S5E27: Matt Bateman and Laura Mazer set the record straight on Montessori

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell, and today we are talking about Montessori.

I’ll admit, I came into this conversation skeptical. Most of what gets sold as “Montessori” today is a watered-down, follow-your-bliss version of what Maria Montessori actually wrote. The popular caricature— that Montessori is a free-for-all where kids drift between activities and nothing systematic ever happens — turns out to be just as wrong. Reading Montessori’s own writing, especially The Discovery of the Child and The Absorbent Mind, and you find a much more rigorous, structured, an determinate method than the caricatures capture.

There are scripted presentations. There’s a sequenced curriculum. There are mastery expectations.

So I wanted to sit down with two people who actually take Montessori seriously as a method and who have thought hard about how it intersects with the stuff we usually talk about on this podcast.

Matt Bateman has been building Montessori programs nation wide for many years. Laura Mazer is a former surgeon turned educator whose work focuses on the integration of Montessori practice with adaptive learning technology and on translating Montessori’s approach into a model that can be rigorously evaluated and scaled.

Together, Matt and Laura run Montessorium, an elementary school model that combines a full Montessori environment with the Timeback adaptive learning platform. My daughter is enrolled at their school, which gives me a unique vantage point: I’m not just talking to them as a podcast host, I’m talking to them as someone preparing for what their model will do to my kid.

In this episode, we discuss what Montessori actually said, as opposed to what people imagine she said. We work through the question of how Montessori is compatible with what cognitive science tells us about how children learn — including the role of explicit instruction.

We then get into how a Montessori environment can be enhanced — and arguably completed — by explicit instruction delivered through adaptive software. The Montessorium model uses a two-hour computer-based learning block built on Engelmann-style mastery principles, with the rest of the day spent in a traditional Montessori environment. Matt and Laura make the case for why this isn’t a compromise but an improvement.

Along the way, we talk about what genuine Montessori looks like in practice, what gets lost when the brand drifts, and what it means to take both Montessori’s genius and the explicit instruction evidence base seriously without letting either tradition off the hook.

🚨 Tickets Selling Fast! 🚨

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

🗽 NYC | July 27–31, 2026

👉 Learn more + register here: 🎟️ Explicit Teaching Institute registration

I also hope you have time to check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.