Is There a "Best" Montessori School in Austin?

You have probably typed "best Montessori school in Austin" into Google and found advertisements, directory listings, and a lot of schools saying lovely things about themselves.

A search for the best school in any city tends to reward whoever spent the most on advertising, or whoever built the biggest directory. Some of those listings are paid for. Some of those rankings are reader polls. They rarely paint a full picture of a school, to answer your query. So what we would rather do is equip you to judge it for yourself.

So if your question is "what is the best Montessori school?", here is the honest answer.

Nobody ranks Montessori schools. There is no list. There is no best. There are, however, bodies that uphold the principles, review schools, and make sure that Montessori as it was intended is what is actually being practiced.

Why does that exist? For the benefit of the child. A true Montessori school's compass is not success metrics, or filling classroom spaces, or finding a place in an online algorithm. It exists so that children are given every chance to meet the world, and their potential, with dignity and joy.

The good news is that you can become a very good judge of this yourself. In about ten minutes, standing quietly at the edge of a classroom, you will feel it.

Here is what we, as parents and as educators, would look for.

What does AMI recognition mean?

Maria Montessori never trademarked her name. Anyone may use it. A school can put it on their sign tomorrow.

So the first thing to check is recognition, and you can do it before you leave the house. A look at a school's website should tell you whether it is AMI recognized. The Association Montessori Internationale is the body that upholds Montessori, founded by Dr. Montessori herself in 1929, and it holds the most exacting standard in the field.

Why does that matter? Because everything an AMI school does is arranged around the child rather than around the school. The materials, and the way they are presented. The way children move through the room. And above all the guide, who has completed the most rigorous training in the Montessori world in order to meet your child with respect, patience and real attention. These are the things AMI holds a school to.

Many parents walking through an AMI classroom might for example marvel at the materials. Even these are reviewed on a yearly basis for an AMI school to keep its recognition. One of many things held into consideration as a part of the exacting standard AMI uses.

More about what recognition actually involves is in what AMI recognition really means, and about AMI itself at montessori-ami.org.

Us, plainly. Austin Montessori School is AMI recognized. We opened in 1967, and we are the oldest and largest AMI-recognized school in the Austin area, one of only about two hundred AMI-recognized schools in the country. We have around 350 children across three campuses, from sixteen months to fifteen years.

What should a Montessori classroom look like?

A simple checklist of things to look for.

The room itself. A Montessori classroom is calm, ordered, and unusually beautiful for a room full of children. For example, for younger classrooms, there is no "front". No rows of desks facing a board, because nobody is being addressed all at once. Instead, there are low shelves dividing the space into areas, tables and rugs where a child can settle, and floor space to work on. Everything is child-sized and real. Glass, china, small brooms, a jug that actually pours. Most of it sits at knee height, because it belongs to the children rather than to the adults. By adolescence you will notice the room has changed again, because the young people have. The furniture is adult-sized now. There may well be a long table everyone gathers around, and a board someone is writing on, and that is not a step backwards, it is a seminar. What tells you it is Montessori is how little of the work stays in the room. The environment has grown to take in land, animals, tools, and real responsibility that somebody is genuinely depending on.

The materials. They are called materials, and they are not toys, though they may be every bit as captivating to a small hand. But each one holds more than is visible at first glance: a single idea, made grippable and lovely enough that a toddler's hands can meet it years before anybody could explain it to her in words. An adolescent classroom again, may look different to how you might envision it. With far fewer of those wooden materials, and more of what you would recognize from a laboratory or a workshop. Balances and glassware, measuring instruments, field notebooks.

Something has changed about the objects, and it is the whole point. A material in the Children's House holds its answer inside it. Built wrongly, it does not sit right, and the child sees that for herself without an adult telling her. By adolescence the instruments hold no answer at all. A microscope will not tell a fifteen-year-old what she is looking at, and the measurement she takes may be one nobody in the room already knows. The material has stopped guiding her. It has started letting her find out.

How they are placed. Look at the shelves themselves in a classroom. Materials sit in complete sets and in sequence, left to right and top to bottom, the way you would read. Nothing is heaped together. Each thing has one place and it is within reach, so a child can decide to do something and simply go and get it, without asking anybody's permission. Gaps in a set, missing pieces, or beautiful wooden things sitting untouched at adult height tell you something too.

The children moving. Is a child carrying a tray across the room with both hands and enormous concentration, entirely by herself? Is a five-year-old showing a three-year-old how something is done, thoroughly pleased to be the one who knows? Can children fetch, carry, spill and clean up without an adult swooping in? Is there an adolescent working alongside an adult on something real? Is there an adolescent crossing the building on their own errand, unremarkably, because they are trusted with it?

If that is what you are seeing, you are beginning to understand what an AMI recognition actually means.

What should a Montessori classroom sound like?

Listen to how the adults speak to the children. You will hear a guide talk to a two-year-old in more or less the tone she would use with you. Engaging, unhurried, respectful. You will hear her ask before helping, and then wait for the answer.

You may also notice how little praise there is. "You did it" rather than "good girl", because the satisfaction belongs to the child who did the thing, and not to the adult who happened to notice.

Then listen to how the adults talk about the children, to you, a stranger, on a tour. That will tell you more than any brochure. You are listening for curiosity rather than labels. "He is working out how to join a group at the moment" is a very different sentence from "oh, he's my difficult one."

In adolescence, look at how a guide engages with for example a disagreement. Adolescents are built to understand the world, and a Montessori adult expects that rather than merely tolerates it. Listen for whether a young person can say "I don't think that's right" and be answered rather than managed. Listen for an adult saying "I don't know, how would we find out?" and meaning it. And in a seminar, notice who is doing most of the talking. If it is the adult, you are in a different kind of classroom.

And listen to how the adolescents talk about their own work. You are listening for ownership. "We need this finished by Thursday" rather than "what are we supposed to be doing." Somebody explaining a thing to you that you did not know, and being right about it. Nobody asking whether it will be graded, because the work has a consequence that is not a mark on a page.

Signs you may not be in a Montessori classroom

None of these make a school a bad school. They are simply different choices, and it is worth knowing which you are looking at. Here is what they are and what Montessori chose instead, and why.

• Desks in rows, facing a board. Montessori instead arranged rooms with no front, because a lesson is given to one child, or to three, at the moment each is ready for it, rather than to everybody at once.
• Worksheets. Montessori replaced them with materials a child can hold, because a young child understands a quantity she has carried in her arms long before she understands one printed on a page.
• Star charts, stickers, colored behavior clips. These were left out on purpose. The aim is a child who does something because it is worth doing, rather than because somebody is keeping score.
• A school-wide bell that signals a change of task for everyone. The long work cycle exists precisely so that a child who is deep inside something is not interrupted.
• Single-age classes. Mixed ages are the point. The younger child can see where she is going, and the older child learns a thing deeply by teaching it.
• Screens in a room of two-year-olds. In the early years the work is done through the hands and the senses, and a screen quietly takes the place of both.

More on the screens question in screen-free childhood, a Montessori perspective.

Words you will hear, and what they mean

Work, in reference to what your child is doing. Watch a two-year-old wash the same table for the fourth time and some of us would call it playing. Kindly, but still. Montessori called it work, and the word is a form of respect.

Think about what it means to take a small child seriously. She is not filling in time until real life begins. She is doing the most important job there is, which is making herself, and somewhere in her she knows it, even if the rest of us have forgotten. When we call it work we are saying: I can see what you are doing, it matters, and I will not interrupt it, or tidy it away, or hurry you along. There is nothing stern in that. It is one of the kindest things an adult can offer a child, and mostly it is offered by simply stepping back and letting her carry on.

The work cycle. Which is why nobody interrupts her. The morning runs as one unbroken stretch of about three hours, so a child who falls deep into something can stay there until she is done with it, rather than until a bell says she is.

The guide. What a Montessori teacher is called, and the word is deliberate. She gives a lesson to one child, or to three, and then steps back. A great deal of her training is in studied, measured, calm observing rather than instructing.

The planes of development. Montessori saw childhood as four six-year stages rather than one long climb: birth to six, six to twelve, twelve to eighteen, and eighteen to twenty-four. Each plane has its own appetite. A small child absorbs the world through her senses and her hands. A child of eight wants fairness, friendship, and enormous questions about the universe. An adolescent wants real work and real responsibility. Classrooms are built to meet the plane a child is in, rather than the birthday on the form.

How far does the school go?

Quite a few programs in the United States using the Montessori name stop at age six, and there is nothing wrong with that. But it has meant that many people associate Montessori with the early years, when really it was designed to run from sixteen months to eighteen. At our school we serve children from sixteen months to fifteen years, which spans the first three planes.

So when you tour a school, ask to see the classes beyond the one you are applying to.

If a school has an elementary class, ask to see it, because that is where you find out what all the early years were truly for. Children recording lessons, work choices, and progress in a learning journal. Two of them talking their way out of a disagreement with no adult refereeing. A child coming back on Thursday to something she started on Monday, because no timetable is dictating what it should take her to absorb a concept. A big work spilling out of the classroom and down a hallway, because that is what the age calls for.

And if there is an adolescent program, ask to see that too. Somewhere between twelve and fifteen the work turns outward. Young people take on something genuinely real, with animals or land or money or customers, and find that their effort has consequences past a grade on a page. Ours is at our Gaines Creek farm campus, and it is the only AMI-recognized Montessori adolescent program in Austin. Watching adolescents at it is the fastest way to understand what all of it was for.

This is also where you may find technology arriving, thoughtfully and late. In the early years an authentic Montessori environment is screen-free by design. By adolescence, when young people are beginning to meet the wider world, technology comes in as a genuine tool for real work, used critically. The aim was never to keep children from it forever. It was to build the attention and judgment to be its master rather than its subject. We wrote about that in screen-free childhood, a Montessori perspective.

A practical guide to visiting a school

One thing worth knowing before you go. Montessori schools have welcomed observing parents for over a century, and a classroom is built to absorb a quiet visitor without the morning changing shape around her. In return there is an etiquette, and a school that holds you to it is telling you something good about itself.

• Ask to come during the morning work cycle. There is not much to see in an empty room.
• Sit where you are shown, and stay as quiet as possible.
• Try not to speak to a child who is working, however charming the temptation. Engage politely, without leaving the door open for interaction. Her concentration is the thing everyone in that room is protecting, and now that includes you.
• Watch one child for ten minutes rather than scanning the whole room.
• Notice what happens when something turns out to be difficult, and what happens when something is finished early.
• Listen for how a disagreement gets settled, and by whom.
• Notice what the adults do when nothing at all is going wrong.
• Notice how you feel in the room. Parents are usually right about this.

There is a longer list in questions to ask on a Montessori school tour. And if you are weighing up other approaches too, Montessori compared with Waldorf, Reggio, and traditional school is an honest attempt at a fair comparison.

Where we fit

Most families do not arrive having decided on anything like fifteen years. They arrive with one practical question about next year. Somewhere warm and dependable for a two-year-old. A kindergarten that will not rush a child who is not ready to be rushed.

That is a perfectly good way to begin, and it is how a great many of our longest-standing families began. What tends to happen is that a parent stands at the edge of a classroom, watches a three-year-old carry a tray of real glasses across a room without interference, and starts wondering what else they had not expected.

The longer arc is there if it turns out to suit you.

You are warmly welcome at any of our three campuses on a working morning, when the children are simply at their ordinary business. Go and see two or three other schools the same week. We would rather you chose well.

More on choosing a school

Is Montessori a preschool or a day care?
Montessori in Austin: our campuses, and finding the right fit
How much does Montessori cost in Austin?
Is Montessori right for my child?
Why Montessori doesn't stop at kindergarten