San Diego, CA, August 1-6, 2010
at Humphrey’s Half Moon Inn and Suites Resort

Registration and hotel reservation deadline is July 2, 2010.

NAMTA is pleased to coordinate this event with the annual retreat of the Montessori Administrators Association (MAA), being held July 28-31 in San Diego. Click here for the MAA retreat brochure and registration materials.

Description

Since 1988, NAMTA has documented best administrative practices and provided professional development to beginning administrators with one overarching principle in mind: Montessori schools, in order to retain their authenticity over time, need Montessori-oriented administrators who understand the specific operational aspects of Montessori pedagogy.

The increasing complexity of Montessori school structure means that the Montessori school must reintegrate its parts to complete the developmental continuum. This is an extraordinary endeavor as the Montessori school must embody the Montessori vision of successive prepared environments, indoors and outdoors, encompassing the natural and human-built worlds through all academic disciplines from concrete to abstract, from eighteen months to eighteen years. The more comprehensive the Montessori vision, the more complicated the institution and the larger and more diverse the staff. There is also more difficulty in staying organic and remaining focused on the organic whole, which is simply children and their intrinsic needs in contact with the appropriate “prepared environment,” including the natural environment. The implementation of Montessori Whole-School Management^SM requires not just administration, but visionary leadership, which is as much a test of character as it is of knowledge.

Philosophical Assumptions

Montessori leaders are decision-makers based on Montessori principles derived from a framework of Montessori development:

• Montessori Whole-School Management^SM is a systems approach to school administration.
• A Montessori school is a dynamic and complex system, a structured and integrating community where specific pedagogical and business realities can be seen as one organic whole.
• The Montessori organic system serves the human personality at all stages of development, and therefore the planes of education—the successive prepared environments—must work in concert to evolve optimal conditions for engaging growing children, their families, the teachers, and administration all at once.
• Schools have a core of Montessori principles and they also have stages of maturity that generally correspond to how many levels of education have emerged to date.
• Successive prepared environments together can be viewed as a whole ecosystem (indoors and outdoors), where the physical environment is a means of development and defines the educational process.
• Schools are matured by their adolescent programs, which suggest combined outcomes for their early childhood and elementary programs, helping to characterize the underpinnings of the whole school’s impact on child development.
• As Montessori schools develop the full continuum of education from birth onward, the school not only shapes the development of people within but has the potential to change society as well.