Hurricane Relief: Re-Opening St. Croix Montessori

Our school began the academic year with a challenge to ourselves: At St. Croix Montessori, our commitment is to prepare children for life – i.e. the many, many years beyond high school. In order to raise independent, respectful, engaging adults, our school must build a healthy learning community around and focused on supporting children. Thus, how can we practice being a learning community at every level of our organization?

 This question has guided a process of alignment across our school.

 Learning Takes Order & Chaos

Hosted on campus, we began with a deep-dive lesson on complex systems and change. One of our favorite moments was discussing the chaordic process – as it is extremely complimentary to our Montessori philosophy of freedom and responsibility. Our team discussed how being in a learning community means that we invite chaos and order to coexist, recognizing that it’s this balance that allows transformation to occur. Parents and teachers self-identified with which part of the process we are most naturally comfortable (e.g. chaos or order). We discussed positive mindsets and different ways of approaching opposition, unknowing, or change.

 Some insights shared:

• Seeing this, hearing this, reminds us to stay flexible while also creating a structure.
• As an adult, we need to remember to step back and observe, not to jump in and control.
• Now I understand why I love my role – it has clear, consistent parts each day – and how I can be more positive when the unexpected happens. It’s good to know this!
• I get it! You set expectations for a child – that’s order – and chaos is the learning process and experimentation!

 Learning The Language of Strengths

Before our school reviewed alignment of our practices, we wanted to support a strong foundation of trust across our leadership teams. Our St. Croix Montessori school team, which has three (3) new faculty, and our Board of Trustees, which has four (4) new members, each took Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder and spent a day with a coach learning about strengths-based leadership, our unique individual strengths, and recognizing strengths in others. One of our exciting discoveries was how our leadership teams had strengths evenly distributed across all four domains (executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking).

St. Croix Montessori’s school team set personal and team development goals for the year that reflect our strengths. The workshop’s insights assisted in creating mentorships for the new teaching team and new Board members. Over the course of 1.5 months, our teaching team reviewed best practices, school procedures, and our day-to-day social norms. By using a strengths-based approach, we were able to quickly identify what worked well, where we needed individual support, where we needed clarification or adjustments, and which procedures did not align with our mission of having a learning community. The result was a teaching and administrative team operating in sync, having fun, appreciating and supporting one another – which transformed the relationships with families.

The workshops were so successful that the Head of School was asked by a new parent to lead the Caribbean Center for Boys and Girls Frederiksted and Christiansted teams’ professional development day and to facilitate their Youth Leaders retreat. Based on everyone’s feedback, we are preparing to launch a Parent Education event on learning strengths and using strengths-language in parenting.

 Capacity Building & Measuring Learning

Hiring early childhood teachers to stay or move to St. Croix has always been challenging. This past year was especially difficult to hire teachers, as the cost of living increased and there continues to be a lack of housing. With our Elementary class already at capacity, St. Croix Montessori is planning ahead for the need to transition to two Elementary classes (ages 6-9 and ages 9-12). It is an exciting time for our school. As our Board works to increase our physical space, we asked ourselves: What do our children and our teachers need to be actively learning today and preparing for transitions next year? How are we measuring learning?

Our school decided we needed to be creative.

We are piloting a teacher training model. We invited a consultant teacher trainer to collaborate with us throughout the year in a combination of remote and extended on-site visits. In this model, our Elementary classroom has two trained teachers available to provide all of the learning experiences for the students; we created a career pathway for an assistant; the teaching team receives ongoing coaching; and the Head of School receives feedback on how to successfully create a teacher-training pipeline to suit St. Croix Montessori’s needs.

St. Croix Montessori knows that behind these stories there’s data. However, our school had been searching for affordable assessment tools that could measure across all the domains of learning – executive functioning, academics, and social and emotional learning. In late November, our school was accepted as part of a pilot consortium. We became trained and certified in two statistically valid assessments for executive functioning and developmental learning environments. These resources allow us to more accurately self-assess and measure growth in our learning environments. We are also excited to be the first in the U.S. Virgin Islands to be trained in them!

The Year Ahead

The gift of the Global Giving community was that our school made it through over a year of hurricane recovery, and now we can focus on our true mission: access to a healthy learning community for all of St. Croix.

With gratitude,

St. Croix Montessori