Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Montessori vs. dedicated gifted school

Hello. We had our daughter (age 2.5) tested because our city has a gifted private school with a preschool program. Her scores qualify her to apply. If we decide to venture down the private school path, I am torn between the gifted school and a Montessori school. They are in some ways diametrically opposite programs.

My hope is that my daughter has the opportunity to work at a challenge level in school, and that she develops time management and task persistence which allow her to harness her abilities in whatever undertaking she decides to pursue as an adult.

The gifted school focuses on issues of challenge by working all the kids at the equivalent of at least a one-grade skip. To develop organization and time management they give lots of homework. They use lots of extrinsic motivation - publicly visible behavior charts, rewards, etc. The use of extrinsic motivation is a mismatch with our choices at home, we have avoided rewards and punishment so far. At this point our daughter finds learning to be its own reward. I don't want her to lose that.

Montessori is a better philosophical fit with our discipline methods and preference for intrinsic motivation. However, I've read through this forum and find mixed reviews from families with real-world Montessori experience. I'm worried about what would happen in the third year of the multi-age classrooms if she was to be unchallenged among younger children. I'm also concerned by reports about kids who have been made to repetitively work through material they have already mastered. I have talked to a parent whose children attend this Montessori school, and she says they have been willing to seamlessly allow her children to visit older classrooms for instruction in subjects where they are working above grade level. That sounds promising, but her kids are outliers in working that far ahead.

TLDR: Does anyone have advice about whether gifted child might gain more from being prodded (firmly) into confronting challenges and given rewards and consequences to keep her on track ... or put in a more open-ended environment without external pressure, where she might or might not be capable of more than what they expect?

Thanks!

Welcome!

I'd start simply by reassuring you that a toddler needs very little in the way of structured, formal education. It is developmentally entirely appropriate and healthy for her to spend all of her time playing, exploring, and experimenting with the environment and personal interactions around her. Toddlers and preschoolers also do not need to develop organization and time management skills, through homework or any other extrinsically structured activity. I would go so far as to say that it is unhealthy and counter-productive to attempt to do so.

Secondly, placement decisions that you make for this next year or two do not obligate you to any particular path for subsequent years (although I understand that some programs have limited points of entry). What is best for her and your family system in one year may not be best for her in a future year. Less so-called academic rigor in preschool most certainly will not put her "behind".

Does she need to go anywhere? If you are looking for daycare I would consider a good home based person (you would need to be very careful though), a forest preschool or a play based preschool. If you don't need daycare keep her home. If you can't do that, I really don't like the sound of the private school motivational practices and would be worried about what their discipline practices.

If choosing between the two, I’d go with the Montessori.

If it has to be one or the other, I'd go with Montessori, with the caveat that our HG+ son was bored stiff in a Montessori classroom.

If I had to do preschool over again, I'd look for a play based classroom that focuses on fostering imaginative play and social/emotional development.

The gifted preschool sounds at odds with the current thinking on early childhood development. If the Montessori allows for materials to be brought in from the older age classrooms or for visiting them, I'd try that instead.

We really liked Montessori, when it was a good program that had some flexibility in it. It was wonderful for our PG child, who was allowed and encouraged to follow his interests, including learning all he could stretch to learn.

Homework and public behavior [read shaming] charts for a 2.5 year old?! I'd stay away from this school like the plague.

A 2.5 year is still a baby and doesn't need such manipulation. If this method is successful with the older kids then I would suspect they either aren't that gifted or are heading for counselling later or both.

Thanks for your collective thoughts. Sorry for the following very long reply.

Yes, she does need to go somewhere. At the moment she�s at a really wonderful program with a focus on open-ended exploration and imaginative play. The teachers said that her personal interests seem to lie in areas generally considered academic at this age, and that she�s beyond the limited academics they�ll be introducing. We�re torn about leaving.

It�s at odds with our home life. So far we do not use rewards or punishment with her at all. The school apparently does things like (at the elementary school level) having a �reading chest� with rewards in it to motivate reading. Right now our daughter is reading because she wants to, I feel no need to give her objects or candy per book read. It feels like it would distort something which is a source of joy to her. I recognize that not all children may be internally motivated to figure out how to read.

I think I may have been unclear about something - I'd like my daughter to develop those skills, but later in the educational process. I am personally not fully convinced that substantial homework is the best or only way to accomplish this. The gifted school in question begins homework in elementary school, not preschool.

Organization and task completion are my personal weak points. My kid isn't my clone, but I coasted through school for years by passing tests while zoning out during class and either not completing work or forgetting to turn it in. The gifted program thinks this is a common outcome when kids aren't appropriately challenged. They consider their workload an appropriate challenge. I'm trying to consider their opinion.

Do you have any input on whether you think this goal is an appropriate concern in the longer term, and if so how you might want to see a school address it? The Montessori school we�re considering says that it is possibly spending a greater amount of time imparting organization and time management skills by asking children to manage their own time all day long. They give very limited homework, unless a child doesn�t complete work during the school hours and must thus complete it at home.

This is good advice, and I need to try to remember that. I may be too hung up trying to think long term, rather than taking this a year at a time. Or rather, I do need to think long term, but do not need to think about this as picking a forever home. Unfortunately both of the schools we�re pondering are likelier to have slots available for preschool admission, and state that students have a better experience in their elementary programs if they started at the preschool level.

I�m not at all worried about her being behind. I�d like her to have an interesting time in preschool and am more worried about what traditional kindergarten and beyond would look like for a kid who is out of sync with age-level expectations.

The homework and behavior charts don�t appear until elementary school. Regardless, I have an aversion to the idea of public behavior charts in any grade. If she were to attend our local public elementary school there would also be behavior charts. The Montessori option would be the exception in not using them.

That sounds really wonderful. Basically what I�d love for her to experience. Were you able to feel out the flexibility of this particular Montessori program before you started? Is there anything in particular you�d recommend asking about or looking for when visiting the school?

How quickly was it apparent he was bored? Was the school willing pull appropriately leveled work for him? Was his school experience any better after leaving Montessori? How do you think elementary school would have looked for him if he�d been in a play-based preschool instead?

The goal is most certainly a worthwhile one. My observation is the same: many GT students struggle with executive functions and study skills later in their lives because they had no incentive to develop them during elementary and secondary school. (I don't think I really learned how to study until graduate school, and I'm not sure my extreme PG sib ever has--though it hasn't impaired any major life outcomes.) As to the means, I would agree with the Montessori school. Further, in my experience, the response of GT students to volumes of work principally for the sake of learning time management (aka, busy work) can be even more damaging than the absence of study skills itself. I have had enough students in this situation whose response was to deliberately sabotage their own academic performance--as a means of either protest for meaningless busy work, or of having a voice/choice in their own, overly-adult-managed educational experience--to suspect it is a real correlation, with possible causality.

Creative, abstract, divergent thinkers generally do not take kindly to demands to churn out masses of meaningless check-the-box work products.

I would prefer to see study skills and EF develop because a learner is being instructed and challenged in the quality of their work, in the zone of proximal development. so that the exertion of work ethics, study skills, and organization are in service to personally meaningful learning. This is what NT learners more often receive, because conventional schools do instruct them in their ZPD. Why should academically-advanced learners have to learn it using drudgery? If it isn't possible to find this in academics, one can also create meaningful learning opportunities in other contexts, such as sport, art, music, technical trades, hobbies, et al.

Your DD is also an outlier; perhaps you might consider that reading for pleasure at 2.5 yo is not quite typical?
That the school has been willing to accommodate outliers appears promising.