Maria Montessori was Italy's first woman doctor. She developed her interest in the education of difficult children while teaching at a psychiatric clinic attached to the university in Rome. She became a professor of anthropology in 1904, where she continued to develop her theories about how children learn.
In 1907 she took over La Casa dei Bambini, a school for pre-school children in the slum area of Rome where her ideas of guided but spontaneous learning were seen to succeed. She began to write about her methods of pedagogy and was soon being hailed in other countries round the world. By the 1920s, the Montessori method was being widely used, and still is today.
