When I began my Montessori training, I was told I needed a quick answer when someone asks, “What makes Montessori different?” It’s like the old adage elevator conversation; what are you going to say about a topic in two minutes. The usual suspects for discussion topics are freedom of choice and freedom of movement, and if there is time, add a little about peace education. However, there is one aspect of the Montessori curriculum that I believe does not get enough attention. I believe one of the core strengths of the Montessori curriculum is its ability to promote integrative learning.

A perfect example of integrative learning is the Great Lessons, which contains the full scope of all lower and upper elementary, and it fits into five unique lessons. The Great Lessons instantly answer the question, “When am I ever going to use this, or why do I need to know this?” because the students instantly see how it fits into the grand scheme in understanding the universe, the Earth, and themselves. Traditional schools usually miss this opportunity for integration by segmenting education into independent curriculums like: math, reading, writing, science, etc. The students shift their focus from one subject to another, unfortunately completely missing how important the connections between the subjects. Many students find word problems in math so much harder because it combines reading comprehension and math calculation, and that is how people work with math 99% of the time. In the real world, we do not shift our thinking from one subject to another when we work, we use every tool at our disposal for problem solving. The connections is where creativity often lies.

Integration has been my ultimate mission in Montessori Physical Education. Maria Montessori created such a beautiful method for teaching children that I wanted to incorporate as much as possible. She understood the importance of practical life for young students, which is part of their physical education, and it was one of the core components of their school work. Practical life does not disappear as the students get older, but now they are expected to be doing much more work with language, math, and culture, learning by following the template of concrete to abstract. She understood that many children need physical manipulatives to learn best. Moving things with the hands initiates the process of being able to imagine and construct in the mind.

The reason physical education has become a national standard has an interesting origin. After the Civil War, physical education was introduced into the mainstream school system, but it wasn’t until World War I when it took on a new life. One third of the soldiers drafted were “unfit,” so PE was ramped up so if the need were to arise again, potential soldiers were ready. As time progressed, through research it was discovered that there was tremendous benefit for the students academically, physically, and socially. As we progress further into a future of technology, it seems like the physical activity of our children is continuing to wane. Many argue this makes physical education even more crucial to counteract this trend. Having physical education may not have been such a concern for Dr. Montessori in her time because children were likely far more active than many of our children today. However, it seems that physical education’s role in modern society has only grown more in importance, especially when we factor that many PE teachers are also harnessing the power of social and emotional learning in their classrooms. Social and emotional learning is incredibly important, and luckily for me, it is one of the foundational components of Montessori education already.

However, I wanted to go a step further. It’s great that modern PE has integrated SEL concepts into the PE classroom, but what if we could do more? Integrating SEL has not eroded the students physical abilities; it has enhanced the whole curriculum. The integration of SEL has made the full PE curriculum more rich, and made PE teachers more essential. What if we integrated further? What if our PE lessons could integrate directly with topics from the classroom curriculum? Would that erode the physical learning that happens in PE? Would it be missing the point of PE? Or would we be creating the most enriching, effective physical education to date?

My belief is that integrating physical education with the classroom curriculum creates a new and immersive learning environment for the student. You can read about benefits in many of my past blog posts. The PE environment becomes an extension of the classroom, and the students learn better in the classroom when they can physically move through concepts. At least, that is my hypothesis. I have done some research on this question of whether integration of the classroom curriculum in PE enhances learning in the classroom, and I have had interesting data so far. My master’s thesis looked at how integration of classroom content in PE could help with learning and retention. You can read the full experiment here. The short version is that there was significant benefit for the younger students, as their concept retention was greater than the control group. Here is a chart of the results.

Something you do notice is that there was not an improvement in the 3rd graders. Is there an age effect where integration loses its luster and is not helpful anymore? Would this trend continue if I repeated it multiple times, or would I see that integration would be beneficial over time?

I conducted another experiment which looked at the effect of exercise on math facts. You can read the about the experiment and the results here. The short version is that it was not as helpful for the younger students who were working on addition and subtraction facts, but was very helpful for students working on their multiplication facts. This experiment demonstrated that older students seemed to benefit more than the younger students, which was opposite of the above research. However, I will freely admit that math facts research was missing important pieces, like a control group. So, it’s time for another experiment.

After Spring Break, I am going to do proper experiment that will investigate the effects of integrating the classroom curriculum with the PE classroom for upper elementary. The students are going to begin their science fair work when we get back. On Monday, I am going to administer a pre-test that asks them the following questions:

What are the components of the scientific method?

What is a control?

What is the difference between an independant and dependant variable?

I will also give them a simple experiment to read over, and they need to identify all the components of the scientific method within the write-up, as well as be able to tell me the control and variables. This second part will force them to apply their knowledge instead of just a demonstration of recall. This pre-test will be given the first day we get back before any lessons, and I imagine the results of the pre-test will be all over the place. I’m going to try and take advantage of how Covid decimated this year and utilize the pod structure we have to conduct the experiment. There will be a control group pod which will receive PE unrelated to the science fair. There will be two pods that will receive lessons from the human body experiments series from me directly, and there will be two pods that will receive the lessons from other non-PE instructor teachers.

This experiment will be looking at the effectiveness of PE integration with older students, and another part will be looking at the effectiveness of the lesson plans taught by traditional teachers (not me). My hypothesis is that the students I teach will have increased retention and comprehension of the scientific method, but I am interested to see if the pods taught by other teachers will be as successful. I hope that the lessons themselves are strong enough to stand on their own and do not require my personal instruction to make them effective.

We will see.

I should have a conclusion by the end of the school year, which I will share with all of you. I will also not post a new blog next week because we are starting Spring Break, and I will be too busy hiding Easter Eggs for Marshall.