Montessori Mentoring Communities

The mentoring program for early educators at the Greenspring Center has been invaluable for three main reasons: expertise, community, and flexibility. First, the mentors who host our weekly sessions bring decades of teaching experience to share with us on any classroom, philosophy, or curriculum question. The mentors create a community in which the new mentee teachers share their experiences and tools with each other. This network of peer teachers can discuss on-the-ground, pertinent issues that are coming up in each of our schools. We help each other brainstorm ideas that are practical and are additionally informed by our mentors. Finally, the ability to implement our learnings directly in the classroom week after week is the third reason for the value of the program. The flexibility in the structure of this particular Greenspring Center program makes it so the topics are immediately usable in our day to day; e.g. we moved the session about family engagement to the week before we were set to have our first family/guide conferences. All in all, the expertise passed on to us, the accessible community of practitioners, and the flexible curriculum that follows the mentee teacher is the winning formula for this mentoring program. The tangible outcome to participants is that it makes us more engaged and confident Montessorians.