In modern schools, worksheet-based learning is taken for granted. This method consumes a large amount of paper and significant time for both teachers and children, yet it is believed to be the best approach in an education industry that is busy with everything.
While worksheet-based learning is a way to increase learning efficiency while reducing management costs for teachers, Maria Montessori criticized it as “busy work.” Is there an alternative to this generalized method of learning?
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share your comments!
Profile
Yati Obara
Editor-in-Chief, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1989. CEO of Motherhand and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Holds an M.Eng. and is an AMI-certified teacher. Focused on Montessori developmental theory and AI. Mother of two.
Hiro Obara
Publisher, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1990. CEO of StudyX and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Works as a software developer and game designer. Father of two.
Learning methods have plenty of room for evolution.
Yati
As I mentioned in the three to six article, this time we’re discussing worksheet learning.
Hiro
In Montessori education, is worksheet learning good or bad?
Yati
It’s bad. AMI’s elementary trainers, the people certified to train teachers, repeatedly devote many pages to saying, “Don’t use worksheets or workbooks.”
Hiro
“Don’t do pencil work.” Why is that?
Yati
“Because we don’t just want to give answers.” And we certainly don’t want rote memorization. We want children to understand for themselves and to reach that understanding in a state of being “set on fire,” deeply engaged. That kind of engagement ultimately leads to new discoveries for humanity. Instead of worksheets, children experiment and make mistakes with didactic materials, set their own problems and research them, or build their own models and materials.
Hiro
So kanji drills and math drills are also out.
Yati
That’s how it goes.
Hiro
Isn’t that specifically for ages 9 to 12?
Yati
Worksheets aren’t part of cosmic education, so it applies to the whole six to twelve range. I believe it’s the same for ages three to six. Worksheet learning never came up in my three to six course.
Hiro
Then how do children develop literacy skills like calculation, reading, and writing?
Yati
They create their own problems. For example, if five or six year olds are doing four-digit addition with the Stamp Game, you just say, “Tell me any four numbers you like,” and that becomes the first number. If you want to avoid carrying, you can say, “Now I’ll pick four numbers I like.” Once children see how problems are created, they start making and solving their own. It’s curious, children aren’t motivated by pre-printed problems, but when they can create the problems themselves, they become eager.
Hiro
Without building that foundation from age three to six, wouldn’t it be pretty painful? The premise is different.
Yati
That’s true. A Montessori environment has many children who are self-reliant, working asynchronously on activities they’ve chosen themselves. For children raised where doing the same thing as everyone else and waiting for instructions is normal, even “pick any number you like” might feel stressful.
Hiro
Exactly. No matter how superior Montessori education is and how bad worksheet learning may be, people ask, “I get the ideal, but what am I supposed to do?” Methods for avoiding worksheets in Montessori education aren’t widely shared or generalized.
Yati
That’s AMI’s fault. I’m grateful to Montessori education for helping me, and precisely because it’s so wonderful, it should become “Open AMI.” Everything should be made freely available. If they’re truly aiming for world peace.
Hiro
Would making it public solve the problem?
Yati
No, that alone wouldn’t be enough. There’s still the issue of teachers. Unless you experienced something Montessori-like as a child, like Will Wright’s games or something similar, and know the joy of becoming absorbed in something and making your own discoveries, you won’t be able to use the materials well. Adults end up guiding children for their own convenience.
Hiro
So the teacher’s own background matters a lot.
Yati
Right. And on top of that, science keeps advancing, new facts emerge, and new technologies become available. You have to keep studying, thinking, and incorporating new things on your own. But people who can do that are rare.
Hiro
And there’s the issue on the children’s side too, like waiting for instructions. Maybe one-on-one teaching would work, but that’s unrealistic. What’s good about worksheets? If the technology is mature, it can be done cheaply. Everyone can use them. You print them, use recycled paper, and the problems are standardized. But there’s also the view that they’re “too outdated” and “too low quality.” On the other hand, the Montessori approach we’re talking about isn’t commoditized yet, so it’s demanding. Still, we can’t just drop existing worksheet learning, and we can’t achieve a perfect Montessori setup. But isn’t there something in between?
Yati
Isn’t that what we’re doing? [laughs]
Hiro
Wait, we are? What do you mean? [laughs]
Yati
We’re digitizing the materials. We’re evolving them and then digitizing them.
Hiro
Go on, even if it sounds like advertising.
Yati
We’re turning didactic materials into apps for iPhone and iPad.
Hiro
This is definitely promotional, but keep going.
Yati
There’s a material called the Sandpaper Letters for learning letters. It’s a thin wooden board with sandpaper cut into the shape of letters, or grooves carved into it, and children trace them in the correct stroke order to learn how to write. We made an app version.
Hiro
In English-speaking countries, three to six year olds learn 26 letters of the alphabet plus 10 numerals. Strictly speaking, there are also sandpaper letters for digraphs like the letters S H and C H. But in Japan, you can’t stop at just hiragana and katakana, the phonetic Japanese writing systems.
Yati
Right. Our app, StudyX Smartpaper Letters, supports over 6,800 characters, including kanji, the Chinese-derived characters used in Japanese. Imagine making that into physical materials. You’d need classroom space, resources to produce them, and transportation costs.
Hiro
A set of 6,800 boards. The materials would cost a fortune.
Yati
Some say that once children are in elementary school, they should learn kanji theoretically by thinking about the meaning of components rather than tracing sensory-based sandpaper letters. But considering how writing evolved, from pictures, to kanji, to hiragana and katakana, I think it’s more natural for three to six year olds to start writing kanji first.
Hiro
Under Montessori purist rules, digital apps aren’t allowed, right? Isn’t AMI telling people to avoid screen time?
Yati
How much time and money do you think it would take to set up the ideal Montessori environment AMI describes for every child in the world? StudyX Smartpaper Letters gets downloaded in China, so we added support for Simplified Chinese characters. That kind of rapid adaptation is only possible with digital.
Hiro
Are you ready to be excommunicated by AMI? [laughs]
Yati
I’m doing this at the risk of excommunication. Maria Montessori was familiar with the cutting-edge technology and developers of her time, and I think she believed education should evolve with the era. But here’s the thing. Environments that officially qualify as “Montessori education” are actually far more restricted than most people realize.
Hiro
How restricted?
Yati
Take Gandhi in India. He exchanged ideas with Maria Montessori, and he tried to adapt Montessori education so it could be practiced even in poverty. He provided real work, spinning thread and making cloth. Gandhi understood the essence of Montessori education so well that Maria personally certified him as a teacher without requiring him to take a course. But in response to Gandhi’s efforts, Maria said something like, “I am not a tailor. I have only provided the fabric. If you want to wear it in an Indian style, how you cut it should be left to the skill and judgment of the teachers.” In other words: don’t call it “Montessori education.”
Hiro
So even Gandhi’s version didn’t count.
Yati
Meanwhile, for an elite school in India that had child-sized furniture and a full set of materials, she said it was “my ideals rendered in brick and mortar.” She held up a Dutch Montessori school with a pool and gymnasium as a model in her training lectures, and she insisted on personally training every teacher and equipping each classroom with a complete set of Montessori materials. So even back then, the spread of Montessori education was heavily restricted. By those standards, you have to wonder whether any environment in Japan qualifies as “Montessori education,” and apps are so far beyond the pale it’s laughable. [laughs]
Hiro
That’s pretty stuck-up. This might sound provocative, but when you actually build apps yourself, you realize: ultimately, “the teacher gets in the way.”
Yati
Exactly! That’s it! Liberation from teachers! And liberation from location constraints at the same time. This is evolution.
Hiro
In a sense, AMI’s very existence would be threatened by apps that “make teachers unnecessary,” so maybe they don’t want that.
Yati
Maybe. With the Sandpaper Letters, having a teacher demonstrate how to write every single character one-on-one is exhausting. Teachers can’t always respond the moment a child is ready, and children want to see it over and over. At the same time, they want a teacher who doesn’t make unnecessary comments.
Hiro
Hard to satisfy all of those at once.
Yati
That’s where a machine wins. It can teach even the most complex kanji accurately every time, whenever the child wants, without saying anything unnecessary. It calculates a score based on tracing accuracy and encourages repetition. My eldest daughter used the app StudyX Smartpaper Letters to teach herself. Within the first half year of elementary school, she finished learning all kanji through sixth grade. Technology just hadn’t caught up before; children’s potential is still largely unknown.
Hiro
The theory was that with lots of children, older ones become teachers for younger ones, but birthrates are declining.
Yati
Right. For a three to six environment, the standard is one teacher, one assistant, and thirty-five to forty-five children, the more the better. But in Japan, where the birthrate is seriously declining, is that even achievable?
Hiro
Tuition running into the millions of yen, the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars, isn’t sustainable either. And as you said, making physical materials isn’t eco-friendly. It goes against the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Yati
I learned a lot from actually making wooden materials. You use wood that took hundreds of years to grow. You use paints that prioritize safety. And yet chemical substances are inevitably involved. Shipping also generates a lot of carbon dioxide.
Hiro
Working with your hands really does teach you things.
Yati
It does. People say materials are expensive, but the prices are reasonable. Making them beautifully is hard. They’re actually cheap, if anything. Cheap materials are scary. Where are they cutting costs? They must be using inferior materials.
Hiro
And probably not paying workers fairly. So, in summary, AMI’s approach isn’t sustainable and isn’t cool.
Yati
I’ve thought many times about burning my teaching certificate.
Hiro
That’s radical. [laughs] Well, we’re anti-establishment. We don’t believe Maria Montessori was absolutely right, that’s why we take a scientific approach. We don’t think we’re absolutely right either; we always work with the awareness that we might be wrong.
Yati
True. Our thinking keeps updating, so I’m glad we created a monthly magazine that can deliver the latest information. That said, I do want to point out that physical materials are still genuinely valuable.
Hiro
In what way?
Yati
I made wooden fraction circles, and the other day my eldest daughter used them in an unexpected way while studying math through programming. This is turtle geometry, where a character on screen draws shapes by tracing its path. “Move forward 100 steps, then turn 120 degrees,” repeated, draws an equilateral triangle. Why does that work? She was able to explore that question hands-on with the material. Experimenting hands-on like this really does lead to discoveries.
Hiro
That’s the difference from worksheet learning. If a worksheet tests knowledge and you don’t have that knowledge, you can’t do anything. But with materials, you might figure something out just by handling them.
Yati
That’s absolutely true. For something like these fraction circles, there are hardware stores now where you can use laser cutters, and wood is easy to get, so I think people should try making them. When parents do that kind of thing, children want to make things, too.
Hiro
That’s ideal, but the bar is pretty high for ordinary families. So I think we should keep evolving apps. I made a handwriting-based math drill app, and it gives immediate feedback on whether answers are correct. I was able to design a learning experience where children naturally write numbers carefully and try to solve problems quickly and accurately. There are lots of ways to encourage learning. The specifics are trade secrets, though.
Yati
I hope we can get the apps we’re developing to everyone soon.
Hiro
I’m going to create apps that unleash the creativity of children around the world. Conventional education spoils creativity. We’re fighting against that.
Yati
Ages six to twelve are what Maria Montessori called the most intellectual period, the time to fully unleash imagination. Let me close with her words.
Hiro
Please.
Yati
“The secret of good education is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to sprout and grow under the heat of a flaming imagination. Our aim, therefore, is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force memorization, but to touch the imagination and kindle enthusiasm to the child’s inmost core. We do not want complacent students; we want students hungry for knowledge. Rather than cramming theories into children, we wish to sow life and help them grow, mentally, emotionally, and physically. To do this, we must offer the human mind great and lofty ideas, for the mind is always ready to receive them and asks for more and more.”
