About the Montessori Makers Institute
Montessori education prepares adults to understand children with extraordinary depth.
It rarely prepares them to lead organizations.
Across Montessori schools, leaders are asked to guide adults, navigate conflict, respond to families, support staff growth, make high-stakes decisions, and sustain culture — often with little structured preparation for how to reason through those moments.
So leaders improvise.
They rely on personality, urgency, or borrowed management models that don’t always align with Montessori values. Even strong communities begin to feel inconsistent, reactive, or dependent on individual heroics.
The Montessori Makers Institute exists to close that gap.
Here, leadership is treated as a professional practice that can be studied, observed, and strengthened using Montessori principles — not just in classrooms, but across the entire organization.
We work from a simple premise:
Children experience the organization adults create.
When adult systems are clear, humane, and developmentally aligned, classrooms stabilize.
When adult systems are ambiguous or reactive, even excellent teaching struggles to hold.
The Institute supports leaders already carrying responsibility — helping them translate Montessori philosophy into decision-making, communication, culture, and long-term sustainability.
This is not certification.
It is formation within real leadership.
Through seminars, intensives, and focused study, leaders learn to reason through complex situations with steadiness and clarity, strengthening both the adults they serve and the children those adults support.
About Hannah Richardson
Hannah Richardson is a Montessori leader, consultant, and founder of Montessori Makers. For over two decades she has worked across public and independent Montessori settings — guiding classrooms, coaching educators, supporting leadership teams, and helping organizations design systems that protect both children and the adults who serve them.
Her work focuses on applying Montessori principles beyond instruction: hiring, adult culture, decision-making, and continuity. She partners with schools nationally and speaks widely on leadership, equity, and sustainable organizational practice.
The Montessori Makers Institute grows directly from that work — a place where leaders can develop judgment, not just knowledge.
