Montessori in Action Podcast

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.