Maria Montessori Quotes

I would say this to my students all the time, it's about 30% you as the teacher and 70% about them. They tend to think that their role is to be the baby bird in a nest and you're going to feed them? They're going to feed themselves, or they're going to starve.

He is not likely to learn who is not willing to be taught; for the learner has something to do, as well as the teacher.

A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

I quickly learned that teaching students was far more complicated than managing adults. Why, you may ask? Here are three simple reasons: Your employees are paid to listen to you, students are not. In business, employees are selected based upon a search and interview process. Teachers do not select their students. In business, an insubordinate employee is fired. An insubordinate student is merely one more challenge for a classroom teacher.

Teachers across the world are doing all they can to ensure a good education is the top priority for children.

I really love teaching; I was actually studying to be a preschool teacher.

One of the biggest reasons that teachers have trouble with student-centered learning is that they have to give over a level of control to the kids. And, when you do that, you can have chaos, or you can have high levels of learning. Often, teachers are afraid of the chaos.

...we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.

Let the main object... to seek and to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners learn more.

The teacher's role in discussion is to keep it going along fruitful lines - be moderating, guiding, correcting and arguing like one more students.

What we want... is for students to get more interested in things, more involved in them, more engaged in wanting to know; to have projects that they can get excited about and work on over long periods of time, to be stimulated to find things out on their own.

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.

The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

By leaving a student to himself he may... be led to undertake matters above his strength, but the trial will at least have this advantage: it will discover to himself his own deficiencies and this discovery alone is a very considerable acquisition.

The only thing that happens when I'm teaching is that I hope there are some students out there in the class who will ask questions.

There are amazing teachers, but the system doesn't always allow them to address the individual needs of a child.

You've got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children

The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.

Teaching children to read was one thing; keeping them interested in reading was something else.

One of the marks of a great teacher lies not only in an ability to impart knowledge but also in knowing when to encourage a student to go off on his own.