Low Cost Montessori methods for developing countries

Damaris, who managed our Montessori project some years, kept a blog on some of the work we have been doing in innovating low-cost Montessori: http://khomloymontessori.blogspot.com

Khom Loy Montessori

This article reviews a 2017 study by Angeline Lillard, showing that Montessori can produce positive effects for low-income families: http://educationpost.org/are-montessori-schools-a-better-approach-for-teaching-low-income-children/

Are Montessori Schools a Better Approach for Teaching Low-Income Children? Is the Montessori method of schooling better for low-income children? A new study that looks at Montessori preschool students by University of Virginia psychology professor

Here is an interesting article reviewing considerations to bear in mind when trying to address education systems in the developing world: https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/seven-actions-fight-extreme-poverty-improving-education-developing-world

I want to talk about how we can create a scaleable and sustainable model for Montessori (MS) in poor parts of the world where Montessori is only available to wealthy families.

At the moment, Khom Loy and a few other projects are trying to develop low-cost methods of one model or another to do this. However, I don’t think we yet have the answer.

KLDF’s model of low-cost (locally made) materials and a 9 month in-class training period has been successful in some rooms in continuing for some years after we leave ​t​he room, but depends on us happening to find an exceptionally motivated teacher in place​ (10-15% of rooms)​.

In rooms where we don’t find such a high level of motivation, the teachers tend to stop using the method some time after we leave, for such reasons as:

- one of the teachers we trains leaves
- she loses motivation
- there is a change of school head and the new head for some reason does not support the project

In order to minimize his “dropout rate”, we would need a​ full time person or team, going round the schools where we launched the initial program to keep up skills and motivation - almost lost an alternate manager to the teacher's line manager, the school head. This would be in addition to the team we need to keep identifying, surveying and training new schools to add to the network.

At present, KLDF's model is fairly resource intensive, and I do not think local administrations in Myanmar or Thailand (where we work) would have the resources to support a broad-based programme covering a substantial part of the country. ​

​So the question arises: are there changes we can make to the model to increase the chance of MS method (or some adaptation of it) being easier to introduce, and also to sustain after the initial period.

I would welcome contributions to this debate.

My ideas for discussion and reaction are:

- should we somehow scale down or simplify the system we are using? If we try to rank the desirable outcomes, maybe we should limit the programme to maths/literacy, or somehow drop other parts of our "full-line" method? (I think Doris has a smaller set of materials she uses in the Lao schools.)

- should we make the teacher training more intensive, so that more of it "sticks"?

- better or different training materials which teachers can refer to after we leave as a way of reinforcing their training?

​What other ideas to people have? Is there something successful being tried somewhere else which we should go an look at?

I have set this page up as an extension of KhomLoy.org, the webpage of Khom Loy Development Foundation. We have been working in Thailand and Myanmar to bring the benefits of Montessori education to poor families and minorities. So far, we have converted 70 rooms in Thailand and 9 in Myanmar, using a system which costs about USD600 per room in materials, and offers local teachers an eight month training course.

I would like to start a debate about ways we can adapt and modify the "pure" Montessori philosophy to serve larger number of families than the resource-intensive methods used in conventional Montessori schools.

If you have an interest in this debate, please feel free to comment on my occasional posts and post articles or views you would like to share. Please also Like or Share.