Under the Nine Principles: The Montessori Way of Developing Human Capacity

A child who has just learnt to walk usually wants to walk everywhere. A three-year-old may ask the name of every plant, vehicle or animal they encounter. Another child becomes absorbed in putting things in exactly the right place, pouring water with extraordinary care, or repeating the same activity long after an adult would have considered it mastered.

Maria Montessori paid close attention to these periods of intense interest. She saw something developmental happening underneath the behaviour.

More than a century later, developmental psychologist Angeline Stoll Lillard identified nine principles running through Montessori education and examined them against research on how people learn: movement, choice, concentration, interest, intrinsic motivation, collaboration, meaningful context, adult interaction and order.

The nine are useful on their own. They become far more revealing when we ask why Montessori needed them in the first place.

The answer lies in the kind of developing organism a child is.

The Nine Montessori Principles

In Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, developmental psychologist Angeline Stoll Lillard organises much of her examination of Montessori around nine ideas about human learning and development:

1.       Movement and cognition are closely connected. Purposeful movement can contribute to thinking and learning.

2.       A sense of choice and control matters. Learning and wellbeing can benefit when people have meaningful control within an appropriate structure.

3.       Concentration can develop through practice. The capacity to sustain and direct attention supports many other areas of development.

4.       Interest changes learning. People tend to learn more deeply when their attention is genuinely engaged.

5.       Extrinsic rewards can alter motivation. Adding rewards to an activity that already carries interest can change the child's reason for doing it.

6.       Children can learn powerfully from one another. Collaboration, observation and peer interaction can all contribute to learning.

7.       Learning gains depth when it belongs to a meaningful context. Knowledge connected with purpose and experience has more structure than isolated information.

8.       The way adults interact with children matters. Montessori combines warmth and responsiveness with clear limits, substantial freedom and high expectations.

9.       Order supports development. A coherent, predictable environment helps children orient themselves and work with increasing independence.

Lillard gives each principle substantial attention. Movement, choice, executive control, interest, motivation, peer learning, meaningful contexts, adult interaction and order each receive their own chapter in the book. Read simply as a list, they can appear to be nine good educational and even parenting ideas. Montessori becomes more interesting when we ask why these ideas repeatedly appear together.

Movement concerns how a young child acquires knowledge. Choice concerns the emerging ability to direct action. Concentration concerns control of attention. Interest supplies much of the energy for repetition. Order makes the environment intelligible. Other children and adults provide the social conditions within which development takes place.

The principles begin to look less like separate teaching techniques and more like responses to different features of the same developing human being.

That takes us underneath the nine principles.

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Understanding the Developmental Logic

A framework underneath the nine

Borrowing the familiar language of organisations can help here. A good organisation has a vision, a mission, goals and objectives. The objectives only make sense because something larger gives them direction.

Montessori did not use those terms to describe her educational system, and Lillard does not arrange the nine principles this way, but we will use the structure as a lens.

The vision is adaptation: the developing human child gradually becoming capable of living, understanding and participating in the world.

The mission is to align education with the child’s unfolding development: recognising periods of heightened readiness, observing what capacities are emerging, and preparing an environment in which the child can actively practise and strengthen them.

The goals are the human capacities being constructed along the way: control of movement, language, attention, agency, reasoning, social participation and the growing ability to regulate oneself.

The nine principles become the objectives, the conditions Montessori repeatedly creates because they give those developing systems something appropriate to work with.

That distinction matters. Otherwise, it is easy to see Montessori as a collection of good educational practices without understanding why those practices belong together.

Vision: adaptation to the world

Lillard notes that Montessori saw adaptation to reality as a goal of development. The word adaptation can sound passive, as though the child simply learns to fit into whatever world adults have created. Montessori meant something much richer.

Consider what happens during the first few years of life.

A newborn cannot walk, speak, dress, judge distance, understand social customs or deliberately control attention for long. Within a remarkably short period, the same human being begins navigating physical space, communicating through language, understanding relationships between objects, remembering sequences and participating in the routines of a family or community.

The child is acquiring a way of being human in a particular place and culture.

Language is a good example. The infant is biologically prepared for human language, yet the particular language they acquire depends on the people around them. Movement develops through human biology, while the environment determines whether the child has space to practise it. Social understanding emerges through relationships with actual people.

Development therefore needs both inheritance and experience.

Montessori education is built in that meeting place.

Mission: recognise when development is ready to move

One of Montessori's most interesting observations concerned timing.

The mission is to align education with the child’s unfolding development. Montessori recognised that children do not acquire every capacity at the same time or with the same intensity. At certain stages, movement, language, order, coordination or other forms of activity can become unusually compelling. Rather than treating these interests as incidental, the adult observes them as possible signs of developmental readiness and prepares experiences that allow the child to act on them. The environment therefore changes the educational question from simply “What should we teach now?” to “What is this child becoming ready to construct, and what experience will help that development move forward?”

Walking makes the idea easy to see.

Around the time walking develops, many children become almost consumed by it. They pull themselves upright against furniture, cruise along edges, push objects across the floor and reject being carried when they could be moving under their own power. Montessori's response was practical: provide an environment where the child can pursue that work. Once walking becomes established, the intensity fades and attention moves elsewhere.

Language offers another example. Young children appear extraordinarily receptive to words and grammatical patterns. Montessori responded by surrounding them with precise spoken language and abundant vocabulary. Lillard discusses the parallels between Montessori's early observations and later work on language development.

This gives Montessori educators an unusual question to ask.

What is development trying to accomplish here?

The child who insists on carrying the jug may be inconveniently slow. The child who wants the same puzzle again may seem ready for something new. The toddler who insists, “Me do it”, can appear stubborn when everyone needs to leave the house.

Those behaviours look different when they are viewed as practice.

Interest creates the pull. The environment provides somewhere for that interest to go. Repetition gradually changes what the child can do.

Goals: what is being built?

A great deal of early development concerns the movement from dependence towards increasingly deliberate action.

At first the hand reaches imperfectly. Later it grasps with precision. Walking begins as an unstable achievement requiring enormous concentration and eventually becomes automatic enough that the child can carry something, talk and navigate obstacles at the same time.

Language follows its own extraordinary course. Attention becomes more controllable. Impulses can increasingly be delayed. The child begins to plan a sequence, notice an error and try another approach.

These capacities do not emerge independently of experience. They need use.

This is where Lillard's description of the Montessori child as a “motivated doer” is particularly useful. Montessori classrooms assume that children learn through self-initiated action on an environment, rather than primarily through receiving information from an adult.

The hands matter because movement is one route through which young children think. Choice matters because intentional action needs opportunities to be exercised. Concentration matters because directing one's attention is itself a developing capacity. Lillard devotes separate chapters to each of these because the research behind them extends well beyond Montessori education.

Something else is developing at the same time: the child's experience of their own competence.

A child pours water and spills some. They notice. They fetch a cloth. Tomorrow the movement is slightly more controlled.

There is information in that sequence that praise cannot supply.

The child encounters the consequence of an action, adjusts, and gradually becomes more capable. Confidence has a firmer foundation when it grows from repeated evidence of competence.

Interest is doing developmental work

Adults often think of interest as something that makes learning more enjoyable. Montessori gave it a larger role.

Interest directs effort.

When children are strongly drawn to an activity, they willingly provide the repetition that learning requires. Nobody needs to reward the toddler for practising walking across the room for the twentieth time. The emerging capacity appears to generate its own motivation.

Montessori tried to preserve that relationship.

Lillard's fourth principle concerns learning through interest. Her fifth examines what can happen when external rewards are attached to activities that already contain their own attraction. The Montessori response is to rely heavily on the satisfaction of activity, concentration and mastery rather than continually adding prizes or grades.

This does not mean that every passing preference signals a sensitive period, or that children should only encounter subjects they already enjoy. Montessori educators deliberately introduce a broad curriculum. Materials themselves are designed to awaken interest, and teachers introduce new possibilities that the child may not have discovered alone.

Interest opens a door. Education still needs to provide a worthwhile room behind it.

Order gives development something stable to work against

Order is perhaps the easiest Montessori principle to misunderstand.

A beautifully arranged shelf looks pleasant, but appearance is a small part of its function.

Young children are trying to discover regularities. Where does this belong? What comes next? How much fits here? What happens if I pour too quickly? Where will this object be when I return tomorrow?

A predictable environment reduces the number of things that need to be worked out afresh each time.

Montessori believed the need for order could be especially strong in the first years and described children becoming disturbed when familiar arrangements unexpectedly changed. Some of her specific sensitive-period claims remain much less researched than language development, something Lillard acknowledges. Yet the educational logic remains clear: order allows a child who is still organising their understanding of the world to find stable relationships within it.

There is a practical consequence too.

Independence becomes possible only when the environment is understandable.

If a child knows where the cloths are kept, they can respond to a spill. If every activity has a recognisable beginning, sequence and ending, less adult direction is needed. If objects are accessible and returned consistently, memory can guide action.

The environment begins carrying some of the teaching.

Human development is social development

The independent child is sometimes mistaken for the solitary child. Montessori classrooms tell a different story.

Children work alongside one another. They watch older children. They ask questions, offer help, wait for materials and eventually become the more experienced child whom somebody younger observes.

Freedom is continually encountering other people.

A child may choose an activity, but cannot take it from another child's hands. They can move around the room while respecting somebody else's concentration. They are free to use materials they have been shown, and responsible for returning them for the next person.

The adult is part of this social architecture too.

Lillard's discussion of adult interaction describes a combination of warmth, substantial freedom, clear limits and meaningful expectations. Montessori explicitly supported freedom within boundaries and warned against permissiveness.

A boundary, in this setting, is information about how individual agency operates in a shared world.

That lesson eventually extends far beyond the classroom.

The Objectives: Why the Nine Principles Belong Together

Seen from this level, Lillard's nine principles stop looking like separate techniques.

Movement gives developing cognition a way to act physically on the world. Choice allows emerging agency to be used. Concentration exercises the ability to direct attention. Interest draws the child towards sustained engagement, while the limited use of extrinsic rewards leaves more of the reason for continuing inside the activity itself.

The social principles widen the field. Collaboration allows children to learn through and with other people. Meaningful context connects knowledge with real activity, so that learning has somewhere to belong. Adult interaction provides guidance, limits and access to knowledge without making the adult the permanent engine of every action.

Then there is order, surrounding all of this with enough consistency for the child to orient themselves and increasingly act without help.

Lillard's original summary places all nine side by side. Montessori practice makes them interdependent.

Give choice in a chaotic environment and the child may simply have too much to organise. Provide perfect order while controlling every action and there is little room to develop agency. Interest can spark engagement, but sustained attention allows the child to go somewhere with it. Movement becomes especially useful when it carries meaning. Independence grows more securely when the adult knows when to assist and when to wait.

The system works through those relationships.

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What This Looks Like in Daily Life

A child washing a table

Watch a young child wash a table and the activity can look almost absurdly ordinary.

There is water, a small brush, perhaps a cloth. The child works slowly. An adult could finish the whole job in thirty seconds.

Yet the point of the activity changes when we look underneath it.

The child must remember where the materials belong and carry them without dropping everything. They judge how much water to use. Their hands cross the surface in a sequence. Too much pressure splashes water; too little leaves part of the table untouched. Eventually the work has a visible end. The table really is cleaner.

Movement, concentration, order and meaningful context are all present. Choice may have brought the child to the activity. The result provides its own feedback.

This is why Practical Life has such an important place in Montessori education. Real work contains resistance. Objects have weight. Water spills. Buttons need alignment. Floors remain dirty if part of them is missed.

Reality answers back.

When a child says, “I can do it”

At home, the same developmental logic often arrives at inconvenient times.

The child wants to fasten the buckle when you are late. They insist on pouring milk while you imagine the clean-up. They want to carry the shopping bag that is clearly at the outer edge of what they can manage.

Sometimes you will help because family life has actual time limits. There is no developmental prize for missing an appointment while everyone waits for a shoelace.

Where time allows, though, the child's insistence deserves a second look.

They may be testing a newly emerging border of competence.

An adult can preserve that work without withdrawing support completely:

“I'll hold the shoe while you pull the strap.”

“You carry this bag. I'll take the heavier one.”

“Pour to this line.”

The useful question is not whether a child should do everything independently. It is how much of the task they are ready to own.

Repetition can look like going nowhere

Adults tend to look for novelty because we already possess the skill.

A child may complete an activity successfully and return to it five minutes later. Then again tomorrow.

The first successful attempt tells us that something can be done. Repetition is often what makes the capacity dependable, efficient and eventually available without enormous conscious effort.

Walking followed that pattern. So did speaking.

This is one reason Montessori environments allow children to remain with purposeful work after adults might be tempted to suggest something new.

We do not always need to make the next experience more entertaining.

Home preparation can be modest

Applying this at home does not require Montessori shelves throughout the house.

Look for friction that exists only because the environment assumes an adult will always be present.

Can your child reach a drinking cup?

Is there somewhere predictable for shoes?

Could a small cloth be kept where spills happen?

Does the child have a place to put dirty clothes without asking where they belong each time?

These are small changes, and that is partly why they work. They quietly transfer a little more participation to the child.

A home with children will still be busy, untidy and occasionally chaotic. The aim is usable order, not a photograph.

The difficult adult skill: waiting

Adults possess an enormous advantage over young children. We already know how most of these simple tasks end.

That makes intervention tempting.

We see the puzzle piece facing the wrong direction. We know the lid needs another quarter-turn. We notice the child has started the buttons one hole too high.

A few seconds of waiting can reveal whether the child is stuck.

If they are, help. If frustration has overtaken the possibility of learning, help more. If safety is involved, intervene immediately.

There are also moments when the child is thinking with their hands and our correction would arrive just before their own discovery.

Knowing the difference is part of the Montessori adult's work.

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Troubleshooting Common Questions

“Does following the child's development mean letting them decide everything?”

Young children cannot carry responsibility for decisions beyond their capacity. Montessori freedom has always existed within limits. The adult protects safety, other people and the integrity of the environment. Within those boundaries, the child receives genuine opportunities to choose.

At home, “Would you like the red jumper or the blue one?” offers agency. Whether a jumper is needed on a cold morning remains with the adult.

“What if we miss a sensitive period?”

The idea is more useful as a guide to observation than as a timetable to fear.

Lillard is careful about the evidence here. Sensitive periods are well established in some areas of development, while several of Montessori's specific proposals remain comparatively unexplored. Children also continue learning after periods of heightened sensitivity.

If an interest is strong, repeated and developmentally useful, give it room. There is no need to turn childhood into a race to catch every window.

“My child asks me to do things I know they can do.”

Capacity and willingness do not rise together every day. Children become tired, hurried or simply want connection.

Helping once does not remove independence.

You might do the whole task today. Tomorrow you may say, “I'll start it and you finish.” Over time, the broader direction matters more than any particular morning.

“If rewards make children cooperate, why avoid them?”

A reward can certainly change behaviour in the moment.

Montessori asks what will carry the behaviour once the external incentive is gone. Lillard's review of motivation research is one reason Montessori environments generally protect the satisfaction that comes from interest, effort and mastery instead of making rewards the main reason to participate.

That is a developmental preference, not a demand for parental purity. Families occasionally use incentives because life is complicated. The larger aim is to leave plenty of room for children to discover that worthwhile activity can contain its own reason for continuing.

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Lillard's nine principles give us a useful account of what happens in Montessori education.

Montessori was trying to organise education around development already underway in the child: the drive to move, communicate, understand, participate, master new capacities and gradually direct oneself. Sensitive periods gave her clues about timing. Observation gave her clues about readiness. The prepared environment supplied opportunities for action.

Lillard describes the result simply: a child placed in an environment created to respond to human needs becomes interested, begins to concentrate, and through meaningful activity develops further capacities.

We are not trying to hurry children towards adulthood. We are giving development somewhere useful to go.

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References

Lillard, A. S. (2017). Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Montessori, M. (1939). The Secret of Childhood.

Montessori, M. (1967). The Absorbent Mind.