A Deliberately Developmental Organization

City Country School is a developmental organization. How could it be otherwise, founded, as it was, on the developmental pedagogy of Maria Montessori? By developmental organization we mean that every single person in our school community—children, adolescents, teachers, support staff, parents, families, teams—are in a moment of growth that requires “relations and human contexts which spontaneously support [them] through the sometimes difficult process of growth and change” (Kegan, The Evolving Self). Those relations and human contexts provide growth environments for optimal development, and those growth environments are, by necessity, different over the course of our lifespan. As trained Montessorians our expertise is in creating developmentally appropriate holding environments in which our students find the support they need to work at their growth edge, the challenges they need progress through to their next edge, and the community to welcome their new, grown self.

A child in each stage of development has particular abilities and interests. The Montessori prepared environment is simply an environment prepared especially for the interests and abilities of children at a particular stage of development, without anything extraneous or distracting. Every part of the child’s environment can be an opportunity: a lost opportunity, or an opportunity that is maximized. If we keep foremost in our minds that a child is always learning, then we can understand that every moment is an opportunity to learn, and that the entire school must be a prepared environment: the hallways, the bathrooms, the dining room, the kitchen, the classrooms, the workshop, the outdoor area.

The prepared environment includes a structure that is seldom discussed in schools, but is of paramount importance: time. Clock time reigns supreme in most schools where the day is divided into fifty-minute segments marked by the whims of a bell. At City Country School we try to help the children find and follow deep impulses of learning that will not be determined by a clock, but by an individual psychological time that only they can understand. To help children connect with their own psychological time they must be permitted to choose their own work and work for as long as they wish to, without interruptions. They must be permitted to continue with a work for day, weeks, even months. Ample clock time permits the child to forget about looking at the clock, and permits them to contact their own connection to the work, their own rhythm and their own process. A child can be creative and insightful in their work, if they can relax.