Observation Analysis

Molley Green

MTE 506

September 29th, 2012
Shawn Wells

Observation Analysis

Observing a classroom has a certain metaphysical edge. Merely by your presence and watching, you cannot help but feel that you are somehow changing or influencing the class and the students that make it up. My observations took place in two settings, the first and my primary observation source, was at Children’s Garden Montessori School in El Cerrito, my daughter’s school, it is a private pre-school with children ages two to five. My second observation was the Fit Kids program at my local Berkeley YMCA, this program was created for …show more content…

Ms. Montessori was not quite a victim, she certainly attacked traditional methods of American education, in The Absorbent Mind, she states “Education as it is today! Can we imagine anything more immobile, stagnant and indifferent?” (Montessori, 1949). She also refers to other movements in cognitive psychology as “mental hygiene”. In other words, she may have had many critics but her strength and the solidity of her teaching is what made this school survive. We have to believe that many of the critics, especially those of the competing progressive school, were reactions of fear to the strength of her ideas and the threat that they pose to American education. The overlapping philosophies of progressive and Montessori school were seen as a threat rather than a sign that perhaps the movement forward was paved with the idea of learner centered teaching. Just like the progressive schools, her results were startling, even referred to as “miracles” in the publications of the day (Montessori, 1949). How could a student learn how to read and write without any lecture or proper instruction? It was the belief she had in environmental cues and coercion, and the power of social interactions that she reliably turned out students that were better behaved than other preschoolers, harder working, showed better assimilation into social groups, and had a profound sense of morality. During my