Nurturing Global Citizens: Implementing Montessori Dual Language Classrooms

How can administrators successfully implement and sustain a dual language program in a Montessori school? In this presentation, Melissa Rohan shares her experience leading Waterfront Academy, a Catholic, bilingual (Spanish-English) Montessori school founded in 2013. She provides a practical and philosophical framework for school leaders looking to integrate dual immersion while staying true to Montessori principles.

✨ Key Topics Covered:

The educational, cognitive, and long-term benefits of dual language immersion

Challenges administrators face when launching and maintaining bilingual programs

Strategic planning and vision alignment for staff, teachers, and families

Leveraging Montessori’s planes of development to support language acquisition

Building strong school–home partnerships for language reinforcement

Assessment and accountability tools for consistent program success

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

And welcome to my workshop on nurturing global citizens. This is a workshop on how to implement Montessori dual language classrooms. It's for administrators because what you're going to learn is you're going to learn how to maintain the fidelity of a dual language immersion classroom as well as the fidelity of a Montessori school. So I'm going to go through my workshop here. I'm going to cover why we're looking at dual language in a Montessori classroom, some of the challenges that we face. Our response is a clear vision and strategy, and I'll discuss that a little bit. The planes of development and language, partnering with parents, feedback and assessment, and then I'll finish it up. I do want to say that I am working on a handbook to go with this presentation that I am going to be publishing soon. I just had some feedback on the first and the second drafts. So based on the feedback, I'm just making a few minor changes to it and then I'll go ahead and publish. So that should be available relatively soon, certainly before the end of the calendar year. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to me.org. So a little bit about myself, real quickly. I am the founder of Waterfront Academy. I had I started it in 2013. So we've been doing this for 12 years. The school is inspired a lot by my own experiences. So prior to opening up the school, I did run for school board here in Washington, DC. Noticed even more some of the concerns I had. And so this is also a direct reflection or response to my experience in that as well. Prior to running for school board, I served on a few different boards, school boards, private school, charter school, etc. And then prior to that, I was teaching ESL up in Columbia Heights area of DC. So I have quite a bit of experience beyond just administering or founding and running this school. But if you're a Montessori teacher and you go and get trained as a Montessori teacher, you are only being trained in the one language, right? So if you are training in Spanish, you are learning in Spanish, and all you have are your Spanish albums, right? So if you go into a dual language program as a Spanish-speaking Montessori guide, then you don't have the tools to be successful in a dual language environment. Similarly, if you uh go to an English-speaking Montessori um program, and then you go to teach in a dual language, you really don't have all the tools. And so, again, doing this for so long, I have I have all of that. And so this was a way for me to support my teachers and staff. And in doing that, I found out that there was a lot of other people who were also interested. And so this is my first step in sharing this product of love, really. Um, and so hopefully it's helpful to other administrators around the world. Now, Waterfront Academy specifically does Spanish and English, but this could be applied to any two languages or multiple languages. So why do we do dual language, right? Why? Well, there's a lot of cognitive benefits to it. Um, you have delays in brain degeneration, increased executive functioning, there's academic benefits, uh deeper vocabulary and grammar understanding, boost in language arts, math, sciences, uh, professional benefits. So they're only children for a short amount of time, and then they spend the rest of their time as adults. And so we want to set them up for um for success. So either higher employability, better income, um, and then just human. We're humans and we live in community, and so um there's benefits in having uh multiple languages, uh empathy, cultural appreciation, global consciousness. A succinct way of describing why we do it. I think that that's just a tip of the iceberg. There's so many reasons to do a dual language program, and I'm sure that you have your own reasons that are beyond what I just described here. Um, some of the challenges that we face in Washington, DC, right? We I can only speak to Washington, DC, but in other areas of the world, you're gonna face the same challenges. But in Washington, DC, our whole neighborhood community predominantly speaks English. But if you were, let's say, in Spain and you were having this um a dual language program, predominantly everybody would be speaking in Spanish, right? And so English would be the target language. Here, the target language is Spanish, and but everybody speaks English, and so the children come in, and I should describe our children are ages three through fourteen. Um, we don't have a full adolescence, we don't go to 15 because there's high schools here in Washington, DC, so we want to make sure that they can get into those high schools. So if we kept them an extra year, it'd be hard for them to get into those high schools. So we only go to 14. So I just wanted to make that clear. But the children, even at three, they're coming in with their own experiences in their own homes and community, so they come in predominantly only speaking English, and so they only want to use English because there is a lot of inertia there, okay? And um, and so everybody speaks in English, and so the teachers they get a little frustrated, they're doing a lot of things at the same time, and so they start transitioning to speaking English instead of Spanish because it's easier, and I again I understand it, and I'm I understand that, but I also understand that if you're in a dual language classroom, you have to make things um better for easier towards the tr towards the mission. Okay, so um the other challenge that we were facing was parents were unsure how to support at home. This is something that we have to keep working on. Um, and so I we've already have started putting a lot of implementing a lot of these things. Same thing with the teachers using too much English, all of these challenges. We've been working really hard over a decade at least on how to solve all of these things. So, you know, we are not currently having these problems, but anyways, parent, but we can always do better. Parents unsure how to support at home, students not meeting language benchmarks. Um, so that's another thing. So in the target language, we want to make sure students are meeting these benchmarks, and so we had to create or find benchmarks that we were going to use and then work from there based on our experience and our observations. And then yearly expectations not being met due to lack of consistency and follow-through. Okay, so that's also on the staff level. We wanted to make sure that we were very clear with our expectations and we wanted to make sure that there was consistency across all classrooms. For the parent or the child experience, the expectations were very similar going from classroom to classroom. So, what we did was we wanted to look at our mission and our vision and make sure that we were at it throughout the whole program. So we reaffirmed our mission, uh Montessori dual immersion school rooted in Catholic values, that's our school, um, identified need for structural or structured manual and consistent feedback, which is what I created that I will be publishing shortly. You know, develop the guide. So, this manual that I created, anyone can use it, right? So the it's everything from the admin and how we can support everybody to the teachers and how they can run their classrooms, and then to the families on how to support their child in their learning journey. So everybody, the whole community is involved in this as it should be. So when I attacked the huge endeavor, I needed, we are a Montessori school. And so, in order to again ensure the fidelity of a Montessori program, I had to go back to the basics, right? The basics, Dr. Montessori's basics, which I would say arguably is the planes of development, um, and also what we know about language learning. So the reason I did this is because what is going to work in the primary classroom, ages three through six, are not going to work in the elementary classroom. And what works in the early adolescence classroom is not going to work in the primary classroom. The children are different and they're learning differently. And so we need to make sure that we are meeting them where they are, so we're setting them up for success. So, as you know, with the primary students, the children under age six, so you could even, if you had a toddler program, I would say similar to the primary program, but also I would kind of um look at the primary students and what their needs are, and the staff's needs are, and how you can support the staff, etc. But um the primary, so children under the age of six, they are in the absorbent mind phase, right? And when you're looking specifically at the three to six, there is a sensitive period for language, and so we really want to make sure that um we're targeting those things. Um, when it comes to the elementary students, uh, we've got our reasoning mind, they're curious, they're logical, they're social. So we're going to take advantage of those things when we are looking at our dual language um learning. And then for early adolescence, erd kinder, um, there's a lot of big and physical, big physical and emotional changes, and so we need to be cognizant of that when we put together our expectations um and how we're and then they're also very interested in community and social justice. So we're going to look at those things in the early adolescence. Um so I just wanted to really clearly so you understand where a lot of this comes from. So the other really important thing is partnering with our parents. Um, we have the children for a significant amount of time each week. That's a given. But their parents are their first educators. And if the parents aren't participating and collaborating and um and supporting their child in this education, it just makes the hill a mountain. It just makes it that much harder than it has to be, or that it can be. Um, and so making sure that the parents are participating and supporting and partnering with them is really important. And so, in fact, what I do with my teaching with my staff is I talk about um parent engagement. So we do have a day where we talk about um dual language and how we can implement it in all of our classrooms, but I also have separately a parent engagement workshop with expectations on that of the teachers to engage the parents because it is critical. I think it's critical, anyways, but it is it it really does make the Spanish or the second language or the target language um easier if we have that help from the parents. So um I do think that that is critical. And I will go ahead and for everybody put together a workshop on parent engagement so you can see what we're doing on that um as well. Feedback and assessments. So this is really important. So we could put together the best plan uh with goals in mind, but if we're not holding ourselves accountable, then um then it's all for naught. And um, and so we do already, and we will continue, and after this exercise, there's a little bit of fine-tuning I'm going to do, but um we do a lot of feedback and assessment. We we have several forums. We have parent surveys, those surveys go out twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring. We also have uh classroom observations that I do uh three times a year, and then the teachers are also observing the children, and we're putting together those progress metrics or already exist. We are um evaluating through observation of the children, um, and we are showing their progress. Um, and we are going to we haven't done it yet, but we are going to start doing that this school year, um, and so we can communicate not theoretically, but in actuality, how their children are doing on the language acquisition, and so we will be doing those three times a year to coincide with our um our conference reports that we send out three times a year. Um, and then we have our weekly parent emails as a school. We send out our emails that go, they're just general, they're school-wide. We send out our parent emails. So, one thing that we're going to start doing is we're going to put in there little home tips on how to what they could do at home, as well as like activities that are in Washington, DC, that they can do again to support the Spanish learning. But our teachers also send home weekly emails to the parents that are more specific to the child into the classroom. And those emails will further go into what the children can do. And I support the parent the teachers by putting together, or the administration does, um, by putting together template emails, uh, template tips that you could do throughout the year. Um, we also make sure that they also know all the events that are going on around DC that would support the Spanish learning. Um, so there's a lot of things in communication with the parents. Um, the classroom observation tools. So we have um we've always done where I go in and do an observation and then I give the feedback to the staff in that classroom. That's happened. What hasn't happened, which I will start doing this year, is adding in um observations and uh feedback and assessments on how they are doing the dual language aspect of the school. And so I think that it sounds like from the feedback that I am currently getting from the teachers, they're very excited about this because I feel like they felt, or I understood that they felt that it was just too ambiguous on what the expectations were, and so they never knew if they were doing it right, and it became a little bit of a stressor. And so this will be very clear-cut uh way to move forward, and I think everybody is very excited with this. But again, as I said at the front end of this um portion, is that the accountability um is really, really important. That way we can make um corrections in in real time so that we can address things as they come up. And so um, and so that we can meet our goals. Um and and our goals are very clear. Um so I think it's it's all really good. And so, in conclusion, I would say that it's for me the reason I started the school, it is really important to have a dual language or multiple languages. Um, and so it was that was something that was very important when I started the school. Um, I also really believe in Montessori. Um, it was the way that I grew up. My mom was a Montessori teacher, my family was very Montessori, um, and um and and we're raising our own children that way. And so it's very important to have a Montessori school. That is also really important. Now, in to be and I think we've been successful. I don't think that this has necessarily been nothing bad has happened, no crisis or anything like that. This is not a response to that. We just want, I want, I think everybody is always striving to do better. And so this is just um another step in progressing to be the best uh Messory, dual language Montessori school that we can be. So, with that, um, I just want to leave with saying that if you have any questions, feel free to reach out, info at waterfrontacademy.org, and also look for this handbook that I'm putting out shortly. Um, I think it would be really helpful. Also, I'll be putting out, as I mentioned, another workshop on doing um parent engagement, which you might be interested in to promote parent engagement in your school. That'll that'll be my next workshop I put together. Yeah, and then um if there's anything other, any other workshop that you would find interesting, please let me know. I think that would be really great. Um, because I I love doing these. Another thing that we're looking at doing, just so you have it um on your mind, is that I'm gonna start doing some interviews with other Montessorians and um education leaders, and um and I'm really excited about this. Um and parents. Uh so I've already put together a little bit of a list of people that I'm gonna do these interviews with. Um so we'll see how they go. I'm really excited about it. Anyways, uh look forward to our next workshop, and I will see you then. Thank you.