Breaking the Paradigm

What happens when two former Montessori students, and lifelong Montessorians, sit down for a conversation?You get this episode of Breaking the Paradigm with my friend Joe Campbell. You might know Joe from the Montessori conference circuit, as the owner of Learning Sunshine and as a publisher of Montessori books through Parent Child Press; what you might not know is that not only was Joe a Montessori student, but the philosophy has had a significant impact on every aspect of his life.We discuss his journey from student to Montessori “true believer,” what the method has means for him now, and the exciting work he’s doing in bringing new Montessori authors to our community.Thanks Joe, for a great conversation! If you haven’t already, definitely check out learningsunshine.org!The conventional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn.Check out everything we do at www.DevelopingEducation.org This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

What needs to change about the way we prepare educators such that they can fully embody scientific pedagogy, engage fully in their spiritual preparation, and bring about a world of equitable interdependence?This is a question that Taylor Henry, Kelly Jonelis, and I have been discussing together over the last few months. It’s led to us deciding to create a “Fellowship in Scientific Pedagogy” for Montessori and progressive educators.This fellowship is still very much in development; we wanted to take the process slowly and thoughtfully, and also to build it in public. Over the next few months, we’ll be recording discussions like these where we dig into some of the fundamental questions we’re grappling with about how educators should be prepared, and what kind of program we want to create. Along the way, we hope that you’ll chime in too- that you’ll share your insights, ideas, questions, and musings on this topic as well.And if you’re interested in being a part of our future fellowship, fill out this link below for us to get in touch with you!Thanks, Taylor for a great conversation, as always. And welcome to the “Three Timers Club” on Breaking the Paradigm!The conventional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn.Check out everything we do at www.DevelopingEducation.org This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

There are some people who I could talk to about Montessori and how education must be transformed all day- and Emily Bloyd is one of those people.You may know her from her viral social media channels, where she goes by Montessori Miss Emily, or as The Montessori Mafia here on Substack. She’s someone who not only talks a big game about how we can bring Montessori to every child, but she also walks the walk.Yesterday, we had our first ever live stream collaboration. Despite some technical difficulties (which we adapted to, as Montessorians!), we had such an enjoyable conversation. It was great to see those of you who joined live and hear your reactions in the comments.If you weren’t able to catch us live, definitely check out the replay above. We’ll be going live again in mid-November, so let us know: What should we dig into next? What questions do you want us to tackle? What new ideas would you add to what we shared? Comment your ideas below!Thanks again Montessori Miss Emily for an awesome conversation- I’m looking forward to next time!The conventional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn.Check out everything we do at www.DevelopingEducation.org This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

I am so excited to announce that Developing Education has a brand new website! You’ll be able to see all of our offerings where we take the ideas in this podcast and bring them to life. Go check it out at www.developingeducation.org - we can’t wait to see you there!Maria Montessori’s birthday, August 31st, corresponded with the first day of school for me, as well as marking 10 years in education.As I was driving home, I was inspired to take some time that evening to reflect on the last 10 years- what am I still holding on to? What’s actually most important as we kick off this school year?That first day was not perfect (hint: it’s not supposed to be), but seeing the seeds of multiple years of culture building and prepared environment curation manifest in new ways was a beautiful sign.Ultimately, I am left with this: We need to offer an education for a world that needed to change yesterday. What kind of courage would that take? What would parents say? Would our colleagues kick us out of the staff lounge? (Hopefully not!)I hope you enjoy these end-of-day thoughts. Lots more amazing podcasts in the lineup that are in the final touches of editing. If you are working with adolescents, or any age group for that matter, I wish you all the best in guiding human development. It’s the most important work!Want to see where our podcast ideas come to life? Check out our website at www.DevelopingEducation.orgThe conventional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

I am so excited to announce that Developing Education has a brand new website! You’ll be able to see all of our offerings where we take the ideas in this podcast and bring them to life. Go check it out at www.developingeducation.org - we can’t wait to see you there!There’s a single part of a teacher or leaders practice that (in my opinion) makes or breaks whether they will succeed in creating truly transformational experiences for their students.It’s not their credentials, years of experience, or where they went to school.It’s their ability to be a reflective practitioner- to do their spiritual preparation.In Montessori settings, spiritual preparation doesn’t refer to adhering to religious beliefs; rather, it is an invitation to look inward, reflect on who we are in relation to our students, and consider how we might continue to change ourselves to best serve the needs of our students.Without continuously engaging in our spiritual preparation, we fail to see the students in front of us, and we fail to understand how our behavior impacts them. I’ve seen guides with graduate degrees and AMI credentials that were ineffective because of their lack of spiritual preparation, and guides at the start of their careers be incredibly effective simply by constantly engaging in spiritual preparation and reflection.Over the past few years, I’ve given workshops on spiritual preparation at conferences at schools, and each time I hear the same comment: “This is the thing we most need - and also the thing that gets pushed to the side first.”This mini-episode is the “first period” of the most recent iteration of one of my workshops on spiritual preparation. It’s evolved as I’ve evolved- indeed, my own spiritual preparation is still ongoing.I hope that, if you are at the start of your school year, that this is your sign to focus on your spiritual preparation this year. In a time of chaos and contradiction, we need it more than ever.And if you want to bring this workshop to your school, reply to this email or fill out the Custom PD form on our website!Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!Our Purpose:Solving the isolation that many adolescent guides feel by convening the first, bi-weekly forum for practitioners, leaders, and anyone who works with adolescents.Why join the MAC Forum?* Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.* Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.* All are welcome: Regardless of your credentials or experience, your voice and perspective is important! We hold space for experienced and new guides alike.Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm ESTJoin Today and Find Your Community!The conventional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

I am so excited to announce that Developing Education, of which this podcast is a part of, has a brand new website! You’ll be able to see all of our offerings where we take the ideas in this podcast and bring them to life. Go check it out at www.developingeducation.org - we can’t wait to see you there!It all started at a doctors appointment, as I was reading Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod. Someone across the room said “Excuse me- how did you get into reading?”This simple question sparked the episode you hear above. It’s not quite an argument about how to “teach” reading, and more an argument about the stance we must take when seeking to foster meaningful capacities in our students (whether with reading or otherwise): namely that without the tenants of self-determination theory (autonomy, competence, and relatedness), our efforts won’t have the effect we hope they will.Ultimately, it’s a reminder to myself about the power of giving our students space. In a time where adult anxiety is running high, we must call on ourselves to give our children and adolescents space to just be. It may be an anecdote, but I believe it’s instructive: My Montessori high school students, who are given lots of space and no assigned summer work, are reading for pleasure. When I attended an elite private school where we had lots of homework (both during the year and the summer), I never read for pleasure- and I can’t recall my friends reading for pleasure either.I hope this sparks some interesting discussion and would love to hear your thoughts. If you haven’t already, definitely check out the latest edition of Provocations “The Revolutionary Adolescent,” because it’s jam packed with ideas that will certainly invigorate your practice going into the next school year. You can check out this latest edition, and all past editions, by becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack. You can also buy all past editions (not the current one, but that’s coming!) as standalone downloads on our website, developingeducation.org.Be well and have a great start to the school year!Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!Our Purpose:Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.Why join the MAC Forum?* Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.* Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.* Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm ESTJoin Today and Find Your Community!The traditional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

I’ve spent my career being told that shooting for the “ideal environment” for adolescents is impossible; that we must be “pragmatic” and make compromises when necessary in our work.What if the problem isn’t reality but our understanding of if? What if the “ideal environment” wasn’t a state of finality or achievement, but a never ending process that could begin immediately?In this episode of Breaking the Paradigm, Taylor Henry joins the Two Timers Club for a session recorded live at Bovina Center Montessori School. Over the course of our conversation, Taylor and I trace a thread that starts with the fear adults carry into adolescent environments. Along the way, we wrestle with the tension between giving up control and still being expected to deliver outcomes (and how we might get away from that). We also examine what happens when adults, out of fear, conditioning, and a culture that has socialized imagination right out of us, preemptively control the young people we claim to be liberating.And while this conversation broke new ground for Taylor and I, many of the threads that came up have been ruminating in our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum, the first global community of practice made up of practitioners and leaders who gather to discuss how we can all live up to our calling to serve adolescent development. If you’d like to join our next session, check us out here!This is a conversation about patience, about the courage to let development unfold on its own timeline, and about living our ideal as a process, now.Thanks, Taylor, for a great conversation!Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!Our Purpose:Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.Why join the MAC Forum?* Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.* Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.* Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm ESTJoin Today and Find Your Community!The traditional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

Are you willing to be inconvenienced for someone else’s liberation… And your own?My guest, Suzanne Yatim, is a Palestinian-American actress, writer, filmmaker, and co-owner of Montessori Thrive. Her directorial debut, Breathe, filmed in Palestine, is currently in post-production. She’s also the bestselling author of Post Pardon Me, a dark comedy exploring motherhood and mental health. And when the genocide in Gaza began, she stopped everything she was doing and turned her full attention to getting people to understand what Palestinians have known their entire lives.Suzanne and I discussed the discomfort that solidarity requires and asks a question that we each must ask ourselves: how much are we really willing to change our daily life for collective liberation?We also dig into why neutrality is a myth and why Montessori herself would never have stayed silent in this moment.This episode is a continuation of our work with the third edition of Provocations Magazine, which centered Palestine and Montessori’s call for the liberation of all children. If that issue moved you, this conversation will too. Become a paid subscriber for full access to all issues of our paradigm breaking magazine!You can find Suzanne on Instagram (@TheActorvist) and learn more about Montessori Thrive at montessorithrive.com.Thanks, Suzanne, for a great conversation!Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!Our Purpose:Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.Why join the MAC Forum?* Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.* Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.* Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm ESTJoin Today and Find Your Community!The traditional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

What is the best way to support students with diverse learning needs?It’s the question that almost every educator I know is asking.There’s a massive apparatus of intervention and support built around labels, diagnoses, and deficit-based thinking that was designed for conventional classrooms where compliance and uniformity are the goals. It’s referred to as the medical deficit model.When that apparatus gets imported into Montessori environments, it doesn’t just fail to help our young people, it actively undermines the very things we know children need: autonomy, competence, and meaningful relationships. In this conversation, Dr. Paige Krabill and I explore what it looks like to reject that apparatus and to build something in its place that’s rooted in the Montessori philosophy, building on the strengths and gifts inherent in every young person while providing them the support they need to cultivate independence and autonomy.Dr. Krabill is a clinical and school psychologist, an AMI-trained Montessori educator, and founder of PDK Educational Consulting. She spent the first chapter of her career working within the traditional intervention and support system, and kept hitting a wall. It wasn’t until she walked into a Montessori classroom with her own child that she found the language she’d been searching for. That discovery eventually led her to develop the Power of Possibility framework and to begin building something new: the Montessori Institute of Northeast Ohio, a training center dedicated to reimagining what inclusion can look like when it’s rooted in Montessori philosophy rather than layered on top of it.In this conversation, we dig into the cycle that so many schools get stuck in: how a behavioral manifestation leads to a label, which leads to separation, which leads to disconnection, which leads us to say Montessori “isn’t for this child.” Paige names the myths that keep that cycle spinning and calls us back to something deceptively simple: presume competence, start with yourself, prepare the environment, and observe.Montessori can (and should) be for every child, if we are willing to prepare environments to meet their needs.What would it mean to stop educating diagnoses and start being in communication with the child in front of us? What becomes possible when we trade the language of deficits for the language of aid to life, and when we trust that the prepared environment can do what no checklist of strategies ever could?This is a conversation about our spiritual preparation as adults; the kind that has to be practiced daily, that works against the grain of enormous systems, and that changes everything when we commit to it.Thanks, Paige for a great conversation!Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!Our Purpose:Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.Why join the MAC Forum?* Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.* Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.* Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm ESTJoin Today and Find Your Community!The traditional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe

I was honored to deliver the keynote at this year’s Montessori Educators of Alabama conference around their theme of “Better Together.” I wanted to use this time to sit with a question that’s been nagging at me for years: if Montessori education is so revolutionary, why haven’t we achieved the world of peace and justice that Montessori described? Why, nearly a century into this work, are we still so far from the equitable interdependence she believed was possible?That question led me back through my own journey: into my own childhood and adolescent experiences, some shocking revelations I had while working with 12-15 year olds, and into a hard look at what we might be unconsciously reproducing even in our most beautifully prepared environments. I wanted the room to wrestle with the reality that the dominant culture of modernity doesn’t just surround our schools, it lives inside each of us. And that meeting developmental needs, as essential as it is, may only be the starting point of our truly revolutionary work.Ultimately, this talk is about what’s becomes possible when we recognize the path we’re actually on: when we understand that Montessori didn’t leave us a recipe to follow, but a method to experimenting with. It’s about the new human that each of us is capable of becoming, and the courage it takes to walk that path alongside our students rather than sending them ahead alone.I’m grateful to the Alabama Montessori community for creating such a warm and generative space. After the talk, multiple participants wanted to share their Montessori origin stories with me. One school leader, who was a Montessori student at her mother’s school, said to me “I realize I am not just carrying on my mother’s legacy, but Maria’s too.”This is at the core of what I think needs to shift in our Montessori collective conscious: that we are carrying on Maria’s legacy and must act as she did- not as replicators of her end result, but of scientists of human development and radical social change.I hope you’ll give the talk a listen and share your thoughts. It was a labor of love to create, and so much was left on the cutting room floor. I hope it invites you to revisit your own origin story and consider how YOU are a part of this legacy too!Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!Our Purpose:Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.Why join the MAC Forum?* Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.* Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.* Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm ESTJoin Today and Find Your Community!The traditional education system had its chance.Now it’s our turn. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingtheparadigm.org/subscribe