Location

Altamonte Springs, FL

School / Work Affiliation:

Center for Guided Montessori Studies

I am:

teacher

About Me:

I am a passionate advocate for the Montessori model of education. With over 20 years in the Montessori community, I have worked with students at the Elementary, Early Childhood, and Infant-Toddler levels. I have given presentations at conferences and workshops; written articles for Tomorrow's Child magazine; led teacher preparation courses; served as an examiner in awarding Montessori certification; and worked as an online Montessori instructor. I have additional experience in the Montessori music curriculum; and play therapy. I am currently working to develop a course for adults interested in working with Infants and Toddlers. I truly believe that excellence in higher education begins in early childhood. Research in bio-developmental frameworks at Harvard's Center on the Developing Child show the importance of neuromotor readiness for learning (maturation of the vestibular system and inhibition of primitive reflexes) as well as the importance of early experiences in determining genetic expression (among other things). Dr. Maria Montessori anticipated much of what now know to be true in neuroscience. She spent 50 years refining an applied science (her materials and pedagogy) in response to her observations of children from around the globe. She found that when we no longer violated a child's evolved expectation of care (when a child's outer environment matches their innate biological drives throughout sequences of sensitive periods during development) that children behave quite differently. They are happy, compassionate, creative, hard working, and peaceful. Addressing previous spotty results in testing the efficacy of the Montessori model, Angeline Lillard ranked and tested schools according to how closely they adhered to Montessori's original pedagogy. She found that while students in traditional schools made gains in executive functions of 2-5 points from fall to spring, and children in the best private preschools and supplemented Montessori schools gained 7 -8 points... the children in classical/authentic Montessori classrooms gained almost 14 points. According to Lillard, "This gain in executive functions is of practical importance because children with stronger executive function skills in Kindergarten are concurrently and subsequently more academically and socially competent. Increasingly, executive function skills are seen as key not only to school readiness, but to success in life."