Amsive

The daily schedule allows for uninterrupted work periods of 2 hours or more in core curricular subjects—math, language arts, history or humanities, sciences, additional world languages, and creative arts. Uninterrupted work periods honor student choice, foster concentration, and support student engagement, while allowing for deep inquiry and a chance to work in collaborative project teams.

A “spiral curriculum” exposes students to many interrelated topics, repeatedly over time, resulting in broad and deep knowledge. Students are academically challenged and given reasonable opportunities for pacing work to meet their needs, while also learning responsibility, meeting deadlines, and mastering skills and concepts with the support and guidance of master teachers.

The Montessori Secondary program also includes advanced courses in language arts, mathematics, sciences, and social studies that are academically challenging. In addition, students take specialized courses including world languages, visual and performing arts, health and fitness, and participate in field studies (such as apprenticeships) and service learning.

Montessori acknowledges the need of the adolescent to serve others, so service is taught as a way to care for the school community and the world outside the school. Through service, students learn the value of hard work, are exposed to lives and cultures different from their own, and develop a sense of empathy. Powerful, successful service projects teach students that they have agency in the world—they can identify things that need to change, and help change them. This is a skill that will serve them well as adults.

Secondary students complete complex projects—a culmination of learning—that include research and presentation and illustrate their mastery of concepts. Through all of their studies, tools (such as checklists, rubrics work plans, and study guides) promote time management, organization, and decision-making.

Additional components of the Montessori Secondary curriculum include:

  • A community within the classroom that allows opportunities to participate in classroom government and other leadership experiences.
  • Experiences in nature that cultivate respect for the environment.
  • Micro-economic experiences such as developing and running a business to promote a genuine understanding of currency.
  • Responsible and ethical use of technology, with the majority of the school day spent in learning activities and practices that require peer-to-peer and student-teacher interaction.

Dr. Maria Montessori, the founder of the education system that bears her name, believed in giving adolescents the opportunity to experience self-worth through real and important work—a process she called valorization. The Montessori Secondary curriculum provides the opportunity for adolescents to realize they are strong, worthy, and capable of effort.

Montessori Secondary programs respond to the adolescent’s need to exhibit creativity, to problem solve, to take responsibility, and to claim independence. Ultimately, the programs support each student in finding a place in the community and in becoming a respectful, responsible, and ethical contributor to society. Isn’t this exactly what you want for your child’s teenage years?

  • “Education should therefore include the two forms of work, manual and intellectual, for the same person, and thus make it understood by practical experience that these two kinds complete each other and are equally essential to a civilized existence.”

    Dr. Maria Montessori,
    From Childhood To Adolescence

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