Montessori in Action Podcast

This month, our podcast focuses on public Montessori programs. Superintendent Dr. Jaime Aquino joins us to talk about his experience supporting public Montessori schools in the district setting. Dr. Aquino has held top leadership positions in several districts, serving as deputy superintendent of instruction in Los Angeles deputy superintendent in Hartford, chief academic officer in Denver, and an Instructional Superintendent in New York City. He is now the Superintendent of San Antonio Independent School District which currently has two public Montessori programs.

This month we have a special guest who joins PMAI Executive Director, Elizabeth Slade, to celebrate the launch of a book they co-wrote, titled, Finding Ground: Building Strong Elementary Practice. Allison Jones, a long time Montessori educator, and Elizabeth got together to set down some thoughts about teaching at the elementary level. In this episode, Elizabeth and Allison interview each other about the book, their writing process, and share experiences as co-authors. Find Finding Ground here!  

Our guest this month has created a new set of Montessori decodable readers. Hannah Richardson is the founder of Montessori Makers and after years in the primary classroom and as a school leader, she has created a set of books specifically for Montessori children who are emerging readers. Join us to learn more about this new material.

Welcome back to the next episode of Montessori in Action Podcast. Our first conversation of season 6 was our Summer Reads episode where we celebrate authors as they release books in our Montessori community. Fortunately, there are an abundance of new Montessori books coming out and so we decided to add a Summer Reads Bonus Episode. In this bonus episode we welcome Teresa Angeles author of The Montessori Home and Beyond, Tatenda Blessing Muchiriri, author of Montessori on Wheels and Jamie Watts, author of Montessori for Grown Ups. During the episode, we talked about sending Montessori books to Tatenda for families to read as their children explored the Montessori bus. If you would like to contribute, please send a book to this address:  Tatenda  Blessing Muchiriri Montessori on Wheels 6343 E Girard Pl #262 Denver, CO 80222

Welcome back to another year with Montessori in Action Podcast! Our first conversation of season 6 is our Summer Reads episode where we celebrate authors as they release books in our Montessori community. This July we welcome Susan Zoll, author of Powerful Literacy in the Montessori Classroom who joins us to talk about her new book, Effective Literacy Assessment in the Montessori Classroom. Susan is joined by new author, Katie Keller Wood, who wrote Alignment: A Montessori Approach to Reimagining Work-Life Balance. Congratulations to these Montessori authors!

Our final episode of the season is a conversation about rewilding Montessori. Montessori in Action Podcast is joined by two deep thinkers- Lucy Recio and Frank George IV and they share their ideas about the concept of rewilding and how it relates to the moment in history we are in right now. 

Coming up in June is a unique conference opportunity- the first ever Black Montessori Conference will take place June 20th-22nd at Howard University in Washington, DC. This episode of Montessori in Action Podcast features the organizers of the conference: Meisha Perrin and Dr. Ayize Sabater. They share the inspirations and aspirations for the event.

Have you ever wished you had superpowers? In this next episode, meet four people with superpowers who are starting two public Montessori schools- one in Columbus, Ohio and one in Oklahoma City. These two couples envisioned tuition-free Montessori programs to serve their communities and they are bringing them into being! Both schools will open their doors this August. Rachelle and Josh Smith will be opening the school in Columbus, and Rufus and Summer Howard will be opening the school in Oklahoma City. Join us to hear about their visions and journeys.

This episode is a conversation with Dr. Kathy Escamilla, who shares her extraordinary contribution to Bilingual education in the United States. She takes us through her fifty-year career in the field and helps us to understand the developments in Bilingual education that have happened across that time. As a former president of the National Association for Bilingual Education, co-editor of the Bilingual Research Journal, and chairperson of the Bilingual SIG for the American Education Research Association, Dr. Escamilla has a unique perspective on the maturation of Bilingual education in American schools across the country.

Join guest-host Maati Wafford with Dr. Juanita Imelda Johnson, a long time teacher at Dater Montessori School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Kristen Smiterman-Voltaire, a parent at Dater, as they discuss their experiences with Equity Impact Circles.

Our episode this month looks at how current neuroscience supports the work we do in Montessori classrooms. Our guest, Veronica Burbano, an experienced Montessori teacher, shares the research she has uncovered that explains why staying true to the pedagogy matters.

This episode is a conversation with some adults who attended Montessori schools as children. They came together to talk about their experiences in their Montessori classrooms, transitioning from Montessori and looking back now on how their early education has affected who they are today. Please join me in welcoming Janyah Bradley and A’Kala Chaires.

Season 5, episode 5 is a conversation with Dr. LaNail R. Plummer, the founder of Onyx Therapy Group a Black, Woman, and Veteran-owned business, dedicated to addressing mental health issues and disparities in communities, organizations, federal government, and individuals in need. We talked about supporting Key children in classrooms and the use of Observation, relationship building and attuning to our own biases and activators. Now more than ever our Key children need us to understand behavior is communication and Dr. Plummer shared some insights on how to do this.

For more than 15 years, Lucy Recio has worked at the intersection of communications, strategy, and organizing. She builds campaigns, programs, and systems in service to community led movements that advance justice and our collective liberation. Anchored by reciprocal, transformative relationships, her work endeavors to inform policy and legislation, enact systems change, shift power structures, and shape public understanding and perception around issues impacting young children, women, and BIPOC communities.

Street Data: A Next Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and Social Transformation invites readers to rethink this era of high stakes testing and engage in new ways of ensuring growth in school for all learners. Co-author, Dr. Jamila Dugan joins Montessori in Action to talk about equity traps & tropes, street data, and how it can be used to shift the focus in schools.  “We don’t need improvement. We need an approach that fundamentally and radically transforms the experiences of children and families at the margins. This is the purpose of centering street data in the process of transformation.”

Our conversation this month is with Meisha Perrin, the new Executive Director of the Black Montessori Education Fund, a non-profit project founded to increase access and support diversity and inclusion in Montessori education by investing in Black educators, children, administrators, and researchers in the US and globally.

We launch Season Five with our Summer Reads episode, where we offer you ideas of something to read this summer. This year, rather than an author, we have a conversation with Joke Verheul who works in the Montessori Archives in Amsterdam. Joke has worked there since the start of the Archives and is pleased to share ten years of Treasure Articles.

"Are you more curious to know or to understand concepts?” This is the question that opens the research done by  A group of 5 researchers including Montessorian, Solange Denervaud  Our final episode for this season is a conversation with Solange who helps us unpack the findings of Learning by Heart or with Heart: Brain Asymmetry Reflects Pedagogical Practices. This research shows that how children learn shapes the brain’s core mechanisms for learning. It looks at the brains of children schooled in traditional settings and compares them to those who attended Montessori schools. The results are fascinating.

Episode eight of this season is a conversation with Antria Goss. Antria is the first Montessori Coach to serve in the Cincinnati Public School District. Antria works in the public Montessori schools in Cincinnati as a Montessori Coach to the teachers. In our conversation, she shares about her role, the work she does and the support she receives from the district.

Our next episode of Montessori in Action features Guest Host, Genevieve D’Cruz. In this conversation, Genevieve speaks with two Montessorians- Elena Gonzalez. and  Jamila Ford  who were Assistants in Genevieve’s classroom when she was a Primary Guide. Both of these educators went on to take their Montessori training and are now leading classrooms of their own. In reminiscing about their time together, they talk about their experience in Montessori training, and share insight and wisdom for Assistants, Guides, and anyone aspiring to go to Montessori training themselves.