Teacher education

I first learned about Montessori when my sister’s children started going to Montessori about 22 years ago. However, it was a number of years later that I started working in Montessori. I started with 3-6 children, but now I have been teaching 6-9-year-olds for several years. It is difficult to recall what first caught my…

I was raised in a large family in the Philippines with three brothers and five other sisters. Having a big family was not too hard for my mother as she trained us from a young age to be orderly, confident, and independent. If she did not do this, perhaps raising nine children would be much…

I met a Persian Bahá’í lady when I was a young teenager living in Tonga with my Tongan mother and New Zealand father.  She was an owner/teacher of a Montessori preschool in Samoa. This was when I first became aware of Montessori principles and practices. As a  Bahá’í, I was raised with the understanding that a…

I come from Ireland, where many small Montessori schools exist.  As a teenager, I babysat the children of a Montessori teacher and she told me about Montessori. When I left school, I decided to begin Montessori training in Dublin. During my training, I began to realise that I hadn’t really understood what I was enrolling…

I had found my experiences in state early childhood and primary frustrating as it always seemed to be ‘busy work’ or playing. On my teaching practices with the primary age group I felt like I didn’t teach anything and that the children didn’t learn anything.  All I was doing was classroom management; ‘Sit down, stop…

I first discovered Montessori as a young mother in the late 1980s when I visited an early childhood expo in Auckland. Several Montessori preschools displayed photos and information about the Montessori method. I was captivated, and it just felt so right. I started to find out more about Montessori. Before having my family, I had…