Building Stronger Bilingual Montessori Programs
Upcoming Community Conversations: registration will be available soon.
Lucy Welsted
"The Human Resources Puzzle: Advice for Finding and Retaining the Teachers your School Needs"
19 April 2023
Lucy will share the experience of her school, Montessori Córdoba International School, of hiring and retaining the right staff for a bilingual school project in different stages of a school’s development. She’ll share information about how she created a hiring strategy based on her school’s objectives and profile. She’ll look at how we can be successful in attracting or/and training the right candidates and what you should consider when employing staff from other parts of the world. We’ll look at the importance of the staff handbook, the induction programme and supporting new arrivals during the transition to a new role and culture.
Why Bilingual Montessori?
The Bilingual Montessori Project emerged in 2020 from the need to create a community of practice for Montessorians working with more than one language in their schools. There is little training to support this work, virtually no research and scarce documentation of effective practices.
The number of schools finding their way on this unmarked path is constantly growing so we wanted to create a virtual community to have spaces to share and learn from each other.
We began by recognizing that each bi or multilingual school is distinct due to:
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the socio-linguistic context of the location
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the culture of the school, its values and priorities
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the human resource puzzle: finding people with the training, human qualities and language skills to reach our goals
These variables, plus many others, mean that each school is on its own journey, so there is no one-size-fits all "how to manual". Instead we are compiling a "Field Guide" to share effective classroom and administrative practices from Montessori schools to serve as "guideposts" to inspire you as you make your way.
In 2022 we were very fortunate to receive an Erasmus + Grant, which has permitted us to add more partners to the project, conduct preliminary research and work towards specific outcomes. You can read more about the work of the grant here.
