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Montessori and The Adolescent



“The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed. It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.” 

- Childhood to Adolescence, Dr. Maria Montessori, p. 72


The underlying foundation of the Montessori method and approach to education uses the idea that individuals go through four major stages of development during their lifetime. Dr. Maria Montessori’s philosophies and research outlined that each of these four stages, or Planes of Development, has its own set of characteristics and needs. Her educational approaches are designed to meet the needs of children in each of these specific planes.




To understand a Montessori adolescent program, one needs to understand what Maria Montessori saw as the sensitivities, characteristics, and needs of the adolescent at the Third Plane of Development.  


Dr. Montessori’s Third Plane of Development ranges from ages 12 to 18 and can be further split down into two groups, 12 - 15 and 15 to 18. The big question of this developmental stage is “Who am I?”. Students in this developmental stage are sensitive to personal dignity, belonging, social justice, and heroes and role models, most often looking outside their families for these influences.


Characteristics and needs in this plane of development are broken down into physical, emotional, social, and cognitive. Students are physically growing more rapidly than at times other than infancy. However, that growth is not fully linear or able to be charted as easily as in infancy with height and weight percentiles. Adolescents can have boundless energy but also need seemingly endless periods of rest. Adolescent programs should include lots of physical activities and a program that trains and educates students about physical health and nutrition.


Adolescent emotions are a lot. There are so many new emotions and reactions to experiences can vary tremendously from day to day. Students experience doubt, hesitation, and incredibly strong emotions for the very first time. As adults, we can sometimes get frustrated with the melodrama and overacting of adolescents, but mostly it’s because we are comfortable dealing with big emotions because we’ve had a lot of practice. Adolescents haven’t had the practice. And that lack of practice is going to look a lot like a lack of discipline. They haven’t developed the tips and tricks and strategies that come so second nature to us as adults, so they need to be exposed to as many of the strategies as possible to find the ones that work best for them. But it’s probably best if those lessons are not presented by their parental figures. At this age, students are starting to pull away and possibly rebel against the figures of authority in their lives, especially parental figures closest to them. Surrounding students with a community of trusted and accessible adults who are not their families is a great way to help make sure students can keep open lines of communication with an adult perspective and not be pulled solely into the influence of other adolescents. A helpful goal of adults in an adolescent’s life is to be there to answer questions, provide support and guidance when things don’t turn out well, and to bolster self-confidence in the student.


Adolescents want to understand their place in the world. Who am I to my friends? Who am I to my peers? Who am I to my community? Who am I to myself? Socially, adolescents crave socialness. Their peer group becomes their first priority as they get their first taste of building a community and contributing to causes. They long to see themselves as a valued member of a group. Together, they work with their chosen group to build a value system that will carry them into adulthood.


Academically, work needs to be not only intellectually challenging but creatively challenging as well. Adolescents want to live a life of variety, one occupation or subject will act as a holiday from another and no work is without purpose. Adolescents experience unexpected and lightning-strong changes in intellectual capacity and thought processes and they deeply start to think about the answer to “Who am I?”. They should be encouraged and enabled to acquire flexible and inquiring habits of education and life skills. They should have an environment that allows them access to express new interests, thoughts and emotions in a variety of ways. Above all students should be listened to and treated with the respect that one would afford their fully grown counterparts because to show disrespect shows that we don’t believe in the person that is going to one day answer the question, “Who am I?”

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