The Brighter Side of Education: Research, Innovation & Resources
Hosted by Dr. Lisa Hassler, an educator and parent, The Brighter Side of Education: Research, Innovation, & Resources is a research-informed podcast offering action-based solutions for teachers and parents. Committed to spotlight innovative individuals who bring about positive change in education, its primary mission is to connect educators and parents to resources that pave the way to a brighter future for our children. The podcast's music was created by Brandon Picciolini, her son, from The Lonesome Family Band. You can explore more of his work on Instagram.
The Brighter Side of Education: Research, Innovation & Resources
The Essence of Montessori Classrooms with Educator Michaela Kucera
Discover the transformative power of Montessori and project-based learning as we journey with Michaela Cucera, a veteran Montessori educator from the Roots Nature and Leadership Academy, through the captivating terrain of individualized education. Prepare to be inspired as we unravel the secrets behind sensory-rich classrooms and mixed-age learning environments that do more than just educate—they ignite a natural propensity for leadership and instill a lifelong zest for discovery among students. Michaela brings to the table a treasure trove of insights from her experience with these progressive educational models, illustrating how they encourage children to blossom into self-reliant learners and innovative thinkers.
Our conversation then shifts to the nuanced art of assessing educational growth beyond the confines of traditional standardized testing. Embrace the Montessori philosophy where personal achievements are celebrated over percentile ranks, and where learning is a journey, not a race to the highest score. The episode sheds light on the crafted surroundings that support self-discipline, foster normalization, and promote practical life skills pivotal for the holistic development of young minds. By integrating these rich Montessori principles into your educational practice, whether you're an educator or a parent, you'll be equipped to not only enrich the learning experiences of children but also to nurture a generation that approaches life with curiosity, confidence, and an enduring passion for learning.
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Want to share a story? Email me at lisa@drlisarhassler.com.
Visit my website for resources: http://www.drlisarhassler.com
The music in this podcast was written and performed by Brandon Picciolini of the Lonesome Family Band. Visit and follow him on Instagram.
My publications:
America's Embarrassing Reading Crisis: What we learned from COVID, A guide to help educational leaders, teachers, and parents change the game, is available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible, and iTunes.
My Weekly Writing Journal: 15 Weeks of Writing for Primary Grades on Amazon.
World of Words: A Middle School Writing Notebook Using...
Welcome to the Brighter Side of Education. I'm your host, Dr Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables and how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? In today's episode, we dive deep into child-centered education models in modern classrooms. Can we successfully blend Montessori methods with project-based learning for a more holistic approach?
Dr. Lisa Hassler:Students arrive in classrooms with diverse skills and needs, presenting a unique challenge for educators. Differentiated instruction, where we adapt lessons to cater to individual learning strengths, is vital. No one-size-fits-all solution exists, which is where the versatile Montessori method comes into play. Developed over a century ago by Dr Maria Montessori, it emphasizes a holistic approach acknowledging the individuality of each student. However, it's important to note that implementing these methods typically requires Montessori training, not usual university pathways.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:In a 2017 study titled Montessori Education a review of the evidence base, Chloe Marshall found that children benefit cognitively and socially from authentic Montessori education, but the effectiveness of adapted forms, which often reduce self-selected learning time, is less clear. Her research also suggests that practical life materials can benefit fine motor skills and attention in non-Montessori classrooms. Additionally, there's ample evidence in the broader educational literature supporting the effectiveness of some Montessori method elements, such as phonics-based early literacy and a sensory-based foundation for math education, when applied in a non-Montessori classroom as well. Today we're going to talk with educator Michaela Kucera, who is using an adaptive form of Montessori. She has over 20 years of teaching experience in Montessori schools in New York and Florida, specializing in cultural studies, and is currently teaching at Roots Nature and Leadership Academy. Welcome to the show, Michaela.
Michaela Kucera:Thank you for having me, and I'm very happy to share my experience with working with young children at Roots and Leadership Academy. First of all, I think Roots and Leadership Academy is like paradise on earth for young children, our founder Brianna.
Michaela Kucera:She created a very unique, special and creative environment where young children can come learn, relax, they find their home away from home. They are challenged, they have all the freedom they need and, most importantly, they are part of the nature. The nature is so divine and calming and inspirational that every day we are enjoying our big, open classroom, where the ceiling is the sky, the walls are the forest and the classroom is under our big, beautiful tree where we open our mats and we start our magic.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:It sounds magical actually. Could you share a bit about your background and how you became involved in Montessori education?
Michaela Kucera:would have to take long walks every day after school, about four hours walking through the beautiful cobblestone streets and learning about architecture, go to different galleries and, of course, go to many beautiful parks.
Michaela Kucera:Nature was really part of my growing up and culture was surrounding me from a very early years. When I moved to New York City in 1990, right after Velvet Revolution, I started in a different field and that was fashion. My deep love of art and literature sticked with me until these years and I thought that I might have a second career and that was teaching. And that really happened when I found about New York University. I love the program that was offered at NYU and also I found out that there is a Montessori program that Dr. Baron, marlene Baron, offered and I had the pleasure to enroll and start my new endeavor. I started in a school called the Cadman School, which is a wonderful Montessori school on Upper East Side, and I was surrounded by very nurturing people. The principal was Miss Divine, who is not with us anymore, but she really inspired me and encouraged the idea of becoming an early childhood educator in me and gave me the opportunity to start teaching.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:For our listeners who may not be familiar, can you briefly explain Montessori education and how it differs from traditional educational settings?
Michaela Kucera:Montessori education is very unique in the way that the child is the center of the environment, of the teacher's focus, designed by Dr. Montessori. And the children are very attracted from the first minute when they enter Montessori classroom and they just want to work with these beautiful materials. They are self-corrected materials and the children can always manage to find out why something didn't work out, so it really instills independence. And all Montessori materials are also designed with the focus on sensory integration, meaning they are colorful, they have sensory texture and young children love to explore with the use of five senses Hearing, the smelling, the visual sense, the olaphoric sense and touch. In a regular classroom or traditional classroom we have certain limitations when the children, of course, don't go outdoors and they cannot explore beautiful gardens and forests. But here in Florida, well, that's a different story.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:It's very lucky that you're able to do that. I also love the way Montessori uses that combination of multiple ages so that they can learn from one another to provide mastery in helping and teaching others within the classroom. How many grade levels are you able to combine at Roots?
Michaela Kucera:Well in our classroom our classroom is called Seeds we would have the age span of three years. That gives children amazing opportunity of basically creating leadership skills. It's the most satisfying and wonderful feeling for teacher to see how the older students pass the wisdom down on the younger students and they really take the satisfaction and learning leadership naturally with them to the next level and how proud they are how they share what they learned. It's just wonderful to see how the progression happens. Think that the mixed age classroom is the most beautiful model, especially in early childhood, where we are not classifying children in different classrooms by age or by skills.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:Can you talk about what practical life is when it comes to Montessori?
Michaela Kucera:Yes, practical life could seem to some parents as just kitchen and kitchen tools and bowls and pots and beans and spoons and tweezers. But practical life has a very significant role in Montessori classroom. All the tools challenge the dexterity of young child. They help to create pincer grip. They help to create confidence in young writers. Children learn how to hold pencil with much more ease if they previously worked with tweezers and ladles and spoons. It also establishes concentration that young children work so hard on, and they do it in a very playful way. So they would transfer beans from the left to the right, from one beautiful bowl to the other bowl, and then when they empty, they can repeat it over and over again. Through the repetition and through the self-discipline that they are learning they can progress then to the next level and they can start writing and tracing with metal insets in the language arts curriculum. But it all starts in practical life.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:I always loved practical life. And then the beauty, the aesthetic quality of Montessori environments, where you have that natural lighting, the low shelving, the use of mats and even something as simple as making sure that you're using real paintbrushes meant for watercolors or tempera and not those really hard ones that come free with a watercolor ring set. So they're using real tools and I think that that gives them the satisfaction that they're using something that is of good quality because they take care of it a little bit better.
Michaela Kucera:Definitely, children are very honored to touch certain objects and Montessori teachers present lessons in a very theatrical way, I would say. That proves to the children that these special, beautiful objects are given to you. We trust you so much. You are amazing. Look, you can touch them and you can feel them and witness them.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:Yeah, absolutely. Now you've combined Montessori methods with project-based learning and an outdoor environment for students. Can you provide an overview of your educational approach and describe what a typical day looks like?
Michaela Kucera:Well, typical day starts maybe 10 minutes before 9 am. Children are starting to enter our garden I would call it the secret garden Through a wooden gate. They would hang their backpacks and lunchboxes and they would sit in a tiny circle on mats that are spread on the ground and they are under the tree. The nature is really the strong element from the moment they walk in. Recently we spotted two bald-headed eagles who just built nests above our heads. Basically, and every day in the morning they're circling above us and entering our circle time. So the children can recognize their sounds and they can identify what kind of birds make these sounds. So it's just a very unusual and different beginning of a day than what I am used to from New York, westchester and indoor classroom. The children have a very beautiful morning circle when they say a beautiful prayer, they welcome the flowers, the day, the sun, the planet Earth, and then we light a candle and that is the beginning of the work cycle and the children start coming and taking activities from the sheds that we have Little, beautiful wooden sheds with nice shelves choosing their activities and placing them on wooden tables or on the ground on traditional Montessori mats, the mats specifically designate. Where is each child's work area and that gives a clear message to children who want to maybe get involved with other things than learning that that particular child is immersed in a lesson learning and wants to be alone. Those mods are very important and every student who graduated from Montessori school is very familiar with the role of the simple white mat.
Michaela Kucera:The project-based learning happens with the curiosity that they develop in certain topics. We have very colorful and profound conversations about animals, mushrooms, maps, and the children decide what they want to study. Then we would follow on the topic, we would do a little bit of research, we would go indoors, sit in our beautiful library that has the most beautiful books and the children would start their research. But they always choose independently their topic of interest. They get minimal support from teachers and they create whatever they are interested in. Our last project was on biomes and the children created grasslands, deserts, ocean and presented to their parents. It was just an amazing event.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:I love to see the projects that you guys are doing on your Instagram posts, like your catapults, and I love the mushrooms you're growing right now. So there really is very dynamic, the differences in your subjects and the integration of those hands-on projects that they're creating. They're very interesting. What child doesn't want to, like you know, catapult a pumpkin? Does it seem like they were having so much fun in that?
Michaela Kucera:There is no limit to their creativity. We have some children who can just take a piece of paper and a few crayons and they can just create a masterpiece.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:Absolutely. I know that art integration is very big with your campus, so those projects are pretty extensive. So then, how does your approach cater to the unique needs of individual learners and what benefits do you believe it offers students?
Michaela Kucera:Well, when I decided that I would like to teach in Montessori schools, I really liked the quote follow the child. I think that every human being is original. You need to be yourself and, as Oscar Wilde once said, well, be yourself, because everyone else is taken already. Everyone else is taken already. Well, this really applies. We give our students tremendous amount of freedom. We respect their interests and we feel that the autonomy of their personalities are evolving in these young early childhood years, and Montessori environment is just the learning environment that gives the space for these things to happen. It's just wonderful to see them being stubborn or cooperative or maybe interested in something else that we are not doing at the time. But the understanding of the Montessori teacher is unique and we feel that some famous and very accomplished people, like Mr Jeff Bezos they all attended Montessori academies.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:Yes, yeah. So now assessing students' progress in non-traditional educational settings can be challenging. How do you measure students' success within your combined approach?
Michaela Kucera:Well, we don't use any tools as assessment tests or assessment evaluations. We look at each child's progress from where they entered our program and we start our education from that point. We don't have any tools that would bring everyone to the same point. If a child comes to preschool and the child can read already, we would offer specific materials and lessons that maybe children in the next level are already using. We would never say, well, we have to achieve this and that's where we start. No, the sky's the limit. Seriously, and we see how self-taught some children are, self-taught some children are, how self-discipline is developed, how children show naturally the thirst for learning. Because we do provide all this freedom that we feel in traditional education, where children's success is measured by tests, it's not there Success is measured by tests.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:It's not there. So with the project base, are you looking at completion or presentation of the projects and then the ability to master certain skills by teaching others?
Michaela Kucera:There is a progress. Of course. We start with maybe a few pieces of paper and maybe old shoe bags and then we have, as I mentioned before, a desert biome full of animals and colorful, beautiful books that come with it and maybe a little essay that older students would add to it and that would be their final project. But we always focus on the progress, on how much fun comes with it, how much passion they put in it and how proud they are in the end, when they present to their parents.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:The prepared environment is crucial in Montessori education. Could you describe how you've designed your learning spaces, any challenges you've encountered and how you've addressed them?
Michaela Kucera:Well, when I saw first time where I will be teaching and how should I set up our Montessori lessons and control the prepared environment because we never control the child, just the environment, their environment, because we never control the child, just the environment I kind of paused for a little bit and thought, hmm, this is going to be a little bit challenging.
Michaela Kucera:Yes, there are all these auditory challenges, visual, beautiful disruptions, but I realized that each child reaches a point of self-discipline and each child comes through the stage of normalization and if a young child normalizes his learning and becomes very self-disciplined, I feel the child can just unroll a white mat, pick up a material and work basically anywhere. And I feel if they reach that stage they can work in outdoor environment that offers many beautiful stimulations and they can manage the same success like child in a quiet classroom with shelves that are carefully organized. Our shelves, of course, follow the same sequence as any other Montessori classroom would offer, but there is the enrichment of the outdoors as well. So in the end it's just beautifully synchronized into success and visually stimulating classroom.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:Now for our listeners who may not know what normalization is. Can you describe what that is?
Michaela Kucera:Yes, normalization is a stage where a younger child reaches in Montessori philosophy and becomes interested in his inner discipline and learning interests. The child would become more mature. The child would decide well, this is what I want to do, even as our teacher's asking me, and the child would be able to immerse into a very productive student in a stimulating environment. It might take a long time a longer time for some children, shorter time for some children but they do reach the self-discipline at one point.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:For educators and parents interested in adapting elements of your mixed Montessori method. What advice would you give them for getting started in overcoming potential challenges?
Michaela Kucera:Well, I like very much how Montessori education is based on tactile experiences. I think that Montessori educational materials are very attractive, very purposeful and very, in a way, playful for young children. Children want to touch, children want to feel, they want to explore. If parents decide to maybe switch children from traditional schools into Montessori schools and they are looking for the results, I would say that from my personal expertise, children learn faster and they reach certain developmental milestones earlier, certain developmental milestones earlier, but they are very happy learners. They choose independently what do they want to learn, when do they want to learn? No one is designing their curriculum. The environment is prepared and the child can spend all day in geography lesson, if he decides to, or in math or in English. And that is the beauty of giving the children the freedom of their thoughts, not telling them how to learn and what to learn, but letting them develop thinking process.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:And they could even do those nurturing and supporting interests at home. I know that you could get some Montessori materials through Montessori catalogs and even Amazon. I send Montessori materials to my nieces. I love the math beads and find that they're very useful in a classroom or at home, and I like how the cursive sandpaper letters are used as a tactile approach to learning cursive and those movable alphabets. There's just some beautiful materials that every home could use.
Michaela Kucera:Definitely. I agree with that. I love how concrete the experiences are, For example with the sandpaper letter sounds. How the children understand immediately that they will trace something repeatedly and they can create words very early on with three combined sounds. How golden beads in math curriculum. Let them explore complicated and complex topics as a decimal placement, multiplication, division. At age four, five, even three, Young children master all these topics and it really comes from the concrete experience.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:Yeah, I would agree on that. I just I love them. I find them very useful. So definitely get some if you don't have any, or look into those. Those are wonderful. Well, thank you, Michaela, for sharing your insights on Montessori methods and how this blended approach can better meet the needs of individual learners.
Michaela Kucera:Thank you very much for having me, and I hope that you will visit us soon at the Roots and Leadership Academy, because, as I said, it's paradise on earth and if I was a little child, I would love to be just in that school. That would be my choice.
Dr. Lisa Hassler:Our call to action is to expand your teaching toolkit to include Montessori methods, enhancing your ability to support your students' needs. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at drlisarichardsonhasler at gmailcom, or visit my website at wwwdrlisarhaslercom and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.
