COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES OF PUBLIC SCHOOL AND MONTESSORI PARENTS AND TEACHERS

Two important aspects of teaching and caring for children were explored using a questionnaire: communication preferences for talking to children and assumptions about how children think about specific things in various situations.

Forty parents and teachers from Montessori Schools and forty parents and teachers from Milwaukee Public Schools completed a questionnaire concerning four social situations and one factual situation. Parents and teachers ranked responses to each situation from 1 to 5 or wrote an alternative response if none of those given were appropriate. Parents and teachers also predicted what they would actually do in each situation and described their ideal response in each case.

In the second part of the questionnaire parents and teachers gave their views on how children understood ideas relating to time, another's point of view, and play. The responses to the questionnaire by parents and teachers tended to reflect the basic philosophy of Montessori education, which is based upon a cognitive constructivist model in which rational authoritative and distancing strategies rank higher than diversion, normative authoritative, and direct authoritative strategies. Moreover, the beliefs and behaviors of Montessori parents and teachers tended to support this conclusion.

A difference was found in the diversion strategy whereby both groups ranked diversion high in the first and second social situations and very low in the fourth and fifth social situations. These differences were likely due to the particular type of situation described. The majority of subjects, both teachers and parents, responded with more cognitive reasons than social reasons to the five situations. They also responded more frequently with active answers than passive answers.

Finally, it was found that public school teachers and parents who were from upper middle class districts and professionally educated tended to use the same strategies as the Montessori teachers and parents. In fact, there were no significant differences between the ideal ranking of these five situations by these two groups.