Growing up in the American Education System I never realized that there were other ways to learn. From a young age I remember being confined to a desk and constantly told to watch my teacher. It was almost like my teacher was my God, and he or she was going to bestow the gift of knowledge onto me. However, when on a class trip P. Ciabatti Montessori Elementary School
(http://www.istitutocomprensivoperugia2.edu.it) in Perugia, Italy I saw that learning and teaching methods can go far beyond what I experienced in my American classrooms.
In the Montessori elementary school, I was able to visit a fifth-grade classroom for, what seemed like, a very long time. While in this fifth-grade classroom I immediately noticed plenty of differences between this way of teaching and the teaching style I experienced in fifth grade. Here in this classroom, there was no teachers desk so there was no separation between the teacher and her students. The kids were also encouraged to work at their own pace and seemed to be free to move around so long as they were on task. The teacher was more of a resource if the student did not complete the task correctly the first time by themselves. This allowed the students a certain type of independence that, I as a fifth grader, did not experience. When I was in fifth grade it was much focused on repeating what the teacher had shown us in the lesson. B.F. Skinner (1981) touched on this type of learning in his paper Selection by Consequences. In this paper Skinner addresses a type of reinforcement as imitation reinforcement, and it is basically a way of learning based on imitating someone or something else. This kind of learning is deeply imbedded in the American school system and was how I learned for my entire educational career before I entered college. One of the biggest differences between imitation learning and the Montessori way seems to be the teacher relationship and the autonomy the student has from a very young age. The teacher definitely had more a background role but was still there if a student needed aid with a specific task. I also noticed that these students at the Montessori school were exposed to higher levels of math at a much younger age. This also seems like an amazing concept, because when they actually are expected to learn those skills it will be easier due to their previous exposure. I really appreciated the Montessori method of teaching, and I hope that it something that grows in the States.
Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by consequences. Science, 213(4507), 501-504.