You're reading: Montessori way in Ukraine

Although they aren’t aware of it, the preschoolers at Clever Kids Club in Obolon are immersed in a curriculum that has been around for more than 100 years.

Here, and in at least a half-dozen child development centers in Kyiv, the teaching principles of Maria Montessori are practiced. It’s the single, most widespread cultural pedagogy in the world, according to Lynne Lawrence, executive director of Association Montessori Internationale, an organization founded by Montessori in 1929 that oversees the development of learning materials and trains practitioners in the Netherlands. “It’s not about intellectual or physical development, it’s about all-round development,” Lawrence told the Kyiv Post. “It’s about putting the right building blocks in place at the beginning of life for children to make more of what they have in the future.”

The fundamental idea behind the Italian physician’s principles is that children are just like adults who’ve lived less time and whose learning capacities are in many ways greater than that of adults.
Days at Clever Kids start like at any normal preschool. Children arrive in the morning, change and stow their belongings in personal compartments. Next, they wash their hands and have breakfast.

But then they enter into a circle, focus and greet one another before they enter “zones” that are divided into sections geared toward enhancing the five senses of touch, taste, sound, hearing and sight.

“It’s less important to teach a child to read at the age of four or six, or when to learn the numbers and count,” said Yulia Demydenko, the founder of the two Clever Kids Clubs in Kyiv. “It’s much more important to help children develop such qualities as self-confidence, goal orientation and independence, freedom and responsibility, self-discipline and love of knowledge.”

The idea is, according to Montessori practitioners, that children develop qualities that will make them into productive, happy members of society who never tire of learning.

Thus, the zones teach practical life skills so that children know how to function in their environment. They practice hanging items, pouring water or washing plastic dishes. Other zones include the sensorial area to develop the five senses; the language area to train the child to focus on sounds and noises, which includes writing.

The other zones teach math to slowly grasp abstract concepts involving movement, numeration and sequencing. And the cultural area helps the child experience their place in the universe via basic art, geography, science and cosmology.

“It’s paramount to preserve the child’s innate desire to learn, and not repulse that wish in the preschool age,” added Demydenko.

That’s why children at Montessori schools are given the freedom to move from zone to zone, ample time to finish tasks to foster a sense of accomplishment, and the freedom to choose with which items to play or engage.

In most state-run preschools, the teacher authoritatively sets the tempo in the classroom and determines the tasks. The child’s wishes are usually not taken into consideration, said Demydenko.

“The current educational system squeezes, crushes the individual,” said Yuriy Rakotski, the founder and principal of the Ukrainian Montessori International preschool in Kyiv’s Sviatoshyn district. Rakotski said it’s a myth that children have short attention spans. He said they concentrate and focus on activities they like.

To foster these interests, a specially trained “guide” or “facilitator” must be part of the learning process to present or demonstrate how something works or operates, “not instruct,” said Rakotski. The younger the age group, the more pedagogues there are in a zone setting. “They are gentle helpers for children,” he said.

Other aspects of the Montessori Method are the so-called windows of opportunity. Through observation, Montessori saw that although children have the inherent ability to learn, there are certain bursts in development, or critical periods, that lead them to want to read, write, or start counting. Trained pedagogues must be keen to catch these periods to maximize the child’s hunger for learning a particular subject or topic.

For this reason, it’s crucial for teachers and parents alike not to compare or measure children with another because each child develops differently and at a different pace.

“The facilitator guides the child’s natural energies towards fulfillment of goals,” Lawrence said. “You measure them against themselves.”

But it’s not all about freedom of choice and movement. That would lead to selfishness. A Montessori setting also provides a backdrop of community and instills self-discipline.

“A simple example is that a child must put away a toy before moving on to a different task or activity,” said Alina Zaichenko, the director the Clever Kids Club in Obolon. “By putting away a toy or sliding their chair back behind the table, the child clears space for other children who might be running around.”

This practice should also be encouraged at home, but it is a task that many adults find difficult to practice, said Lawrence.

Many of Ukraine’s Montessori pedagogues are taught at the Association of Montessori Teachers headed by Borys Zhebrovsky, the deputy head of the Education and Science Ministry. It’s housed in Kyiv’s first and only state-run Montessori school that was founded in 1992 in partnership with the U.S.-based Princeton Montessori School in New Jersey.

Tatiana Mykhalchuk, the principal of the state-run Ukrainian Montessori Center, said she would only grant a Kyiv Post interview if she could see the article before publication, which violates the newspaper’s policy of editorial independence. Some practitioners have been trained in the U.S. and Europe, including at Lawrence’s Association Montessori Internationale.

Kyiv Post staff writer Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].