The Quality of Montessori Schools in Italy: a multiple case study

Abstract

This article reports very briefly the work done by the author for her doctoral thesis. The survey deals with a topic yet completely unexplored in the research concerning the assessment of the quality of education. Although the Montessori schools now constitute a specific reality within the Italian school system, within which they cover a numerical exceeding one hundred units, yet little is known about how they work, and nothing has yet been produced empirically in relation to the issue of their compliance with quality standards or criteria that allow an inspection of the specific methodological aspects declared. The focus of the work consisted in developing a system of indicators for the Montessori school with the aim to assess the quality of this type of institution. In this sense it constitutes a first attempt to analyze a specific situation and the elements (structural, organizational, pedagogical) that determine their identity.

Starting from the theoretical and conceptual framework defined, the author presented the methodological approach followed in the conduct of the project QUAMO (Quality in the Montessori school), an empirical research on the Montessori school geared towards the development of an evaluation system that considers the specific characteristics of this particular kind of school.

The research was articulated through a long series of operational steps, in brief presented in this article. The investigation about the structural, organizational and pedagogical elements of the schools involved in the case study was conducted using specially developed tools (questionnaires, observation sheets, rating scale to evaluate quality level). Empirical data were subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis, following which the author comes to produce an accurate profile of individual cases, documenting in depth the subject of her study; analyzes strengths and weaknesses of individual institutions; makes a cross comparison between cases that allows you to draw a comparative picture and the overall quality of the institutions under investigation.