When daughter Kendall was very young, Scott Witmer and his wife did a lot to encourage their daughter to learn. They read to her often, enrolled in a parent-toddler music class and took Kendall to the park to be around other babies.

Dad Scott admits that when it came time to enroll Kendall in an all-day preschool, he didn't know much about the school he and his wife chose. It was a Montessori preschool, and at the time, he had never heard of Montessori. But he had heard good things about a particular school and had a good feeling about the teachers there. So 3-year-old Kendall went off to be taught according to the Montessori Method.

"Just the way that my daughter has responded to it is amazing," he says.

Defining Montessori: A Historical Perspective
So what is this teaching method?

Its founder is Dr. Maria Montessori, who became involved in early childhood education in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. While working as a pediatrician, contact with young, poor children impressed upon her the idea that all babies are born with intelligence and vast potential. Perhaps the best description of her teaching philosophy comes from Montessori herself, in an excerpt from The Absorbent Mind.

"Ours was a house for children, rather than a real school. We had prepared a place for children where a diffused culture could be assimilated, without any need for direct instruction...Yet these children learned to read and write before they were five, and no one had given them any lessons. At that time it seemed miraculous that children of four and a half should be able to write, and that they should have learned without the feeling of having been taught. We puzzled over it for a long time. Only after repeated experiments did we conclude with certainty that all children are endowed with this capacity to 'absorb' culture. If this be true -- we then argued -- if culture can be acquired without effort, let us provide the children with other elements of culture. And then we saw them 'absorb' far more than reading and writing: botany, zoology, mathematics, geography, and all with the same ease, spontaneously and without getting tired. And so 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. -- Dr. Maria Montessori

More than ninety years after she began, Montessori's ideas about self-directed learning have inspired more than 5,000 schools in the U.S. and Canada.

The Montessori Classroom
It was important to Montessori that children teach each other, rather than be lectured by an adult. Because of this, Montessori schools group together children of different ages as peers in the same classroom. A 3-year-old child will attend school with 4, 5 and 6 year olds, and will likely learn many tasks from the older children.

"They're very intrigued by what they see the older kids doing," says Ron Goldstein, administrator of the Rogers Park Montessori School in Chicago. "A 3 year old can look at a 4 year old and think they're super and say, 'Wow, I want to do this, too.'"

The major difference between the Montessori method and a traditional preschool is structure. The main focus of a traditional preschool is socialization, where teachers provide children with ample opportunities to play and learn the valuable peer interaction skills they'll need as adults.