The Magic Blend: Creating a Culture of Community & Challenge

“Caring.” “Like a family.” “Intimate.” Research indicates that a top factor in student satisfaction and success is a deep sense of community. How do Montessori schools create this kind of culture? How do we sustain and enhance it? And, how do we strike the essential balance between nurture and an atmosphere that challenges students to reach their full potential and embrace the opportunities to come? In this presentation, Dr. JoAnn Deak, renowned educator, psychologist, and author, will draw on her experience working with hundreds of schools across the country and around the globe to identify the elements that work to help us achieve the magical blend, that delicate mix of ingredients, including the shared role of parents and teachers as everyday guides, that stimulates children’s minds and protects their hearts.

JoAnn Deak, PhD, began her career as a teacher and immediately became interested in the complexity of student psychology and success. Her doctoral work in preventive psychology at Kent State University in Ohio focused on the assessment of environmental, school, and family patterns that lead to children’s healthy or unhealthy development. After several years as a privately practicing psychologist, Dr. Deak began work as a consultant to schools before joining the Laurel School, in Shaker Heights, OH, as director of the lower and middle schools as well as founding director of their early childhood program. In 1999 she left Laurel to expand her consulting practice, helping parents and schools across the globe examine and enhance their roles as guides for children.

Dr. Deak has written numerous articles and contributed to several books on the subject of nurturing healthy, successful children. The author of How Girls Thrive and Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters, she is currently at work on her third title, The Brain Matters: A Middle of the Road Guide for Parenting and Teaching.

Dr. Deak has worked as an advisor to Outward Bound and is a past chair of the National Committee for Girls and Women in Independent Schools. She sits on the advisory boards of New Moon Magazine, the Seattle Girls’ School, Bromley Brook School, Lendl Montessori School, Power Play, and Girls Can Do. She has worked with schools, educational associations, and parent groups in Australia, Borneo, Canada, England, Ethiopia, France, India, Kenya, the Philippines, Nepal, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, has called Dr. Deak “an earnest idealist and a rigorous researcher . . . a good combination of head and heart.” Michael Thompson, author of Raising Cain, has said that Dr. Deak’s writing “offers parents humor, understanding, parenting philosophy, and well founded words of wisdom.” Among her many other accolades, Dr. Deak received the 2002 Female Educator of the Year Award from Orchard House School and the 2003 Woman of Achievement Award from the National Coalition of Girls' Schools. In 2004-05, she was named visiting scholar for The Red Oaks School (Morristown, NJ).