Chip and his team hold live workshops for Montessori Educators, both in-person and online. In-person workshops are held throughout the country each school year, and live online workshops are held via Zoom. Below are descriptions of the workshops that are offered regularly. To see a list of those currently being offered, the dates, and links to register, visit the Upcoming Events Page.
The Practitioner’s Class
Positive Discipline in the Montessori Classroom
The Practitioner’s Class is a case study approach to discovering the principles and tools of Positive Discipline in the Montessori Classroom. The class gives participants the opportunity to connect with other Montessori educators in an experiential setting to learn how to implement the respectful and time-tested classroom management approach that builds responsibility, independence, motivation and empathy within classroom communities.
Using real classroom situations, participants will learn to:
- Prepare a classroom social-emotional environment that encourages cooperation, connection and mutual respect.
- Understand the roots of misbehavior in children.
- Create effective support plans to help students with behavioral challenges find success in the classroom community.
- Develop consistent, respectful and effective discipline practices among adults.
- Help children develop self-regulation, independence and normalization.
- Create a classroom community where children feel belonging and significance.
- Develop school-wide practices that will help teachers and parents.
Conflict to Collaboration
Developing Partnerships with Montessori Parents
The Conflict to Collaboration course is designed for Montessori Educators and Leaders to help build supportive and collaborative relationships with Montessori parents. Children are best supported when parents and teachers, and leaders, have strong relationships and work together. Supported children become secure children, and when children feel secure they have more success, emotionally, socially and academically. Unfortunately, school-parent relationships sometimes break down; and this tension affects everyone: teachers, school leaders, parents and students. The good news is that most conflicts with parents can be prevented by developing sound communication skills and strategies, and planning ahead to prevent future problems. In this workshop, participants will learn to:
- Build supportive and trusting relationships with parents.
- Handle difficult and emotionally charged interactions successfully.
- Avoid common communication mistakes that are often overlooked.
- Communicate child concerns to parents and maintain parent support.
- Turn challenging situations into opportunities for building strong relationships.
- Hold successful and productive parent-teacher conferences.
- Develop school-wide practices that will help teachers and parents.
