Rediscovering the Child: Review of Montessori Educator Research Projects 2024–2025

This article is part of our annual series “Rediscovering the Child” which began as an effort to disseminate high quality practitioner and classroom-based action research (CBAR) that does not typically have a widely accessible forum. CBAR is powerful because it is conducted in real classrooms with real children by practitioners with real-world problems they wish to address. We highlight several studies each year that we hope will inspire other practitioners to formalize their classroom inquiry to share with the wider community. We also hope that practitioners in the field can reflect on their own practice by learning about how other educators are addressing the challenges they face. First, we include with studies that focus on the whole child by exploring the impact of outdoor play and engagement with nature through papers by two authors: Speakmanova and Lederer. We also consider work by Dinkler that looks at the role of music in holistic development and prosocial behavior. Next, we examine papers addressing the academic subjects of reading and math. The first of the academic focused papers is by Allred and Johnson who explore reading development for early childhood students who did not have 3-year-old Montessori experiences while in the second Thompson investigates the use of goal-setting strategies on math fluency for elementary students. We conclude this year’s review with a practitioner inquiry paper by Sadrnafisi who develops a supportive teacher community to address the causes of teacher turnover.