At Wheaton Montessori School, one of the first things parents notice is how calm and purposeful our classrooms feel. Children are deeply engaged in meaningful work, helping one another, solving problems, and moving and communicating with confidence, while teachers guide intentionally and with expertise in the background.
This is a careful, deliberate practice, one rooted in science, deep respect for children, and years of collective experience and expertise.
Our teachers thoughtfully avoid four common adult habits that can unintentionally limit children’s growth: interfering, domineering, admonishing, and over-serving.
The First Practice to Avoid: Interfering
Rather than stepping in too quickly, we give children time to problem solve, collaborate, and experience the satisfaction of overcoming challenges. Within a clear and respectful structure, children are given meaningful choice and ownership over their work.
It takes intention to resist solving every problem for children and to recognize that struggle is often where the deepest learning happens.
Dr. Maria Montessori illustrated this with a simple, striking example. A teacher was about to interrupt a child who was coloring a tree trunk red, ready to ask whether the child really thought trees had red trunks. Dr. Montessori stopped her and let the child color the tree red. The child was not making a mistake to be corrected. Instead, the child was on a discovery process that adults could honor.
Children often find solutions adults would never anticipate. When we step in too quickly to resolve what looks like a problem, we can interrupt a harmony they were capable of creating on their own and take away the deep satisfaction that comes from figuring things out for themselves.
As Dr. Montessori observed, children who are left to manage their own challenges often “feel irritated if we intervene, and find a way if left to themselves.” The teacher’s role is not to prevent the problem, but to observe, to trust, and to be genuinely available only when something is beyond the child’s current reach.
This requires, as Dr. Montessori acknowledged, a fundamental shift in how adults understand their role. We might intellectually grasp the idea, but it is genuinely difficult to embody: “This idea, that life acts of itself, and that to study it, to divine its secrets or to direct its activity, it is necessary to observe it and to understand it without intervening. This idea is very difficult for anyone to assimilate and to put into practice.”
The Second Practice to Avoid: Domineering
Closely related to interference is domination, which is the practice of imposing adult schedules, expectations, or will upon children’s natural development. In traditional educational settings, the structure of the day is often built around external control: children are told when to start, when to stop, when to move, when to be still, what to work on, and how long to spend on it. This assembly-line structure interrupts concentration and repeatedly communicates that children’s own inner guidance cannot be trusted.
At Wheaton Montessori School, we take the opposite position. Our goal is not external compliance but inner discipline. This self-regulation grows from the inside out, nurtured by freedom within clear and respectful limits.
As Dr. Montessori wrote with characteristic directness, “The basic error is to suppose that a person’s will must necessarily be broken before it can obey.” Forcing obedience does not build discipline. It builds dependence on adult direction and external pressure.
Dr. Montessori offered an image of imposed silence and stillness as “annihilation” rather than discipline: “We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.”
True discipline, the kind that serves children throughout life, is built through purposeful, self-directed work, not through the suppression of spontaneous activity.
The Third Practice to Avoid: Admonishing
Admonishing, the habit of correcting, scolding, and constantly drawing attention to mistakes and shortcomings, is perhaps the most common obstacle to children’s inner development and, in many ways, the most counterproductive.
Instead of constantly correcting or admonishing, Wheaton Montessori School teachers guide with encouragement and redirection, helping children build confidence and a healthy relationship with learning.
A useful image for thinking about this is the distinction between watering flowers and watering weeds. When adults focus their attention and energy on what children are doing wrong, marking errors, issuing reprimands, and pointing out failures, we are, in effect, watering the weeds. Children’s confidence decreases. Their energy drains. Their relationship with learning becomes fraught with anxiety and self-consciousness.
As Dr. Montessori wrote, “To tell a child he is naughty or stupid just humiliates him; it offends and insults, but does not improve him. For if a child is to stop making mistakes, he must become more skilled, and how can he do this if, being already below standard, he is also discouraged?”
Instead, we redirect attention from mistakes toward purposeful activity. This requires an environment rich with interesting and meaningful work that naturally draws children toward growth and competence.
As Dr. Montessori explained, “The end is obtained not by attacking the mistake and fighting it, but by developing activity in spontaneous work.”
What tends to emerge in this kind of environment? Children begin to admire each other’s accomplishments rather than compete with them. “They admire those who do better than they do,” observed Dr. Montessori. When adults are not constantly measuring and comparing, children are freed from the need to measure and compare themselves.
When you step into a Wheaton Montessori School classroom, you may notice that the teacher is not the center of attention. You’ll see children moving around, working on various tasks, solving problems, and helping each other, while the teacher moves quietly through the room, watching, waiting, and stepping in briefly when needed.
The Fourth Practice to Avoid: Serving
The fourth practice, and perhaps the most surprising on this list, is serving children. Not in the sense of care and warmth, which are always appropriate, but in the sense of doing for children what they are capable of doing for themselves.
Rather than over-serving children by doing everything for them, Wheaton Montessori School teachers carefully support children in doing things independently, whether that is preparing a snack, communicating thoughts, caring for materials, or developing responsibility and self-confidence.
Dr. Montessori described a scene that captures this clearly. A child was stretching and straining to see something of interest, working hard to solve the problem independently. A teacher lifted the child. Problem solved, from the adult’s perspective. But what had actually happened? The child’s expression of “anxiety, hope, and joy,” which reflected genuine effort, was replaced by “the stupid expression of a child who knows that others will act for him.”
That moment of being lifted did not help the child. It taught the child that personal effort was unnecessary because an adult would step in. Repeated across hundreds of daily interactions, this is how capable children gradually learn to feel incapable.
“We habitually serve children,” wrote Dr. Montessori, “and this is not only an act of servility toward them, but it is dangerous, since it tends to suffocate their useful, spontaneous activity.”
The child who is dressed, fed, carried, and managed at every turn is denied one of the most important tasks of childhood: building genuine competence through real effort.
This does not mean adults disappear. It means adults calibrate their support carefully. Teachers remain present, attentive, and available, while allowing children the space to try, struggle, persist, and ultimately succeed on their own terms.
The Ongoing Work
Avoiding these four practices, interference, domination, admonishment, and over-serving, is genuinely difficult. These tendencies are deeply human and often come from care, good intentions, and ingrained habits of relating to children.
Dr. Montessori herself acknowledged the challenge: “Nothing is more difficult for a teacher than to give up her old habits and prejudices.”
This is precisely why the Montessori teacher’s role is not passive, even when it appears quiet from the outside. It requires tremendous awareness, ongoing self-reflection, and deep trust in children’s natural capacity to grow.
And what happens when that space is genuinely protected, when adults resist the impulse to interfere, dominate, admonish, and over-serve?
Children and young adults develop resilience, concentration, independence, self-motivation, and genuine confidence. They learn to solve problems, care for others, and delight in their own competence.
This is one of the reasons summer at Wheaton Montessori School feels so special. The relaxed rhythms of summer and increased time in nature create even more opportunities for exploration, creativity, outdoor experiences, practical life skills, and meaningful friendships, all guided by attentive adults who know how to nurture both freedom and responsibility.
Most importantly, the same qualities that make Montessori summer camps so enriching are the qualities that support children throughout life. A Wheaton Montessori School teacher is not simply managing children for the day. They are helping children build the inner tools that support lifelong learning: confidence, thoughtful independence, self-motivation, and care for others.
