on whether these few dozen educators can convince others to make room for this transformation of teachers and schooling.
Author's note: All teacher names are pseudonyms.
