Positive Discipline and Montessori: A Perfect Match?

Do you find yourself coming up against familiar behaviour challenges time after time, as if the same child in a different body is following you everywhere you go? Do you sometimes ignore misbehaviour because you don’t know what to do, or because you just want students to like you…only to turn into that controlling and rigid teacher you promised yourself you would never become, when you can’t stand their behaviour anymore? Classroom management can be the most difficult thing for any new teacher. It’s so often the missing piece in many teacher education programs.

Teaching your students tools that promote peaceful, even joyful, cooperation doesn’t have to come at the expense of the academic curriculum. In fact, when you learn how to decode those subtle cues that reveal the beliefs that drive children’s behaviour, what used to be annoying interruptions become opportunities to help students develop those soft skills that will allow them to get the most out of their time in your classroom.

Of course, Dr Montessori’s writings provide many solutions to managing challenging behaviours. However exploring “deviations”, as she called them, wasn’t her main focus, and, frankly, relationships between adults and children have changed in important ways over the last century.

Jane Nelsen has said that, in the more than four decades since the release of Positive Discipline, Montessorians have been the group that have embraced her approach to relationship building most enthusiastically. Like Montessori, Positive Discipline shows parents and educators how to gain the cooperation of children by empowering them with skills that develop resilience, empathy, self-control and the ability to solve their own problems without tantrums or acting out.

With Positive Discipline, educators and parents learn through experiential activities and Socratic discussion how to create a classroom environment where children can develop a secure sense of belonging and significance based on the program’s core principles that children need to feel valued as part of their community and have the opportunity to contribute in meaningful ways. When their sense of connection is lost, children become discouraged, and misbehaviour results when they adopt mistaken beliefs about how to regain belonging and significance. Positive Discipline will show you how to reconnect instead of reprimand, how to encourage rather than enforce.

Join me to find out how to use the world-renowned Positive Discipline Relationship Tools to encourage Cooperative, Capable Young People in your Montessori classroom.