In the coming months you will be hearing about a web portal and a recruiting campaign called Teach Montessori.
The purpose of the campaign is quite simple: increase the number of Montessori teachers by dramatically boosting the number of people who enroll in Montessori training programs.
The United States Montessori movement is united in an understanding that there are not nearly the number of Montessori teachers needed to meet current and future demands. Accordingly, every national Montessori organization in the United States is supporting this undertaking.
Training centers and teacher education programs likewise, are backing the effort. They know of the shortages that schools are facing. Yet nearly every training program is operating at less than full capacity; in a recent survey, over 90 percent of training centers reported that they had slots available for potential future teachers.
Heads of schools and principals, obviously, see the value of a larger teacher pool. School leaders in both the public and private sectors struggle every school year to meet the personnel needs of their schools. For newly opened schools looking to fill multiple positions, the situation is even more dire. One example: Nineteen new public Montessori schools opened in the fall of 2014. Every single one of those schools struggled, and continues to struggle, to find a sufficient number of highly qualified teachers.
If the status quo continues, teacher shortages will continue to the detriment of all existing schools. And beyond that, we will have failed to take advantage of a moment in history when a substantial growth of Montessori in the
United States is possible.
What You Will See On the Website.
The Teach Montessori website will be a portal into Montessori teacher training. The site is still in development, but we know the elements that will be present.
First, Teach Montessori will emphasize connecting with young adults who are about to graduate from college or with those who have recently graduated. The assumption is that this group, while underrepresented in training programs, is eager to find a meaningful profession that will change the world for good. Another assumption is that these young adults will know little, if anything, about what Montessori is. The task of the initiative, then, will be to provide information about what a Montessori classroom looks like, what a Montessori teacher does, and what the process of becoming a Montessori teacher entails.
While young adults are a point of emphasis, the website will be of value to a much broader range of people. Anyone who wants to know more about becoming a Montessori teacher (career switchers, former Teach for America teachers, early learning teachers seeking a richer curricular, parents who have learned of Montessori from their child’s school) will be able to use this site to navigate on how to do so.
Second, to complete this complex task, the website will feature video footage of classrooms and training programs. Current Montessori teachers will talk about both the rewards of their chosen profession and the rigorous and meaningful preparation required to become a Montessori teacher. The Teach Montessori website will highlight relevant quotes; information that describes the various training traditions in the U.S.; and maps and tables that identify where one can get training.
Third, the website will be an interactive portal that will be able to match schools that have teacher needs, and may be willing to sponsor training, to those individuals seeking to take training. In addition, it will be a place where job postings will be aggregated and searchable.
Fourth, the website will make the task of selecting a training course much easier for those who want to do so. An interactive map will list every accredited training program in the world. Information will be presented that describes the program levels available at each TEP or training center, start dates and end dates for training, cost, and the experience level of trainers.
In other words,Teach Montessori has the potential to be the go-to site for recruiting teacher candidates, facilitating connections between schools and teachers, and finding available jobs in Montessori education.
The National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, the same organization that has been collecting data for the Montessori census, is developing Teach Montessori.
Keep on the lookout for the site and more news: public-montessori.org
Tomorrow’s Child / April 2015 / p 15
