Headmistress of campus

“Passion, responsibility and commitment have been guiding my life at work all the time since I became a Montessori Teacher  years ago.  I've been loving each day that I've spent at school motivating my staff to grow in order to touch every child's heart”.

MY PHILOSOPHY AS A HEADMISTRESS

PRINCIPAL RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Create a sense of community involving parents, teachers and students.

• Motivate and accompany 38 people to reach their goals providing appropriate feedback.

• Ensure that the Montessori Method and Peterson Philosophy can be breathable in the environment.

• Organize and supervise extracurricular classes (music, art, physical education).

• Promote and supervise workshops. (dance, football, baseball, sensory arts, art and creativity, arts and crafts, English, Dough Modeling...).

• Supervise planning and reflections of all the staff.

• Organize Schedules, duty guards, teacher training and events around the year.

• Guide teachers to explore and use the Google Apps to work.

• Assemble meetings and share minutes with all the Principals and Coordinators from the 4 Campuses.

TECHNOLOGY PROJECT

• Students had the opportunity to work with computers and iPads in oder to explore basic Google Apps like Drive and Google Presentations to create their own portfolios at the end of the year and share their work with their parents during the Student Led Conference.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROJECT

• Sent all communication to parents and teachers online in order to avoid any type of paper waste.

• Promoted our alliance with "Escuela Promesa" in order to teach our community to recycle and implement an orchard in our school. 

COLLABORATIVE WORK

• Promoted a culture of Collaboration and Collegiality among the staff. We began  moving from  an apathy mentality into a growth mindset. 

• Created meetings once a week to share best practices to learn from others. 

• Took time to ask and listen to teachers and students ideas before organizing general activities, such as festivals, celebrations... 

• Finally, I invited teachers to make a formal observation to other teachers to see how each style can contribute into the students education. 

MINDFULNESS

• The administrative team modelled how practicing mindfulness can lead you to a healthier life and therefore can also help kids to improve their self-control of emotions and body. In contemplation of helping teachers to align their pedagogical principles to mindfulness routines I provided them with more resources to use in the classrooms and opening spaces for us to practice mindfulness. 

• We changed lunch and started providing healthier and more balanced food in our campus.

COACHING

• Working as a team with the Coordinator, Psychologist and Technical Director, we will agreed with each member of the staff, 2 personalized goals at the beginning of the school year, in order to accompany them  during the semesters providing feedback so they can reach them and then feel successful about it. 

• Likewise, we took advantage of this meetings in order to motivate each member to keep on growing by offering support to read a book, take a course or research about something they will like to know more. By this, intended to cultivate intrinsic motivation to keep on learning.

MONTESSORI PHILOSOPHY

• We gave more weight to what really matters! We stopped having too many shows and distractions in order to have more time to concentrate in the real work inside the classrooms. 

• Instead of inviting parents to 3 festivals, we promoted parents observations inside the classrooms. 

• We provided personalized instruction without pushing children to reach a specific level when they are not ready to do it.

• With the support of the psychologist, we continued training and guiding teachers to create strong bonds with their students.

PLANNING AND ASSESSMENT

• With prompt and support from the new Academic Coordinator, we redesigned the formats of planning and evaluating in order to make it more objective, concrete and personalized.

• Combined the Montessori Philosophy, with the Peterson Curriculum and the New SEP Program.