The New Century School follows a classic Montessori structure and approach in its primary division for children ages 3 to 5 years old. For the 2017–2018 school year, Elizabeth Bowling, who is from Carroll County here in Maryland and lives there now with her husband and their three children, joined the primary Montessori team. Although new to the school, she was already well known to her current colleagues!

Journey to Montessori

Having now been in a Montessori classroom environment for the last 14 years, she began her present career as an assistant at Bethesda Montessori School. After assisting for 4 years, she decided to take the training herself. Her route to that decision, however, had some twists and turns along the way:

I was an education major in college initially, and then I changed my major to law and became a paralegal. But, in the back of my mind, I wondered if I had made a mistake. When I told a former high school teacher of mine, he said, ‘You’ll regret it, and you’re going to end up a teacher. You think that you want something more exciting now because you’re young. But you’ll end up a teacher.’ So I kind of always kept that in the back of my mind.

Although Mrs. Bowling did not set out to become a teacher, let alone a Montessori-certified one, once she started, she knew she had found her calling. “After I graduated from college and in the legal field, I was not really very happy. I just sort of looked around one day and thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ and wondered what would be a better fit for me,” she recounted. Still in her 20s, she felt it was an ideal time to explore options and happened to see a job opening for an assistant at a Montessori school. “I knew nothing about Montessori, but I thought, just to be in a school setting, let me see if I like that. I had the interview, and the head of school had a good feeling about me. So, even though I had no experience, I worked there for a couple of years.”

When asked to elaborate more on how and why she chose the path of Montessori with no prior familiarity with it, she explains that having only been inside a traditional classroom was actually a benefit. “Although I had some adjusting to do, coming in with a clean slate meant that I didn’t have any preconceived notions and was very open and very trainable that way.”

Although she enjoyed her colleagues and the administration, she went back into law for financial reasons but was soon once again miserable. She says, “I had hit some crossroads in life and knew I needed to change my course. That’s when I went back and I took the Montessori training.” She had been encouraged by her colleagues (as well as students who wanted their in-class lessons from her) to do so and had felt such a strong connection in the Montessori classroom that this next step felt right and natural to her.

Once certified, she began teaching as classroom lead at what was then called the Montessori School in Lutherville, MD (and also where she completed her training) and is now known as Greenspring Montessori. She reports having a truly wonderful experience there and an amazing mentor, who has since retired from teaching. “She taught me everything that I know. I was her student teacher, and we were still extremely close and very good friends,” said Mrs. Bowling.

Welcome to TNCS!

In that reciprocity intrinsic to Montessori, Mrs. Bowling was later able to become a mentor in her own right. TNCS’s own Lisa Reynolds was once her assistant and mentee! Mrs. Bowling enjoys being back together and also with Ms. Mosby and the rest of the team. She feels they all work together incredibly harmoniously. (See TNCS Primary Workshop 2017 that demonstrates how each lead teacher on the Montessori team plays to her strength and contributes to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.)

Her current classroom here at TNCS comprises 19 3- and 4-year-olds. She is assisted by Yanely Pozo, who is in her first year as assistant and who Mrs. Bowling is thrilled to be working with and finds a “perfect match.” “Im really enjoying it here,” she said. “The administration is very kind and very supportive, so I feel very calm, joyful, and accepted here. I feel like what I bring to the table is is always considered and respected, which is lovely.”

And then there’s her established connection with the other teachers:

Ms. Mosby, Mrs. Reynolds, and I all worked together earlier on, so we already knew each other quite well. But it’s nice to kind of come full circle and be back together. And Yangyang is fantastic—extremely supportive and so kind—so it’s just so nice to feel like you can easily go to a colleague for an idea or to share work or whatever the case may be. We have that kind of support among us, which is really nice and not always the case. We powwow and brainstorm together, and that’s usually how we handle our division. At the primary workshop, for example, we worked out how to convey what we feel is important and what we feel that the parents should know and would be helpful to understand. I happen to like the work cycle, so explaining that was my part of my contribution. We just share the love.

She says of her students: “My children are precious. At this age, they are a work in progress, but they enjoy each other and they have a great amount of potential.” She says her classroom functions quite smoothly. “This a good fit for my personality and the things that I believe in,” she said.