Minimum viable Montessori

The first time I tied laces into a bow was at Montessori school.  I’d been trying for some time but hadn’t been able to get it.  Then one day my friend Susannah got it, tying the laces on the Montessori dressing frame while I watched, envious.

I was newly determined: if she could do it, I could do it.  I asked her to show me what she’d done.  I watched as carefully as I’ve ever watched anything, and then I kept trying until I got it, later that same day.  We were seeking together.

Montessori dressing frames

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It is this same seeking together that Sugata Mitra saw emerge when he installed Hole in the Wall computers in slums and rural townships throughout India.  In his 2010 TED Global talk, Mitra explains:

“I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi. The children barely went to school. They didn’t know any English. They’d never seen a computer before, and they didn’t know what the internet was. I connected high speed internet to it — it’s about three feet off the ground – turned it on and left it there.”

Mitra then repeated, refined, and repeated some more this experiment, throughout India and then the world.  On average he calculates that within six months, over 300 children will become computer literate from one computer.  He explains how:

“If you calculated the actual time of access, it would work out to minutes per day, so that’s not how it’s happening. What you have, actually, is there is one child operating the computer. And surrounding him are usually three other children who are advising him on what they should do. If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them. Around these four are usually a group of about sixteen children who are also advising, usually wrongly, about everything that’s going on the computer. And all of them also will clear a test given on that subject.”

These self-taught children increased from 0% to 30% proficiency in biotechnology.  With a small tweak, their performance increased to 50%, the level of the best schools in New Delhi:

“I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her. I asked that girl, ‘Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass?’ And she said, ‘How would I do that? I don’t know the subject.’ I said, ‘No, use the method of the grandmother.’ She said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘Well, what you’ve got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. Just say to them, ‘That’s cool. That’s fantastic. What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more?’’ She did that for two months.”

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According to the American Montessori International/USA, the essential elements of a Montessori education are:

• One Teacher in Each Class
  “It is necessary for the teacher to guide the child without letting him feel her presence too much, so that she may always be ready to supply the desired help, but may never be the obstacle between the child and his experience.”

• 3-Year Mixed Age Groups
  “There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with the utmost ease. To understand what the older ones are doing fills the little ones with enthusiasm.”

• Recommended Class Sizes Between 28-35
  “When classes are fairly big, differences of character show themselves more clearly and wider experiences can be gained.”

• Three Hours of Uninterrupted Work
  “Left to themselves, the children work ceaselessly; they do not worry about the clock … after long and continuous activity the children’s capacity for work does not appear to diminish, but to improve.”

• One Set of Materials in each classroom
  “Since [waiting] happens every hour of the day for years, the idea of respecting others, and of waiting one’s turn, becomes a habitual part of life which always grows more mature.”

The essential elements of Montessori are very close to those that have emerged from Mitra’s work.  The role of the teacher is divided by Mitra, who sets up the environment, often giving the children a goal—answer this question or master this subject—and the “grandmother” who encourages the children to continue with their lines of inquiry.  Large, mixed aged groups huddle around a single computer for as long as it interests them, advising, arguing, and explaining what is happening.

What Mitra is building is a minimum viable Montessori.

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Many minimum viable products grow up to take the market from the established incumbent.  Whether it’s the first blurry digital cameras that within a decade put nearly all traditional film companies out of business or The Facebook that grew from a site where Harvard students poked each other to Facebook, a site that seems to increasingly be a competitor to the open internet.

So what does minimum viable Montessori grow up to be?  It’s hard to see that it will become the Montessori of the developed world—an upmarket offering mostly limited to preschool.  But how deeply will the model penetrate?  Will it become the dominant instructional paradigm in any emerging countries?  And if it’s a better paradigm, how will we stay competitive?

While these questions are far enough away, Mitra’s persuasiveness isn’t to be underestimated.  It was his work with Hole in the Wall that served as the inspiration for Slumdog Millionaire.

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