AMI Training Albums
My friend Electra recently posted this question in response to my last post, and since I often get this question, I thought I’d respond publicly.
Your training program calls these “albums.” Are there actual pictures and images inside, or is it basically a binder of class materials. I am curious…
The training albums are indeed a compilation of both text and illustrations. In the elementary training (ages 6-12) there are nine albums:
- theory (which is comprised of Montessori philosophy and history)
- language
- mathematics
- geometry
- geography
- history
- biology (botany and zoology)
- art
- music
For the primary training (ages 3-6), there are a different set of albums, as the curriculum is not so heavily academic:
- theory
- practical life
- sensorial
- language
- mathematics
(Electra, if you’re curious about the primary albums, you should ask MontessoriEd about his!)
The format of AMI training at all levels is lecture-based, during which the trainer will present a lesson as if we were students. We record notes about each lesson:
- the theory and any introductory notes
- prerequisites
- the materials used (almost every lesson has some kind of hands-on material that allows for direct experience of the concept being presented)
- the lesson procedure itself
- the direct and indirect preparation that this lesson gives for future work
- any follow-ups
- illustrations of the procedure
Almost all illustrations are either drawn by hand or done on the computer (except under rare circumstances, no photographs are allowed).
In the AMI tradition, each teacher trainee writes her own albums for each subject area (although in the classroom, we never refer to them as subject areas, as there is much interdisciplinary overlap and interconnection). In the first years of teacher training, these albums were a necessity because the training was given orally by Dr. Montessori herself–there were no textbooks on how to do Montessori. A trainee went to one of Dr. Montessori’s international training courses, where she lectured, you took notes, and when she thought you were ready, you took an exam and got a diploma.
AMI has continued this oral tradition and requires that each teacher compile her own set of albums. The thought behind this is that in the act of creating our own albums, we will have a deeper experience of each lesson than if we were just handed a set of binders and told to memorize it.
For the most part, I agree with this philosophy, although, I also think that the training could benefit from some outside connections to the world of adult education. In Montessori we talk about the developmental needs of the child and how they inform the way in which we prepare an ideal classroom environment. I firmly believe that adults also have their own needs in the learning process, and they are not always satisfied in a lecture-based learning environment. But that’s a post for another day…
In the meantime, here’s an example of a typical elementary write-up. This is for a language lesson called Logical Analysis–it’s essentially a systematic exploration of syntax not unlike parsing sentences–but with physical material to manipulate in order for the child to really experience what it’s like to change the order of words in a sentence.
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Three points of thanks:
Thanks for answering my question with such depth! I really appreciate it!
Thanks a lot for choosing your write up to logical/sentence analysis as an example! Maybe it was just serendipity but I was just this month puzzling over how to start to teach sentence analysis to an 8-year-old and how to prepare a 6 year old for reading words. (They are both Japanese, but I think some of the ideas in your write-up help me to help them analyze their language [Japanese] and the language I’m teaching them [English].) I’m pretty worried about the 6-year old. I have no experience creating lessons for someone so young. Luckily, the only time I have with her is limited to 15 minutes, so I can’t make anything go past her attention span!
Also thanks for pointing out MontessoriEd’s blog! I didn’t know he’d made that! I have subscribed already, and may ask questions as you suggest.
Ed will definitely have some great ideas too, as the primary language lessons are really geared towards that introductory idea of a sentence.
Also, we do a lot with teaching the parts of speech (noun, verb, article, adjective, etc) and relating those words to their function…if you’re interested in more on that just let me know and I’d be happy to share!
Another thought to keep in mind when reading these write-ups:
The psychological characteristics of the elementary aged child mean that we develop lessons that require the child to reason through the how’s and why’s of things. We never “teach” grammar so much as provide the materials for the child to make her own discoveries. The child naturally wants to know how and why his or her language came to be…so we capitalize on that desire by developing lessons that encourage this critical thinking process.
The child grows up speaking his or her native language…she already has assimilated the grammatical syntax, which is the foundation for thinking about another language. What we do through our language lessons is heighten her awareness of how that structure works, and give names to the various components of that structure: subject, predicate, direct object, etc.
Ideally, the materials themselves, along with the child’s experience with them, are what will lead to these discoveries, more than anything that the teacher is saying.
Also…the six year old is on the brink of transitioning from a more sensorial mode of being in the world to a more intellectual, abstract way of being in the world. Anything you can do to offer opportunities for hands-on manipulation are going to be incredibly helpful in allowing the child to truly experience the concept you want to convey. It can be as simple as cutting up sentences, isolating the parts of a sentence, and rearranging them to see if it makes sense to have a verb before a subject, etc.