Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy montessori education and identifying gifted kids

https://montessoriobserver.com/2013/07/02/montessori-and-gifted-children/

This is interesting; based on my knowledge of montessori schools, do you think the parents of young children (pre-k) arent given enough information about their child's abilities to suspect giftedness? I know my own daughter's "teacher" (she is 2) has told me that they arent really allowed to tell me anything unless there is a problem, but has told me outside of class on numerous occasions that she is "so smart"

It made me wonder if the adherence to some of the philosophies actually allowed some kids to go unnoticed as gifted.

I think it is really dependent on the Montessori school. DD3 is in a Montessori school that was recommended by our psych (who specializes in GT kids) and although we are moving her to same school at DS (we knew it would only be for 1-2 years max since hers only goes to around the eq of first or second grade).

We have visited and heard of wide range of Montessori schools - some where I can completely see where the school would have no clue about giftedness.

In DD's case (she is in the class with 3-5 year olds), since the classes are mixed age, I don't see a lot of comparisons to what a typical age peer would be like I did in the previous preschool at our PT conferences. She gets to hang out with older and younger kids.

In her classroom, they do really allow them to go at their own pace - her teacher told us that sometimes DD would sometimes sit with her activity close to a lesson for the older kids and although appear not to be listening, as soon as the lesson was over, she would get it out and do it correctly, and they don't force her to put it back. She has been showing a lot of interest in some areas so they have been encouraging her and they are aware of her ability to pick up things quickly.

I would imagine - in a good Montessori school, where they do really follow the child's pace, there should not need to be identification for GT specifically but rather work seamlessly so if the child needs materials from next class, they could get those materials. However, Montessori name is used and misused frequently so it would really be dependent on school, like any other school.

Montessori as a concept and the implementation of those same concepts are two totally different things.

What you mention about working at their own pace is what actually gives me concern. I mean, she is only two, but at the same time, I could see how they would be working with her individually, and not use her abilities comparably. In our montessori school/daycare, the ages are not mingled. She is in the 2s classroom and another child has to age out of the 3s room before she can move in, and they do it by age order, not by ability. which frustrates me. They say they curriculum is the "same", but I think her being exposed to kids that are her peers would be beneficial for her. Like her teacher says, she is very smart. but she also, I doubt, is being given much room to grow.

I think in general teachers may not be good identifiers of giftedness (and this is not a knock on teachers - it's a really hard job).

I would agree with this. especially with gifted kids that are not 2e, and are in that socially optimal range.

Is the teacher bringing materials from older age rooms into her classroom once she's mastered those in the 2s? Our son's teachers did that regularly. They were always bringing in new-to-him materials. I don't know that anyone there every called him gifted, but the head of school did tell us several times that he was amazingly smart.

As with any school, experiences vary considerably between Montessori schools. We had a 95% awesome experience with one our ODS (DYSnow ) attended for nearly four years (age 2-K). He flourished there. The teachers knew he could handle more advanced materials and made sure he had exposure to them. In particular, the math manipulatives worked very well for him.

We visited two Montessori schools in our new town and were far less impressed with them.

I am not sure. I have a small complex about being a pushy parent and I don't want her teachers thinking her mom thinks shes a snowflake... and I also don't know if she is really pushing for anything new? if that makes sense. shes a pretty submissive and sensitive kid, so i'm not sure that there is an awareness that's even an option, thus not triggering anything from her teachers.

I did bring up the fact that she was "reading"... or knew some sight words once to her teacher and she said, "yeah, that's pretty common at this age that they start associating pictures with words". It felt pretty dismissive, but it also made me think that DD isn't really showing herself at school.

I really do love the daycare/school. she is happy there and seems to be well adjusted and enjoy the teachers and children, so I don't plan on reevaluating her being there. If she really wants to move ahead in concepts, she will.

I do wonder, though, if there is a shyness/reservedness about her that doesn't allow other people to see growth potential. if that makes sense

In general, I would suggest that at this age, if she's happy, don't worry about this quite as much as you will likely need to do later. However, if she starts to say it isn't fun or gives you other signs she might be through the materials (no longer finding things to interest her), then revisit it.

thanks! that's good advice. It was my inclination. mostly, I just what her to be having fun at school, and learning to be around and resolve conflicts with other kids. play. shes two... so i am not worried about her education so much as I am wanting to make sure that she doesnt fall through the cracks because of her personality.

We have three children in two different Montessori schools. In my experience Montessori is very good for gifted children, especially if they enter at the younger end of a mixed age classroom. Active support for gifted children varies not only from school to school but from teacher to teacher.

We have had one teacher who has been immensely supportive of DYS, providing advanced lessons and enrichment, and supporting his going for math lessons to the highest class in the school (a 5 grade acceleration). We had another teacher who flatly told us - when we told her DD-then3 was reading simple books with sight words - "we don't expect three year olds to read" and refused any enrichment. We switched DD to a different classroom, where her teacher does provide advanced work to DD and a small group of gifted peers but does not go out of her way to challenge or stretch them. DD is fine with that but is cruising along and could do with a bit more challenge when she switches classrooms. The gifted group is working about two grades ahead.

We also have a two year old in Montessori program where I spend a morning each week. At two the curriculum primarily focuses on practical life, emerging language, fine and gross motor skills, and social interactions. It is very different from most daycares for two year olds, and from most traditional schools. If your child is engaged and happy with the activities I would not push for more formal academics. (DS had to "go back" as a kindergartener to master a lot of practical life activities most three year olds have learned ... he was too busy reading and doing math at that age) The works in the classroom are typically updated weekly, and as the children get closer to three more math and language activities are typically incorporated. Our DD2.5 is readily included in these activities with the young three year olds in her class. A good teacher will gauge your child's level but may still have them work through all the material, since most works are designed to address multiple developmental areas. (e.g. sensorial as well as math). Perhaps worth noting that it is common for children in Montessori to read ahead of age peers in traditional schools. Also, Montessori tends to teach writing (tracing letters at first) before reading, but is not rigid about that sequence.

Another very important note about Montessori is that the children select their work. The teacher may suggest something, but ultimately the child decides what they want to work on. Again if your child is engaged and happy she is bound to be learning, though it may be more in the practical than academic areas. As in your daughter's case, our child's teachers realize that she is bright but probably don't realize just how bright she is. At home she works on more advanced math (if you can call it that - counting and adding objects) and reading, and I have no doubt that she will jump from reading sight words to actually reading before long ... but having been through this with DS I am not in a rush! There are a lot of very useful things to learn about navigating the world, independence, and peer relationships: that is the real value of toddler Montessori.

On balance, we are very happy with how Montessori is serving our children. In particular, pre-K through early grades seems so much better suited to gifted children's interest, learning style and pace than most traditional schools.

One of the core tenets of the Montessori method is the mixed age classroom. There is no such thing as a "curriculum for 2 yo". The kids from about 2.5 up to K age should be in a classroom together, the younger kids learning from watching the older ones. If there is no age mixing, it has very little to do with Montessori, even if they do use the materials.
It is true that montessori does not usually bother with identifying giftedness, simply because the idea is that all kids are working at their own pace anyway, though they do tend to run into problems with the speed gifted kids work through concepts and appear to "skip" developmental stages, and if a kid is ready for the 6-9 age classroom stuff even though they're still four, there is not much they can do except lug around materials for a while and when that makes no sense any more, let the kid skip, just like regular schools.

Montessori is in many ways the most rigid and inflexible method around - the prepared environment, the one and only way to use materials, the sequence of works - for the method to work for gifted kids, you need the built In flexibility of the mixed age classroom and the individual pacing. The constraints of the age based classroom destroy most advantages the method might have had.

Leave her in as long as she has fun. If you realize she starts getting frustrated, it's probably time to look for alternatives.

Thank you so much for your insights.

What you said in the last paragraph, i think, is very true. They know she is bright. I do not think they know how bright.

For now, she seems very happy, so I am happy. They also told me today that they plan on moving her up to the 3s classroom, along with a few of her age-mates. So, perhaps my little phase of worrying was for naught.

It is a montessori daycare/school. I think the state legislates things like naptimes and interacting between age groups, so their hands are tied there if they want subsidies. So, I do think that the kids miss out on that tenet of Montessori education.

I think though, once she moves up to the 3s, there IS more intermingling.

That's where I am at for now. I wont worry until there is a problem. My curiosity was more... Am I snow-flaking her? Am I seeing something that they aren't? and if so, is it because I am her mom, or because they either aren't equipped to see it, arent being presented with all the information, or are trained not to investigate it and just go with the flow. Sounds like its a little bit of all three.

In DD's case, I think one big factor are also the kids that attend the school. Her school is careful to screen kids - the application process is long, including requiring the parents to sit and watch each primary classroom for 15 minutes - each classroom, despite being the same ages, are very different due to the personalities of the teachers who run the classrooms and the children in the room. So - that tends to filter out disengaged parents or parents who after observation find it is not what they are looking for...

So I suspect that the children that tends to come into her school are more motivated and tend to lean towards being bright as a group.

The other thing I noticed compared to the preschool she was in before (and that DS went to when he was 3), there is a much wider range of "non-academic" activities - those are not ones that people associate with finding GT like pouring water from one container to another, punching a shape with pins which were not present in DS's traditional room, which leaned more towards pretend play/academics.

From what I have seen, because they are so used to having different kids move at different speeds - with most common being that kids will move faster in some areas but not as fast in other areas - teachers are trained to really go with the flow rather than having the whole group doing the same tasks, which is more typical in a traditional room. When the whole group is suppose to be moving together at mostly the same pace, the outliers stand out. When a group disperses to work on their own activities at different levels as the norm, the outliers may not stand out as much, because no one is doing the same activity all together anyway. If a child wants to work on an activity for just 10 minutes, that is fine. If he is engaged for 20-30 minutes, that is usually fine too. They don't have to wait for everyone else if they want to do something else. So I suspect in this environment, teachers are not really pay attention to giftedness.

For 2 year olds, you are going to find that age constraint in many states - teacher/student ratio, naptimes, what the age differentials can be in a group of kids all are set by law that all daycares have to abide by for licensing from what I understood in our state.

Note, what you see at home will not be what teachers see in school. We always joke that we have home DS/DD and school DD/DS - they are always going to be different in different environments. The thing you want to keep an eye on is if she is suppressing who she really is to "fit in" (which we were starting to see in DS as young as 3). But if she is happy and engaged there, I would not worry...

She is a submissive and sensitive child by nature, and often defers her own desires to please others. I suspect she has some pretty pronounced gifts in intuition and empathy. This is wonderful, of course, but it does present challenges in knowing who "she is".

Several times, at her school I have witnessed this. One example. They children had taken books off the shelf and another tried to take the one my child had selected away from her. The teacher intervened gently, and walked away. My daughter waited until the teacher was focused on something else, slid the book over to the other child, and went up and got another book. She was about 19 months with this occurred.

We were watching ice age last night and the "squirrel" got hurt and she turned to me and said "poor squirrel. is ok mommy? ok?"


sooooo... that really presents a challenge to me as her mom... how do I know if she is even willing to articulate assertiveness? she does with me to an extent, but I doubt she does there. She seems happy to go, though.

Tigerle, I am curious to know your firsthand experience of Montessori? Our experience across four classrooms at two schools (and I have observed at several others) differs from yours.

Of course Montessori has curriculum, though it is matrixed and spiral rather than linear. Works are not just randomly placed in classrooms.

Typical Montessori age divisions are Toddler (18m - 3yo), Children's House (3 - 6yo), Lower Elementary (6 - 9yo / G1-3), and so on. Many states have rules that differ for children under 2.9 or 3. In our state 2.9 is the minimum age for pre-school and any child younger than that is governed by strict EEC daycare rules. Thus they are usually placed in separate classrooms from the 3 - 6 yos. There is also a developmental gulf between even the brightest 2.5 yo and 6 yos.

It’s not clear exactly what you mean by “identifying giftedness”. I would push back on this, and say that - certainly at younger ages - Montessori naturally accommodates at least moderate giftedness. Comparing notes with families whose children attend typical schools, their gifted children typically have far more frustrations in the classroom than children in the Montessori schools. Any school system, including those focused on the gifted, is challenged to accommodate a PG child - PG children don't come along that often. Our experience over three years in Montessori has already embraced the full range of acceleration: skipping topics already mastered; accelerated pace through materials, compaction as chosen by the child; enrichment in the classroom both by broadening/deepening and by bringing in more advanced works; subject acceleration. This has worked well, especially because of the spiral that is built into much of the mixed age curriculum: DS has been able to access similar topics at a much deeper level than age mates. This is unremarkable and completely accepted because there is a natural spread in depth and grasp of concepts between typical students of differing ages. In a year or so we may do a radical grade skip with the full support of our school. I cannot imagine any other school system that could have worked more constructively with our highly asynchronous DYS. … But I can imagine some teachers who would be less supportive.

A well-prepared environment is freeing for children - they are able to navigate and determine their own works, and set their own pace through the works. Materials tend to be self-correcting, and their use is only as rigid as the teacher who acts as guide. Some teachers do encourage extensions and combinations of materials, and children will invent their own. For example DS loves the dice roll game, which is primarily used for learning basic addition. He tries to roll prime numbers and observes their frequency.

My youngest child is in a classroom with a fairly tight age range from 2.2 - 3.2 (this is a new school: the toddler program is rolling up to a 3 - 6 program). They have a range of works in the classroom, which are updated weekly. Their teachers are very thoughtful about which works to put out, informed by the children’s exhibited interests and levels of mastery. While a program with a tight age range does have limitations - for the three year olds this is primarily to do with the lack of older exemplars - the works do not have to be tightly constrained, and children are not prevented from doing works that are either simpler or more challenging.

This is really to do with who your child is vs. the environment in which she is placed. We have one child who is very reflective of their environment, a second who is very assertive, and a third who is highly intuitive and empathetic. As a toddler the third child broke down in tears when watching the Ugly Duckling in Mandarin (which beyond numbers and colors they did not speak). Children like these do tend to go with the flow and avoid disruptions.

We taught our very gentle child first to protect themselves by asserting "stop" or "no" or more complex statements to defend themselves. Then we gradually taught them to proactively ask for what they want. Even now these requests are often very gentle, but they are usually persistent and end up getting what they want :-)

If it's reassuring, our quite assertive 2 yo is more academic at home than at school. At school she is drawn to practical life activities, art, listening to stories, singing, and group work such as doing large puzzles. There are more academic works available which she will choose but she is not deeply drawn to them. At home she likes the movable (magnetic) alphabet, demands to have words deciphered, likes premath games, etc. Her teachers recognize that she is capable so do make works available but follow her lead on whether she chooses to engage with them. This may be as formal as an official work, as simple as emphasizing the sounds in words when reading, or as spontaneous as counting popsicle sticks stuck into playdoh. Even though she is not as hellbent on consuming all information available and structuring the world as her older brother was, she is tracking pretty closely with his milestones at a similar age.

Two classrooms at two different schools, one we only shadowed at, one DS9 did a K program at for a year, with a view to enrolling him in first grade there. Each time, we decided against it. Each time, I was so disappointed with how perfect Montessori sounds on paper and how it then was implemented, there was always so much picking and choosing which distorted the whole result. So I started reading up on stuff. My take away (YMMV, must vary really, because you will always see a different implementation) is that you just can't separate the method from the implementation and insist it's still Montessori even though you dont do, for instance, mixed age classrooms. Of course there's always a reason, possibly a compelling one, for why they are doing some stuff and dropping other stuff, but there is also a reason why the method demanded stuff in the first place. So if administrative rules or financial constraints force you to offer age based classrooms, the question is just how much Montessori is left and whether it might not be more honest to call that school "Montessori inspired" or something.


Please note that I bracketed "curriculum for 2 yo" with quotation marks. I never said Montessori doesn't have one, it's just not supposed to be age or grade based the way it is in traditional schools, the fluidity and individual pace being of of the points of the mixed age classroom after all.

I don't want to quote your description of the Montessori environment that so far has worked well for your children, just because it would make my post so unwieldy. Suffice it to say it sounds great - Montessori done well, implemented thoughtfully and with some flexibility. However, I do think you are lucky, because it is easy to get Montessori very very wrong and it can work out just as badly for asynchronous kids as a traditional school might.
After all, the OP has asked what to be aware of as her very asynchronous child moves through the age levels, and the age based classrooms are already a red flag that the implementation of those parts of the Montessori method that offer benefits particularly for gifted kids in that particular school leaves a lot to be desired.

This. My son at 3 year old was not good at rolling and unrolling of little mat where you put the work on. I was told "he cannot proceed academically until he does it." He also had issues with most of the room was off limit to him because he hasn't been presented the lessons yet. We left after a month. NOT a good fit with that teacher/school.

Thomas,

do you think that problems with young kids in Montessori settings are often as easily recognized as your son's incompatibility?

That's sort of what I'd really like to figure out... are incompatibilities always pretty stark? or are they sometimes much more subtle?

"Montessori School" is a pretty broad term. There are a lot of differences and one really need to visit a school to find out what it is really like. It's not a trademarked term so anyone can hang out a shingle and call themselves a Montessori.

I looked her's up. It is pan american certified, and has other nature playground certs, but i'm not sure its relevant.

Yes, absolutely. However, that's because the concept of “giftedness” doesn't translate well into a really good Montessori classroom where children are allowed to progress at their own pace. One child might move through the math curriculum very quickly, while another might speed right through the language work. On the other hand, certain children need many repetitions on every piece of work and that is okay too.

Our (MG) daughter started at a Montessori school when she was 3 y/o and has been there for 6 years. The first 5 years were excellent because her teachers always introduced her to work when she was ready for it. There was no endless repetition of anything that she had already mastered. She was very happy and challenged. (This last year hasn’t been quite as good, mostly due to a new teacher who has been trying to keep all of the same-aged children in a lock-step curriculum, but I will set that issue aside for now. Ineffective teachers can be found in all schools, not just Montessori ones.)

When we would go to parent teacher conferences, DD’s teachers would show us examples of her work and discuss what materials she was using and what she was learning from them. (For example, “She has been really focused on using the racks and tubes to learn about division lately.”) Coming from a more traditional educational background, I found it a little frustrating that they never compared her to other students. I always secretly wanted to ask, “And how many other children have been introduced to division? Is she the best at it? What is her percentile rank?” However, those comparisons are just not part of the Montessori culture, and if you aren’t comparing the children to one another then there isn’t as much reason to label a child as “gifted”.

Ideally those questions aren't part of gifted "culture," either. Really the only question that should be asked (particularly in lower grades) is, "Is my child engaged at school and being challenged in a way that's appropriate for them?" Being labeled as gifted is simply a recognition that the normal standard for teaching is not going to cut it. It doesn't require direct comparisons between children.

I am not quite sure what you mean by "gifted culture", but I certainly agree that it would be best if all children were appropriately challenged without being compared or labeled. Unfortunately, that seems to be standard in most traditional public school settings where an entire class of students is being taught the same things at the same time. In that situation, parents are required to prove that their child can work at a faster pace than the rest of the class before they are allowed any sort of differentiation.

I've been thinking about this since I saw George's post. I think what I miss the most about the good Montessori experience our son and thus we had is that yes, people noticed what he could do.... And then they supported him in doing it. Just like they did for the other students. Life would be so much easier if this was the case in all schools. It would remove the "glory/stigma" that gifted labels and programs can produce and just let kids learn. All kids.

AAC,

I think problems with young kids are in general are more easily spotted if the child is less compliant. Shortly after we took our son out, we ran into a mother whose daughter was in the same room. She was so interested in how we were able to extract ourselves. She didn't feel that her daughter was happy in that environment but the father liked the academic aspect and paid all the tuition upfront. The daughter is a quite and sweet little girl, and not a behavioral problem at all. They would have lost all of their money were they to withdraw her even though they felt that she was not too happy. In our case, the school did not think we were a good fit either so they were eager to let us off of the hook as well.

I am not sure your case is as dire as mine was. Your child seems to be happy enough. Also the Montessori primary room is for 3 to 5 years old. The 2's room is really not part of the original school plan. They mostly do practical life tasks to get them independent. And that is really important too. I have to say though that the 2s rooms all seemed to quiet for my taste in the schools I visited. I am not sure I like Montessori for 2 year olds.

What I meant by "gifted culture" was the adoption and support of an educational environment that provides kids who have been identified as gifted learners the means to succeed. There's plenty of evidence that such a culture exists, largely because such communities clearly exist (even if some of them, such as this one, are largely online in nature). It might be weird to some to think about the Gifted Issues Discussion Forum as a community, but to many, it functions very much like one.

My point is that gifted culture should also include a recognition (by both parents and educators) that success does not equal "more work" nor should it equal "consistently tests better than age peers." I think there is, unfortunately, a very strong desire among many to see how these kids "measure up" to their age mates, whether they be in a pull-out gifted program in a mixed-ability school or in a gifted magnet school. I think those feelings are often rooted in insecurity.

• "If my kid really belongs in this program, shouldn't they be proving it in some measurable way to justify them staying in it?" - concerned parent of gifted kid
• "Kid A is in the gifted program but doesn't test as high as kid B who isn't in the gifted program. How is that fair to kid B?" - concerned parent of kid B
• "My gifted program / school is funded with the expectation that our kids will score higher on standardized tests than kids who aren't in the program. If they don't score higher, does this mean that the program / school will lose funding?" - concerned administrator

DS7 recently took a standardized test which was normed against, among other things, surburban public and independent schools across the country. The school reported to me, among other things, his percentile rank against these various norms. I did ask the school administration why I should care about these scores, and shouldn't I really just care about how well he's engaged and being challenged. They responded that my perspective was "refreshing" coming from a parent, which makes me think that the "concerned parent of gifted kid" profile insecurity is pretty common!

By the way, I just wanted to make it clear that we've been extremely happy with both DS's teachers and administration at his school this year. It's been great, and we're looking forward to continued success for him there in coming years.

All, thank so much. This is a really interesting discussion. My daughter does seem really happy. My concern is only because she is very compliant, and I DO want her to be challenged and engaged. I have no interested in comparing her to her age-mates, but I did wonder if perhaps the non-comparison and her compliance was keeping her for engagement, if that makes sense.

I'm not worried. It was really more of a curiosity, since there seems to be as much discussion about montessori and I had been noticing some things with her and her classmates.

You may find that the compliant behavior changes as she grows. I would have said that our younger child was very compliant, but now that he's hit K age, things are changing. He is still more cooperative than our older child (understatement, older one is exceptionally strong willed) but wow. He has really started to exert his own will when things matter to him.

that's actually quite encouraging. as much as I love that she is so concerned with others' emotions, i do want her to learn some manner of assertiveness. As I see it, she is exceptionally bright, but I do not want her to believe that making other people happy is a fair exchange for her own development.