International Montessori School teaches collaboration through mixed-age classes

A visit to International Montessori School (IMS) in Stanley is a demonstration of all that is wonderful about a purebred Montessori school, a place where both teachers in each classroom must be trained, or in training with AMI (the global body that maintains the original pedagogy). This is a school that is Montessori to its very core. 

But in the case of IMS, it also has the added dimension of providing a fully bilingual environment with one native English and one native Mandarin teacher in each class. Karin Ann is one of the co-founders of IMS and refers to the Chinese offering as “one of the pillars of our school. We take it very seriously.”

The Montessori approach

Anne Sawyer, the other co-founder, explains how this set up came about. “When we decided we wanted to start a school, we wanted something different for our kids. Because there wasn’t anything in Hong Kong that would enable our kids to truly be able to speak, read and write both in Chinese and English and not have three hours of homework a night.” 

And as anyone remotely familiar with Montessori knows, homework is not part of the deal. Instead, the acquisition of two languages comes about in a much more organic, social manner, requiring interaction with people and materials rather than just an exercise in memorising. 

Sawyer describes the IMS classroom as a truly immersive dual language environment “that’s similar to a family home with two parents who have different mother tongues. The children quickly learn who to speak to in each language.” 

In addition to the presence of two native teachers (and as an aside, IMS teaches traditional Chinese characters), the other reason why IMS children acquire Mandarin – and for some, English – so readily is because the methods of Montessori lend themselves perfectly to language learning. 

“The way Montessori is, being so hands on, so multisensory, with children learning by using materials, this really cracks that problem of how to make Chinese relevant, interesting and engaging,” says Ann. 

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When talking to a Montessori specialist, two of the things you hear a lot are the words ‘enable’ and ‘tools’. This is because the style of learning is not didactic and it’s not just fact learning. Instead the approach is to set up a child with access to all the tools they may need – a combination of materials, environment, teachers and peers – and once these are in place, they are ‘enabled’ to learn in their own way, at their own pace. They work on projects both small and large, individually and in groups, learning skills that will mold them into being proficient researchers, creative thinkers and resourceful problem solvers. 

Of these tools available to them, the teachers are obviously an important component but it is crucial to appreciate that they are not the only component. At IMS, the students learn that there are others in the classroom who can assist in solving a problem or finding an answer. With mixed age classes, children are taught to look to their older peers for help. In turn, they also learn that they might be able to offer help to others. 

“Teachers are not the font of all knowledge. Somebody else in the classroom may know how to tie a shoe or how to refill the water jug. If you can’t figure it out yourself, you don’t always need to ask the adult,” says Sawyer. 

Mixed-age classes 

The benefit of the mixed-age classes is also seen in how it motivates the children to progress, with younger kids wanting to imitate the older ones and older ones enjoying the opportunity to be the expert. 

For anyone familiar with the phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, this concept is very much in keeping with that. At IMS, the focus is on learning from the classroom community and providing children with the ability to craft their own path, in whichever direction they want to take it. 

This frequently means that IMS students become known at their destination schools for their entrepreneurial spirit and ability to see things from alternative perspectives. 

“Montessori kids think differently,” says Ann. “We find that what we do is particularly attractive to people who are entrepreneurs. There are so many articles written on this. Because entrepreneurs see that all the skills they use themselves are naturally nurtured within the Montessori classroom.”

These skills are things such as creativity, collaboration and self-regulation. This last point is something that gets many traditionalists a little nervous: Children? Selecting their own tasks? Working on them independently? Terrifying. 

But in practice, this is one of the many traits that allows IMS to see such success in its students. And it is in truth wrong to think that Montessori is unstructured because whilst the children are allowed to select their own work, this is within a highly structured setting and carefully decided framework, at all times overseen by a duo of eagle-eyed teachers.

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Which paths IMS children take once they graduate is another interesting discussion. Some people who are unfamiliar with Montessori imagine that this type of education will be a barrier to entry when moving onto the next stage of school, assuming it is not Montessori. However this could not be further from the truth. In fact, IMS finds that its graduates are snapped up, their reputation having preceded them. 

“Parents fear that their children aren’t going to transition well into a traditional school but it’s actually the opposite. Because they are used to dealing with children who are older, children who are younger they’re the ideal child to transition. They’re highly adaptable,” says Sawyer.  

Ann adds in that while CIS is a natural path for many of their families because of the strong emphasis on Mandarin, “IMS students fit in wherever they go”. 

It is tough to do justice to Montessori in a relatively short amount of words. It is a much studied and discussed scientific programme on which people have written vast books. But Sawyer sums it up well when she says that creating a Montessori child is creating “an independent thinker”.

“A lot of time, as adults we think that education is just learning a set of facts but there’s so much more to it,” says Sawyer. Maria Montessori might have been ahead of her time, but now that we’re in the 21st century, surely we’ve all caught on to realise this is entirely true.