Introduction

The latest issue of “Elementary Education in Theory and Practice” is devoted to the pedagogical thought of Maria Montessori, one of the greatest innovators of 20th century education. Her pedagogical concepts, although designed over 100 years ago, seem to carry an unusual freshness, originality and intellectual depth, inspiring new generations of teachers, researchers and parents. As Clara Tornar has noticed, the unique cognitive potential of this pedagogy is based on interrelations between the method of scientific observation and its consequent development and improvement, based on rigidly precise scientific criteria – rationality and objectivity. M. Montessori perceived the classroom learning environment as an exclusive “psychological laboratory”. Not from the behaviourist perspective, however, not as a place where, in rigorously controlled conditions, a researcher is activating a stimulus to induce the proper, preplanned and expected reaction of the child. On the contrary, her vision of a psychological laboratory built and practiced in Casa dei Bambini was based on three cyclical phases, representing the methodology of research in action: designing a learning environment prepared for exercising free choice – the place for empowering the child, triggering the free expression of the child’s psychological needs, inner potential and developmental tendencies; methodically observing the child’s reactions to this environment and the conditions for free action; and, finally, reorganizing and transforming this environment to make it serve better to the observed needs and possibilities of the child, to make the stimuli included in this environment facilitators for the child’s development, for constructing his/her own developmental potential