Joliet Montessori School

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Walking into our school, you are greeted with a sense of calm and purposefulness. You notice children as young as three choosing their work, respecting each other’s space, and being happily productive.

Looking into our elementary classrooms, you see students making time-lines together, clustered around a pin-map, or writing a play. Others are working individually on math or penmanship.

Then visit the adolescent space. The director or a subject specialist is guiding the students to a love and enthusiasm for learning unusual in young teens. Wherever you go, you sense joy, respect and hope for the future.

Many schools are now focusing on anti-bullying programs. There is increasing concern about this age-old problem due to the many new venues for bullying to occur. Recent accounts of cyber-bullying send chills into the hearts of parents. These events can lead to depression, isolation and in some cases, suicide. What should schools actually be doing to lessen a child’s need to bully, or put up with bullying?

Joliet Montessori School explains its policy on this all-important question, through the words of Nan Renzi, a 32 year veteran of education, with 23 years of Montessori classroom experience.

“For me, Montessori Education is the wave of the future. Once I discovered it I knew there was no other program that could offer what this type of set-up offers. Montessori teachers are trained in what we call “Grace and Courtesy”. These lessons, enacted from the first day of school, offer a student ways and choices that allow graceful living. And, according to the dictionary, this means beauty of form, movement, manner…pleasing or agreeable quality; charm; ease or elegance…goodwill; favor; mercy; pardon. Our children actually learn how, and why ease exists where grace is present.

An example of a first lesson for a young student (which is a common courtesy) might be…how to say ‘excuse me’, and how this works so much better than ‘hey, get out of my way’. A later lesson might be how to tell someone, politely, that he or she is annoying you. Each day, individually, in small groups or in large groups these types of lessons take place in a Montessori environment. In the process of daily activities students learn leadership skills, coping skills, negotiation, anger management, social skills, conflict resolution, teamwork, when obedience is important, the value of a safe and peaceful environment, and how to protect this safety and peace. Montessori education lends itself to this practice because rather than classrooms per se, we have environments which are more home-like and act as microcosms of the world. The children are allowed to move about, respond to each other, select work partners, negotiate with the teacher, choose when to take on big projects, etc. Each classroom functions as a laboratory for interaction and interdependence surrounding the academic achievement. Mistakes are made, but as the children come to realize, mistakes are not heinous, they are learning opportunities, and with trained staff coaching, reparations are made as necessary. The children learn in a ‘hands-on’ way about kindness. What kindness is, how it works, what the words are that carry kindness, how to respond to it, how it will return to us.

According to my ‘Gem Journal’ in which I record the many interesting comments of my students, here are a few that demonstrate the value of these hundreds of Grace and Courtesy lessons…’In my old preschool class we used to have bullies, but here there’s none bullies’; ‘Tommy, let me tell you something, you’re a great artist…I think I want to be like you’; ‘Thank you for helping me Emilie, I’m still not marrying you though’; ‘That 3 I made is kind of like a two-year old 3, kind of out-of-control!’; ‘How about we work next to your terrarium since you want to be by it, I’ll get a table and give you that lesson here’. I work with 3-6 year olds in the Primary Level environment. At Joliet Montessori School we have three primary environments, three Elementary environments (6-12) and an Adolescent Environment (7th and 8th grades) so the Grace and Courtesy lessons just keep going. At the Adolescent Graduation ceremonies, it is with tears of joy that we staff realize how wonderfully centered and mature our students have gotten.