More Than Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic

Healing Adolescent Educational Trauma Through Positive Psychic Development

Why Psychic Development?

After my first few months as a Montessori adolescent guide, I (Andrew) knew I had a problem: one of my students, who loved reading and writing, was avoiding every language lesson and assignment I gave her.

I was doing everything I thought would make my adolescents great writers: requiring them to use rigid rubrics, answering prompts I provided, and using the five paragraph essay. Yet this approach, which I used as a student in a traditional high school, was extinguishing the joy of language from my students.

In my moment of desperation, I returned to Montessori’s appendices in From Childhood to Adolescence and uncovered the concept that would radically change my pedagogy: psychic development.

Meanwhile, I (Kelly) was working at a low-income, traditional public high school where many of my students had struggles outside of school that were much more important to them than learning math, such as not knowing where they would be sleeping that night or needing to work full-time hours after school to support their family.

These adolescents came to my class defensive after having numerous teachers before me try to place more significance on the subject of their classes than on these students’ lived experiences and their needs as whole people. I realized that the only way for these young people to be successful was if they first felt safe and seen; if they were supported as whole humans rather than students whose only task was to acquire academic knowledge.

In this article, we hope to problematize some of the practices around math and language pedagogy that adolescent programs take for granted, provoking discomfort and a closer review of Montessori’s writing on psychic development to heal educational trauma, develop math and language pedagogy based on developmental needs rather than tradition, and bring the best out of every adolescent in our care.

This article was published in the AMI/USA Fall Journal. Check it out here: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/dfacd9e72e.html#page/42

What is Psychic Development?

Psychic development appears in Appendix B of From Childhood to Adolescence as a part of the Educational Syllabus for the adolescent. Montessori considers Language, Mathematics, and Moral Education to be the three components of Psychic Development which specifically aid in the formation of the personality. Math and language, rather than disciplines to be “covered,” are symbol systems that adolescents utilize to form their personalities through experiences in our prepared environments. The symbol systems also empower adolescents to develop their moral code through interactions with others in their community.

Viewing language through the lens of psychic development means we must see it as a social practice. Language is a practical reality, like morality, which allows human beings to live together in interdependence.

Adolescents are hard wired to use language for the purpose of social cohesion. In all of my observations of adolescents, I’ve found they’re using language nearly all the time: talking with each other, texting, writing, and reading. In our Montessori contexts, the question is not “how can we get our adolescents to engage with language?” but rather “how do we tap into the drive to use language?”

Like language, math is also a symbol system that allows us to relate to the world around us. It is a means of connecting humans with our environment and the phenomena we encounter as well as connecting humans with each other. Math is often referred to as the universal language because the symbols and syntax used in math are ubiquitous; anyone anywhere around the world can look at math symbols and garner the same understanding.

Montessori identified the Mathematical Mind as one of the universal human tendencies. All humans are innately wired to put things in order and to recognize patterns and sequences. This seeking of logic and order supports the shift from a sensorial to an abstract understanding of the world around us. As practitioners, we must prioritize this view of math as an innate tendency rather than viewing it as a disjoint set of facts and theorems to be memorized and applied in strictly theoretical scenarios.

Together, language and math provide the foundation for moral development. Math is related to morality in the context of defining the lens through which we view the world and how we describe our experiences and the patterns we notice in our pursuit of applying logic and order to those experiences.

Language is a critical component of moral education because it cannot exist without society. The type of language we use to understand, speak about, and view the world has drastic implications for our moral outlook on others. It is an invitation to bring adolescents into meaningful dialogue about how their language impacts the way they exist morally with others as they build their moral framework and negotiate social organization within their adolescent communities.

Why Focus on Psychic Development?

Students, in our experience, have more aversion to language and math than any other subjects. That’s because these are not disciplines to be covered, but are intimately tied to the positive development of these young people.

Math and language are the fodder around which adolescents construct their personalities. If we create educational environments where they are punished or shamed for their progress in these areas, we will dim their full potential because they will not take the risks necessary to blossom into their full selves.

We know from Montessori’s writings, and from the writings of other progressive educators, that adolescents are developmentally geared to use math and language as a natural part of their development. However, for this work to be meaningful, it must come from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. This means that our environments must support “just in time” learning, tapping into the needs and interests of our students, rather than pre-determining what is important to learn and when.

Adapting our Practice: Language

In my (Andrew’s) early days as an adolescent guide, the specifics of my language pedagogy were based on the traditional paradigm that I had experienced as an adolescent. My thought process was this: If I made it through that experience and came out “fine,” how bad could it be?

There are many aspects of traditional language pedagogy that are often used in Montessori adolescent circles that I argue do not support positive psychic development. However, perhaps the most controversial piece of language pedagogy which pervades Montessori programs is the five-paragraph essay.

Many believe the five-paragraph essay helps students to learn the mechanics of writing, or that all good writing follows a similar formula.

Unfortunately, both of these are false.

The five paragraph essay was created so that teachers could spend less time on grading student papers. Rather than read each piece of student writing as a custom job, teachers merely needed to look for the component parts of the five-paragraph essay.

To those who argue that writing in a formula is good for students, I ask the following: When you see writing in the world, such as a professional essay or newspaper article, do any of those use the five-paragraph essay?

Of course, the answer is no. The truth is, the key skill in writing that students must be comfortable with is choice. The best authors make choices about what they’re writing and how they’re writing it based on the needs of their audience. Yet the five-paragraph essay eliminates any opportunity for choice because it prescribes the “what” and the “who” in its rigid style. As writing professor John Warner noted in his book Why They Can’t Write, college first years arrive on campus knowing how to make their work “look like writing.” However, after years of only writing within a prescribed formula, they flounder when doing any real writing which cannot follow a formula if it seeks to be effective.

Rather than prescribe what and how my students write, I reframed my pedagogy to capitalize on how writing appears in the real world. Our prepared environments are full of beautiful opportunities for writing development; from production and exchange advertisements to taking notes at community meeting. If language is the air we breathe, we must be able to capture those moments as guides.

When I approach language with adolescents, I give them the three “keys” to any language work: Audience, Purpose, and Format. If our students are able to make choices around these three keys, they will be able to write and speak anything in any context. Regardless of whether they’re writing a short story or a historical paper, a poem or a lab report, they must see opportunities to stretch their ability to make choices about the way they present themselves through language.

What’s beautiful about actualizing writing across the prepared environment and engaging students with the three keys is that they can choose when and how they engage with language. Language work only leads to positive self-construction when it is meaningful and freely chosen. When I aligned my pedagogy with psychic development, my adolescents transformed. I could not get them to stop engaging with language. The problem wasn’t my students, it was my pedagogy. This is what Montessori herself discovered: if our environment is prepared based on the needs and characteristics, we do not need to force growth or development.

Adapting our practice: Mathematics

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that fast math is good math. And this misconception has been perpetuated by mainstream education, especially in the age of standardized tests. But I (Kelly) must ask: are there instances in your day-to-day life when you are faced with a situation that requires an immediate answer to a math problem? Dare I take it a step further and say that most often we aren’t faced with any question or problem that requires an immediate solution?

When you think back to your math classes, which do you have a clearer memory of: the concepts being covered or the way you felt during the class? And which has been more impactful to your life? While it is true that in many educational settings, the curriculum is predetermined and the educator must cover specific content on a set timeline, it is also true that we can minimize trauma by maintaining focus on human development and the needs of the learners in front of us.

The most fundamental shift that can be made in math teaching practices is to focus on understanding and application. Many people have come to believe that fast math is good math. This drive, that stems from the standardized test industry, also promotes memorization over understanding. However, attempting to memorize steps with no foundational understanding of how or why those steps work is one of the biggest contributors to frustration and leads to learners self-identifying as being “bad” at math. Practitioners need to make a shift to promoting math that takes time, allowing learners the opportunity to experience different topics through a variety of applications that foster deep understanding.

In my adolescent classroom, I have accomplished this in a variety of ways. First, we practice slow math with a priority on friendliness with error and being able to justify one’s work. In math seminar, students are given 3 or 4 problems to complete over the course of 1 - 2 weeks. These problems often come from our lived experiences, especially related to camping trips, production and exchange, or other needs of our community. We then gather and discuss what each student’s first thoughts were when they read the problems, what challenges they faced, some methods they tried that did not work out, and how they ultimately organized the information and applied logic and math to reach a solution. This activity prioritizes students’ individual ideas as well as the concepts of taking a long time to solve a single problem and being able to solve the problem in a variety of ways.

In addition to math seminar, we also have lessons that focus on the skills that students need to support their work in other disciplines with a priority on supporting the needs of our community. This might include lessons on calculating surface area and volume if we need to repaint our chicken coop or build new raised beds for the garden. Another example could be unit conversions to support bottling and selling our honey in the most logical way. Through all of these practices, the overarching focus is on showing students the math that surrounds them and how they can think about and use math to support the work that is most meaningful in their lives.

Adapting Our Practice to Support Positive Psychic Development

Through our work with adolescents and our close reading of Montessori’s work, one principle is clear: everything we do as educators must focus on supporting the natural self-construction and development of the learners in front of us.

Psychic development and human development don’t take place in a vacuum. In order to support this work, we must make meaningful connections between the adolescent and the environment, their peers, their guides, and themselves.

Our practice must include time to observe and reflect on our observations. As the prepared adult, we must always be looking inward and questioning whether our practices are serving our students and our environments. It was precisely observation that allowed Andrew to see that his offerings were harming the psychic development of his adolescents and empowered him to pivot accordingly.

When we align Montessori’s vision for psychic development with our pedagogy, we allow three key outcomes to take place. First and foremost, we enable authentic self-construction of the personality for our adolescents. Second, positive psychic development empowers the adolescent to take critical action in the world: relating learners and the psycho-disciplines to their time, place, and space allows for adolescents to see their ability to shape and transform the world around them, as they shape themselves within the world. Language and math aren’t seen as static; they’re levers for adolescents to enact social change. Third, adolescents create a deep understanding of integrated knowledge, with the realization that all things are connected and no subject or discipline exists in a silo.

Our provocation to our fellow adolescent practitioners is this: We must fully commit to human development because to do otherwise is to continue a dehumanizing system that creates educational trauma and prevents your students from becoming their full selves. The arguments of “we’ve always done that” or we “had it like that as teenagers” simply does not hold against the scientific pedagogy Montessori called us toward.

What makes this shift in pedagogy difficult is the reality that most adults did not have environments where we had fully positive experiences with psychic development. Yet we must prepare our imaginations for this work in order to truly serve adolescents. If we commit ourselves to believing in Montessori’s vision, of looking to our adolescents and their developmental needs, and trusting that their growth in math and language will emerge when we prepare the right environment, then we will not only give an incredible gift to our students, but we will move the Montessori experiment forward in a significant way.

This article was published in the Fall 2025 AMI/USA Journal! We were honored to share our voices in this publication. You can read the full article, and the full AMI/USA Fall Journal, here!

https://heyzine.com/flip-book/dfacd9e72e.html#page/42

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