Overview

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Gulf Coast Montessori Teacher Education Center has partnered with TIES (The Institute for Educational Studies) to offer a master's degree in connection with Endicott College. All coursework occurs online without the requirement to travel to any location during the program. Seminar dialogues are asynchronous, taking place over two-week periods. Self-directed adult learners participate as best suits their personal schedules. In many ways, exploring classmates’ reflections while having unfettered space to contemplate one’s own responses makes for deeper learning opportunities.

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How it Works

 

Each year adult learners join a Learning Collaborative. Classes begin with either April’s Transitions course or full studies in September. Students work both collaboratively and independently throughout the 18-month online program (three – six months semesters.) The six-month semester enables working professionals to continue working in their regular employment.

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Over the course of the program, 18 sequenced seminars (two weeks each) take place on our online campus. During the seminar process students experience an evolving progression of readings, dialogues, and creative explorations. These seminars offer adult learners a personalized, self-directed, and discovery-based approach contextualized by integrative learning.

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Throughout the program there are four opportunities to synthesize your learning in the form of written integrative papers. Students use an exploratory approach asking open-ended questions that arise from one’s personal journey.

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Montessori Integrative Learning

 

Montessori Integrative Learning combines the ideas of integrative learning with the wisdom of the Montessori vision, all experienced in an online “Montessori-process” environment.

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In To Educate the Human Potential, Maria Montessori writes, “The fundamental principle in education is the correlation of all subjects and their centralization in the cosmic plan.” The Montessori Method, and hence the TIES M.Ed. is predicated on this integration. For a century Montessori’s methodology was applied only to the first three planes of development, birth through adolescence.

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Originally, TIES did not set out to establish adult Montessori environments. However, in reviewing our academic contributions since 1996, we discovered that the program of study is congruent with Montessori ways of knowing-being: the three period lesson (give, share, receive), the prepared environment, from details to wholes and wholes to details, the “Circle” as a learning community in dialogue, freedom within limits, no grades, love as cosmic manifestation, multi-age teaching and learning, and scientific pedagogy.

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