What About Grades?
This question is often asked of every Montessori school.
We recently sent home the midyear progress reports, and you may have noticed that, while we have a carefully defined curriculum, and closely monitor students' progress, we do not compare one student to another, and we do not think of progress in terms of degrees of success or failure.
In Montessori, we recognize that interest, engagement, and self- motivation are much more powerful and effective drives to learning than external, extrinsic rewards and the threat of punishment or humiliation.
Young people learn naturally. Their brains are receptive to learning, and it takes place all the time both at school and at home. This does not mean that what children would prefer to learn will always be the things an adult has in mind. They do need guidance.
The secret is to respect and encourage children to explore things that capture their interest (assuming they are constructive), and find ways to instill new interests and aware- ness in students by presenting new concepts or skills in ways that capture their imagination or, at the very least, they find enjoyable enough to accept our leadership. We have to win their trust. The last thing we want to do is break their will to produce complacent, passive students.
Normally, once we have built a strong relation- ship, we don't need to manipulate students into learning. They do not need petty rewards or punishments to make them learn.
The exception is sometimes the older child who enters Montessori after years of being in classrooms where students have been taught to be passive learners with every moment scripted by adults. This student needs to rediscover that learning can come naturally and can be an enjoyable exploration of new ideas and a non-threatening
process of mastering new skills.
But why don't we give them grades? Isn't that the real world?
People accept grades because they are a tradition, but let's ask what is the purpose of grading young children's work?
Montessori students normally work voluntarily. They do not need to be coerced, and if we use it, we teach them to work to earn a reward, not to love learning for its own sake.
Is the purpose of giving young children grades to make them work harder? When a Montessori student asks, "How much do I have to do?" she will typically be asked in response, "How much can you do?"
Consequently, our students tend to set goals for themselves that are higher than most teachers would assign.
Is the purpose of grades to make students competitive? If by this we mean, "Possessing the skills that enable them to compete," our students develop those skills. If you mean, "willing and able to strive for excellence," they are and they do. Our graduates' performance in university tells us that consistently.
W
e don't give grades until we have to in high school. We want students to learn because of their own intrinsic desire to do so.
We want them to be internally motivated, not externally motivated.
We want them to become self-confident, creative risk-takers.
And we want them to develop the sensibility that each and every person has value; that each person can succeed; that the success of others is to be celebrated, not that another's success means my failure; that it is desirable to help others, and to take the time to do so.
Ultimately, our success as individuals is not best measured by our relative standing in society, but in the society itself that we help to create.
