Who says Montessori can’t teach reading?
by David Ayer
Maybe we have something to learn here
When I first began to hear a narrative along the lines of “Montessori has a problem teaching reading,” my first thought was, “How is this possible?” If there’s one thing Montessori has a lock on (and there’s much more than one thing), surely it’s teaching young children to read. With its masterful blend of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction via the “Sound Game” (often called “I Spy”) and the Sandpaper Letters–Moveable Alphabet sequence, along with the deeply embedded, culturally responsive literacy that begins the moment a three-year old enters a Montessori classroom for the first time, surely Montessori education bridges the divide between “phonics-based” and “meaning-based” education that has characterized the “Reading Wars” of the last century.
After all, the story of the “explosion into reading” observed in four-year-old children in Dr. Montessori’s very first “Casa dei Bambini” in San Lorenzo in 1907 was widely reported in the contemporary press as a miracle, and played a major role in Montessori’s early recognition and fame. And let’s remember that these children were from communities we would today recognize as marginalized and under-resourced, not subjects of high expectations for literacy or education generally.
Now comes legislation in a dozens requiring schools to use reading curricula or interventions that are “evidence-based” and aligned with the “Science of Reading.” Montessori is not well-represented in the evidence base or in the lists of acceptable curricula, and as a result public Montessori programs may face compromises to the integrity of their approach. The Reading Wars, it seems, have achieved a negotiated settlement, but without Montessori at the peace table.
The Reading Wars
The conflict over how to teach reading goes back to at least the 1970s, and really much further than that: Noah Webster favored phonics, while Horace Mann supported what came to be called the “whole language” method. The lines are pretty clearly drawn. Phonicists believe (and the research supports them) that children learn to read best with explicit structured phonics instruction—even in a not-entirely-phonetic language such as English. (Non-alphabetic scripts, such as Chinese, present an entirely different challenge, obviously.) “Whole language” proponents characterized phonics instruction as over-emphasized and mind-numbingly boring, and argued that children can learn to read by saturation in a literacy-rich environment, using clues such as context, illustrations, and even word shapes. To be fair, studies have shown that adults recognize words faster than decoding would seem to allow, although this has not been found to generalize to children.
Decades of reading research came up mostly empty on the effectiveness of whole language instruction, and by the 1990s, with California leading the way, reading instruction moved back towards a phonics-intensive model. “Balanced literacy” also arose in the 1990s as an attempt to compromise between the perceived rigidity of intensive phonics and the “meaning-making” aspects of whole language, but the approach did not gain wide acceptance and has been criticized as unscientific.
The Reading Wars were arguably settled thanks to the scientific method. Researchers Philip Gough, William Tunmer, and Wesley Hoover advanced the “Simple View” of reading in 1986 as a testable hypothesis about the importance of decoding. Later work, notably Hollis Scarborough’s “Reading Rope,” demonstrated the importance of both decoding and comprehension for learning to read, and the “Science of Reading” as it is understood today is an extremely well-researched and documented model which integrates these ideas and which has shown great success in the classroom. You can read much more about the Science of Reading and its relationship to Montessori in the Fall 2022 issue of MontessoriPublic.
As you will discover, the Montessori curriculum does in fact do a very good job of building the skills necessary for learning to read and making reading and literacy deeply embedded and engaging elements of the classroom. There are some areas where improvement is possible of course—perhaps some more structured work with phonemes and letters, possibly better, more systematic support for comprehension, reflection, and meaning-making, especially in 1st-3rd grades—but Montessori ticks a surprising number of boxes.
So why are public Montessori programs teaching reading with Montessori under threat?
I can see two reasons for this: one on the policy side, and one in Montessori.
On the policy side, what does it take to qualify as “evidence-based?” One gold standard adopted by many states and districts is the What Works Clearinghouse a federal “trusted source of scientific evidence on education programs, products, practices, and policies.” The WWC returns this result in response to a search for “Montessori”:
As of December 2005, no studies of Montessori Method were found that fell within the scope of the Early Childhood Education review protocol and met WWC evidence standards. Therefore, the WWC is unable to draw any research based conclusions about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Montessori Method to improve outcomes in this area.
The WWC review protocols and evidence standards are rigorous, as they should be, calling (ideally) for large sample sizes and randomized control trials, and public Montessori is small, although growing fast, so it’s not surprising that 17 years ago no studies could be found. But at this point it seems that some research could be found, or undertaken, that could fill this gap. Certainly Dr. Angeline Lillard’s ongoing multi-year federally-funded study of public Montessori could be brought to bear when it is completed and published.
On the Montessori side, Montessori teacher training and classroom practice need to update their thinking to align with what one researcher has called “the most universally agreed on result in education research,” as well as the expectations set for public school children by nationally adopted English Language curriculum standards. If the science suggests we should do something a little different with the Sandpaper Letters or the Sound Game, we should do it. We’ll soon see if it makes a difference. If public Montessori elementary students will be asked to “describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges” (Common Core 2nd grade Literacy Standard RL 2.3) or “determine the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details” (4th grade Standard RI.4.2), we ought to teach them. If teachers don’t have a lesson for that in their Elementary albums, they ought to be able to create one without straying from the central practice of Montessori, which is to awaken and inspire independent learning and discovery and to serve as “preparation for life.”
So that’s what this issue is about, and that’s what’s possible.
David worked in private Montessori for more than twenty years as a parent, three-to-six year-old and adolescent teacher, administrator, writer, speaker, and advocate. In 2016 he began working with the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector. David lives in Portland, Oregon.