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The article below was written many years ago but is of critical and lasting importance:

The Three-Year Developmental Cycle:

Key to Our Children’s Education

The three-year developmental cycle is at the very heart of the Montessori educational experience for our children at MSR. It is what assures our children such success and it is one of the features that distinguishes our educational program from others. Curriculum development, staffing, classroom design, and student admission, re-enrollment, and placement all revolve around it.

It drives the educational continuum (our academic scope and sequence), determines materials purchased and placed in the classrooms, and defines student record keeping, progress, and assessment. It is a clearly-defined and discrete educational unit with a beginning, a middle, and an end for each child, with the third year in each sequence a capstone year that is a culminating experience academically, emotionally, socially, and developmentally.

If not followed, a child’s work in that three-year sequence is simply incomplete. Why is it at the core of all that we do?

Dr. Montessori saw the growth of an individual from birth to age 24 in four "planes of development": birth to 6, 6 to 12, 12 to 18, and 18 to 24 years of age (see chart). In each of these planes humans have unique needs and characteristics which she defined. She then developed a methodology and materials to respond to the needs and characteristics of the evolving individual at each plane.

Those needs and characteristics grow and then diminish in importance during each six-year plane. That is, they are at their strongest at each midpoint and are at their weakest at the points of transition (age 6, age 12, and age 18) from one plane to the next.

With each plane divided into two three-year developmental cycles, conventional "kindergarden", Third Grade, Sixth Grade, and Ninth Grade are endings at MSR, completions that are culminations and not beginnings. This runs directly counter to the paradigm in schools across the country where Kindergarden is the start of the elementary sequence, Sixth Grade is the start of Middle School, and Ninth Grade is the start of High School.

We respectfully but vigorously disagree.

We know that ages 3 and 4, Grades 1 and 2, 4 and 5, and 7 and 8 are years of academic and intellectual explosion. Yet, Dr. Montessori observed that in the 6 year olds, 9 year olds (Third Graders), 12 year olds (Sixth Graders) and 15 year olds (Ninth Graders), their great work was social and emotional and lays the foundation for the next "explosion". She concluded that unless the social and emotional growth was addressed directly and effectively, rather than suppressed, academic growth could slow and suffer.

Rather than fighting the social and emotional growth of the children in the third year of each sequence, Montessori encourages it. How?

Instead of making those students in their transitional years the youngest of the children in a sequence, we make them the oldest and most mature in their group. We give them age-appropriate responsibility. We make them educational and civic leaders in this community.

The leadership of the older children has remarkable impact on the health of the three-year community they help lead, and it allows the oldest children in each cycle to stand tall with confidence during an uncertain time while internalizing the academic work of the first two years by sharing their knowledge and expertise with the younger students in the group. They become role models for the younger students, who long to reach their level of academic accomplishment and community responsibility.

We embrace the maxim, "You do not understand something until you can teach it," and giving lessons to the younger students in the group requires that the oldest children reduce complex concepts to their simplest elements and then convey them with clarity and understanding. If they cannot, it is clear that they need a lesson before going on! Thus, without fully realizing what they are accomplishing, our "third-years" internalize and consolidate the academic skills they have garnered for two years before exploding into the next three-year cycle.

The three-year grouping also makes sense because we know from experience that five year olds have much more in common with 3 and 4 year olds than they do with 8 and 9 year olds. Sixth graders have much more in common with 4^th and 5^th Year students than with 8^th Year students. And 9^th Graders have much more in common with 7^th and 8^th Year students than with 11^th and 12^th Graders.

Finally, each of our Montessori Faculty members is trained for the 3-year developmental cycle with which he or she works, and a series of Key Experiences in the final year, such as the 4-day, 4-night trip to New York for the 6^th Years and the week-long Chewonki Leadership training program in Maine for our Ninth Years are culminating experiences that help define and complete our third-year students.

Clearly, the full benefit of the educational program accrues to our children in the third and capstone year of each cycle, and a student’s educational experience is greatly diminished without it. So, too, is the program and the educational experience for the younger students left behind without the gift of the leadership, mentoring, and instruction from the older children they have come to admire.