Training

 If you run an infant and toddler certification programme, you already know the hard part isn't the content. It's finding someone who can teach it and still remembers what a Tuesday morning in a toddler community actually feels like.

I trained for my AMI 0–3 Diploma at The Montessori Institute in Denver under Judi Orion, and I am an AMS Infant and Toddler Instructor. I've taught as guest instructor on AMS/MACTE programmes, and worked with educators in New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines.

I've also been in a classroom continuously since 2007: ten years as a Lead Guide with assistants working under me, and since 2017 running my own parent-infant and parent-toddler practice. When a trainee asks me what to do about a child who won't settle, I'm not reaching back a decade for the answer.

Available for module delivery, guest lectures and practicum supervision.

Here is what I usually find when I walk into a centre that has asked for training: the educators are not short on effort or care. They have each been trained somewhere different, or not at all, and they are quietly doing seven versions of the same thing in the same room. The children feel it before anyone else does.

Certification gives one educator a foundation. Getting a whole team practising consistently is a different problem, and it is the one I am usually called about.

So I don't arrive with a syllabus. I come and watch first, your rooms, your materials, your staff and we build the training around what I actually observe. 

These are what teams most often ask for. Most engagements cover three or four of them, not all.

• The prepared environment for under-threes
• Observation how to watch, and what to do with what you see
• Movement and independence in the first year
• Language from birth
• Freedom and discipline, and the difference between them
• Practical life for toddlers
• Working with parents as partners