Sunrise Kidz: Montessori In Vietnam
“Welcome to Sunrise Kidz kindergarten!” Those were my first words upon seeing Ms Sharon at our purpose-built, five-story, head office and kindergarten center in the new city center of Hanoi, Vietnam in June 2012. Sunrise Kidz had invited Sharon Caldwell, from the Montessori Foundation, to come to Hanoi for a program of in-house professional development with our teachers, focusing on Language and Mathematics. Since those first greetings, Sharon Caldwell has been back to Vietnam this year to run another professional development program for our teachers. This year’s training took place at our newest campus, a first of its kind in Vietnam, located inside a shopping mall.
In 2001, I became interested in education as an investment opportunity. While maintaining my day-time regional post at a global bank, I trained to earn a diploma as a Montessori teacher. After graduating, I left banking and (in July, 2003), I opened what was, to the best of my knowledge, Vietnam’s first Montessori school. The Sunrise Kidz brand has grown to include close to 300 students in our group of schools, which is currently comprised of five campuses. Over 1,000 students have graduated from Sunrise Kidz schools over the past ten years.
As I grew in experience and developed my knowledge of Montessori through attending conferences and seminars, I become increasingly committed to improving the quality of Montessori offered to children. With this in mind, we turned to the Montessori Foundation and the International Montessori Council as sources of inspiration and for support in developing our teachers into better Montessori guides and assistants.
As there is no full Montessori teacher training currently available in Vietnam, we face a challenge of how to ensure that our teachers are properly prepared to offer quality Montessori education. While we have been able to recruit some staff who have obtained Montessori training elsewhere, we realize that ‘growing’ Montessori in general and the Sunrise Kidz brand in particular, will require solving the training conundrum.
All 56 teachers currently employed at Sunrise Kidz have received in-house Montessori training. As our goal is to ultimately provide world-class Montessori, we are recruiting teachers with full international qualifications and exploring options to develop a national Vietnamese Montessori qualification in order to prepare teachers locally. The goal is to have all our staff fully qualified within the next 2 – 3 years. To this end, we have established strong working ties with the leading pedagogy college of Hanoi to nurture a pipeline of qualified teachers for our ongoing growth and needs.
Part of our distinctive model is to develop the principals of the individual schools from amongst our Montessori teachers, putting them through our own management- training program. Six school heads have now graduated from this program, which is ongoing.
Because the Montessori model is relatively new in Vietnam, and because we wish to distinguish between high-fidelity Montessori and other models, Sunrise Kidz now has three distinctive brands: Sunrise Kidz, IMS, and SK Garden. Each of the three sub-brands has its own logo, which links to the corporate theme of Sunrise Kidz.
Sunrise Kidz is our original brand, which is generally regarded as Hanoi’s leading bilingual kindergarten utilizing Montessori methodology as our core, but which aims to be affordable and accessible to working families. IMSK, established in March 2013, is our International Montessori School. This is an English-speaking environment, which we plan to develop into a world-class Montessori school, aspiring to IMC accreditation once the school has been in operation for the requisite three years. There are six rooms, which are set up to offer one area of the Montessori curriculum in each, with the children circulating freely between the rooms.
The school is located in a newly built ‘up-market’ mall in the western part of Hanoi’s rapidly expanding city. The premises are designed to accommodate 120 children. Because the Indochina Plaza Hanoi (IPH) complex, where the school is situated, is a mixed-use block comprising 300 apartments, offices, and retail units, the licensing requirements included that a kindergarten be provided for the residents and business tenants.
Being located in a mall posed a number of challenges as well as presenting many advantages. The biggest challenge is a lack of an outdoor play area. Using a design concept of Outdoors Inside, we incorporated natural aspects of outdoor life into the classrooms themselves. This includes a tree house, a Dutch windmill, a mid-Atlantic lighthouse.
There are numerous staircases, platforms and lofts throughout the facility to encourage movement and create opportunities for children to gain different perspectives on the environment. The floorplan incorporates different levels and flowing lines, with thick safety glass partitions, which, together with lots of windows, create an atmosphere of space and light. The children have access to a roof-top play-ground and benefit from swimming lessons in the complex pool.
The benefit is that the school’s location in the mall provides the best marketing any school can have. Parents with children pass the school everyday and can see our happy and focused children using attractive Montessori equipment. This generates a steady stream of enquiries. Marketing opportunities in the mall include long banners on the escalators and decals on elevator doors.
Many families living in the center itself can benefit from the convenience of having a school in the building, and those travelling from the surrounding area can use the elevator, which comes straight into the school from the parking area. IMSK is pioneering a Montessori solution to providing quality early education to children in densely populated areas.
Our latest installment to the Sunrise Kidz extensions brand is the SK Garden schools. SK Garden is the perfect combination of Sunrise Kidz well-established name and trust, coupled with our traditional genuine care ideology, focusing on the core curriculum of the Department of Education. The SK Garden schools are explicitly not Montessori schools, but are nonetheless inspired by Montessori philosophy and respect for the children.
This is a foray into a customer base that would not usually consider Montessori education, but the model allows each new family to see and interact with the other schools within our predominantly Montessori system, the hope being that, over time, they will see the full benefits of Montessori education and switch to our full program.
In July 2013, we celebrated our tenth year of operation. We have built several schools. In the process, we made some mistakes and have had to relocate some campuses. Overall, the past ten years have taught us discipline and focus. With a decade of experience, it is time for us to look forward to the next twenty years. Our vision for the future of Montessori in Vietnam is that there will be one hundred schools utilizing some or part of the Montessori approach. This will require establishing a minimum quality standard for Montessori schools in the country. With the help of IMC, we truly believe we can be the catalyst to generate and maintain this quality base.
First and foremost we recognize the urgent need to develop and maintain a constant flow of qualified teachers. We need to train them early on, and we need to mass market that training. We aim to establish ourselves as the market leader in quality teacher training, first through a local certification, then onward to an international certificate. Our second goal is to continue the expansion of the Sunrise Kidz brand in Hanoi and to build more campuses. To realize this vision, I am relying on my experience as a CEO of a major bank. I am cognizant of the importance of quality staff, quality investment, and quality service. To achieve this we are making a substantial investment in developing a marketing and corporate communications team, which we hope will lead to higher enrollment.
We are currently in the process of translating Susan Feez’s book, Montessori and Early Childhood: A Guide for Students to help Vietnamese parents have a better understanding of what to look for in a Montessori school, and perhaps give them the means by which they can differentiate between high-fidelity Montessori programs and ‘pretender’ schools.
Montessori Leadership / December 2013 / p 28
