Leadership interview with Grace Kidney, Clanmore Montessori School

A long time ago, when I looked to see what education could be for children, it occurred to me that if I could think in terms of their natural development and meeting the needs of their developmental pieces as they go along, that life is going to be a lot better for everybody. Meeting the needs of children is massive for me in relation to Clanmore Montessori School. I believe that is our number one aim. The children themselves are so extraordinarily full of potential that you can't help but love them and understand the possibility of my job.

Dr. Maria Montessori was a very clever person who lived initially at the beginning of the 20th century, and she was a physician. She was the first female physician to graduate from a real university, and she was very interested in the physicality of human beings. She couldn't get a job because she was a woman, so she took a job looking after children in Rome. She concluded, being the great person she was, there was a lot to be seen in children, and there were very many patterns to be looked at and dealt with one way or another. Dr. Maria Montessori began an amazing approach to education, quite different from any other approach to children's education in the past, which drew me to her, because my idea for Clanmore Montessori School is that we could deal with children as they developed in a way that met their everyday needs Imagine if we could do that for everybody, then the whole human race would be a much better place.

One of the things that Clanmore Montessori School has done is when it came to the elementary children and the middle school children is that we looked very carefully and took ideas that we got in our training, and thought, ‘How can we develop them, and is there anybody who can help us with that?’ One of the things that we have at Clanmore Montessori School that would be unusual in a Montessori environment is Diane Dawson's idea of restitution. That is one of the loveliest things that we have at our school. At Clanmore Montessori School, We feel that if you make a mistake, there’s no shame or blame. It really does change the feeling around having made a mistake. We all make mistakes often, so it’s marvellous if you can get a grip with that when you're very young.

Last week, one of the teachers sent me a PowerPoint that a seven-year-old girl had made about Happiness. It was her first PowerPoint presentation, and it was about where happiness is and where you can rely on it. The answer was it is within yourself. At age seven, she knows that. I think it's lovely that she's been in an environment where ideas have been floating around.

The academic part of Clanmore Montessori School is the part that many people come to look for when they come to the school. They ask, ‘when do the children know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide? When do they write, how much do they do, and what academic rigour are you bringing to the table?’ I think that the Montessori program is a giant, massive thing. It’s important to understand that, in a way, Clanmore Montessori School is a system and has many parts. In that system, we can address things like social development. We plant, feed, and we nurture. We take a lot of time for it. So, for instance, with children of 18 months to six years of age, we're not doing an awful lot concerning talking to them about their social development. They are so busy growing and getting to know all the physical things around them that they just need an absolute.

Clanmore Montessori School starts with the children at about six years of age, and we present annually to the children what we call ‘big lessons’ and ‘smaller lessons,’ and then we help the children as they go along. Anybody can make a mistake at any point, and we need to be there to guide them. I think it is about guidance and reflection. Clanmore Montessori School lays out our beliefs to students and their families. We believe that we're here to learn and to work. We do this by loving and helping one another. We believe in respect and so on. We itemize our beliefs and then talk about our psychological needs; belonging, power, freedom, and fun. What we want to do is get our sense of belonging and maintain our beliefs at the same time. So if I respect myself, I'm not going to be trying to get my respect by putting someone else behind.

I'm not saying that everybody at Clanmore Montessori School are saints. Children all over the place will make mistakes. They've got to make mistakes to find where the edge is. They must find where the end is. Clanmore Montessori School has multi-age group classrooms where there will be those children who will know what the answer is, and the little ones who will be thrilled to learn from them. It's splendid.

It's so mind boggling about where Clanmore Montessori School starts with the children and where the children end up. It’s incredible what we offer to the children in terms of the environment and the opportunities they can seize for themselves. Eventually, they're writing, they're reading, they're presenting, and they're winning.

We would be so foolish to think of children as being empty vessels into which we're going to pour whatever we think is lovely for them to have. Clanmore Montessori School knows that it's all there to come out of them.

The parents of Clanmore Montessori School are extraordinary people. We have recently had the experience of calling upon their power and strength during this time of school closure. I will tell you, the parents have been so loving and supportive of their children, the school, their children's teachers, and the administration in general. It's an admirable group, is what I would say. Their feet were on the ground, they could laugh when they were talking with us, and they could be sympathetic when sympathy was necessary. They have, like everybody, worked tirelessly for their children all the way along. I think that they are very loving, very caring people who are very thoughtful.

With children aged 18 months to 14 years, Clanmore Montessori School has such a diverse community in terms of its makeup. There are children of all types in the school. I would say that for the most part, our children are a collection of everybody, and for the most part, it works very well. Occasionally it doesn't work for children with behavioral difficulties because of the large amount of independence that we think the children can take, and perhaps children with behavioral difficulties cannot take the independence that's offered. So I sometimes think that that could be the case. 

Clanmore Montessori School looks at every individual child very carefully. We work very closely with parents if a child in our school presents us with a difficulty that we have to try and figure out for ourselves. If we can figure it out for ourselves, we can help them succeed.

Clanmore Montessori School is a very warm environment, and you have to look carefully to understand that it's not only warm and fuzzy, but it is very well prepared and highly evolved. It's a little bit like an English country garden. Behind the wall, there's a fellow with the wheelbarrow walking up and down, and you understand that the flower bed is the way it is because there's been a very capable gardener working on the bed. I think that that’s what our school is like, very warm, with a lot of attention paid to children individually, and very loving. You can find happy children skipping down the card or doing whatever they're doing, and that's always a great sign That would be very ordinary in our school.

What Clanmore Montessori School likes to do is bring children to a place of happiness so that they can learn because a happy child learns well.

Clanmore Montessori School is a very happy environment that is very well structured. We don't saddle the children with the structure; they feel that it's just the normal way to be.

I firmly believe that if I can make things a little bit better one person at a time, the whole world will be better. It's not about me; it’s about the children at Clanmore Montessori School discovering what they can do. I'm just one person, but they are many.

When we first started Clanmore Montessori School over 20 years ago, we had a little group of toddlers 18 months to three years of age, a little group of children that were six years of age, a little group of children that were six to nine years of age. We now have many more children than in those days, but a few years ago, Clanmore Montessori School launched our middle school program. The Montessori Middle School program was very much in development Now, the middle school program is absolutely stunning. It's worth coming for a visit if you've got a child. Looking at the sorts of things they do is amazing and very different. Quite different than the ordinary, and what I would call a ‘conventional’ school.

The larger majority of children come straight through Clanmore Montessori School from CASA and up to middle school, and then we will have some children who come from another school system for one reason or another and embrace the Montessori system.

One of the things about Clanmore Montessori School is we are always looking at individuals. I don't know if there is such a thing as a ‘Clanmore Montessori School child.’ What happens when our children leave us? They go to a variety of schools. The larger majority are entering the public high schools in our area at this point. The reports from students themselves are that they are doing very well. Of course, at this point, we've got students who are coming back to Clanmore Montessori School, and they report to us about their progress in the University or out into the workplace, whatever it is. It's quite fun to hear from them, but generally speaking, the students are very well prepared for high school, which is excellent.

Clanmore Montessori School’s assessment of the children is done daily by observation of the teachers, and our presentation to the children of the work they will do is predicated on that observation and assessment. We don't assess in the same way standardized achievement tests are done. Of course, we couldn't function without assessment, so our daily assessment of the children is what we do. That's something everybody should know. Clanmore Montessori School generally thinks that if the children come early in the morning and work their hearts out till the middle of the afternoon, there's not an awful lot of reason to take work home. I mean, take your book home and read it, but otherwise, students spend all the hours they need to on the academic subject. Sign your child up for other things that will be completely different. Sign your child up for something that they absolutely love.