Speaker 2 (01:58.67)
All right, PBL simplified audience, we are super excited to have you with us. Today is a leadership guest episode. We do a lot of solo episodes to walk you through what does it look like to start a PBL school, how do you keep your staff engaged? And then we bring in people from sometimes business, sports, education, to give you a leadership view. And today we've got Marcia Enright. She's the founder of Reliance College. She's a lifelong advocate for independent thinking. So now you're starting to figure out why she's on the podcast.
She's got roots in Montessori education, a passion for helping learners thrive. And she blends this classical wisdom with modern ideas and ultimately prepares young people for meaningful self-directed lives. So I'm hoping we're going to have an inspiring conversation about autonomy and authentic learning. think you're going to love it. Marcia, thanks for being on the podcast today.
Thank you very much for having me, I'm honored.
So Marcia, your roots are in Montessori, right? Can you talk a little bit about kind of why Montessori and then how that leads you into starting a college, like what that looks like?
When I was a kid, I loved school, I loved learning, and I was very frustrated by kids goofing around in class who were disrupting that until I realized that they were frustrated, that they weren't learning in the way that was good for them. And so I said to myself, okay, when I grow up, I'm going to find a kind of school setup in which kids will love to learn whenever they go to school and would be adaptable to different people.
Speaker 1 (03:31.982)
So I kind of had my eye out for that for a long time. And when I was 20, I read some articles about the Montessori Method. And I said, hmm, this sounds like exactly what I would like. So I went and educated myself about the method. read everything that I could. And I enrolled my oldest son, I mean, my oldest child who was a son, in a classic Montessori children's house, which is preschool, and loved it.
And the reason I loved it is it's very developmentally oriented. It's individually oriented. The child works at their own pace. The teachers are trained to be very sensitive to what different children need and how to motivate them to be interested even in topics that they're not interested in naturally. And the environment is carefully crafted. I mean, every aspect of it is thought out.
in terms of what will maximize learning for the child and every aspect of learning that not just the academic but the emotional, the social, and the physical to help the child become an independent human being. And it just that is exactly what I wanted for my children. So that's why I was so interested in that method.
when my son was going into first grade, there was a Montessori magnet program in the Chicago public schools near us. But when I went to observe it, which it was interesting because most Montessori schools, if parents want to observe or people want to observe and see what it's like, they welcome you. So you can see it for yourself. But this was a new thing for them, that to have somebody come and observe. And right there, that was like a
you know, red flag. And so when I observed, if you got one of the teachers, she was fabulous. She knew exactly what she was doing and how to implement Montessori. Got the other one, they didn't know what they were doing. And so I said, well, I don't want to send him here. And I found a small Montessori elementary school near us. So he went there for a couple of years, did well, and then
Speaker 2 (05:31.31)
Yellow flag
Speaker 1 (05:57.442)
they needed to leave their building and we tried to persuade them to come over to our neighborhood because there was more interest in Montessori in our neighborhood and they were going to do something else. And so at that point I had, I knew a teacher who I thought would be fabulous. I had a bunch of other people that were working with me, other moms, and we'd found a space. And so I turned to them, I said, well, you want to start our own school?
And that's what we did. So we decided to do that in March of 1990. We opened the school in September of 1990 with 17 children. And that's still going today. In fact, that school is now run by a fabulous woman, Lila Csikhanovic, and she's doing great authentic Montessori. And they were just rated A plus in Chicago Parent Magazine, one of the top Montessori schools in the city area.
Awesome. Awesome. I mean, it's cool. starts with kind of those roots of like what's best for my kids, right? And then what's best for other people's kids. And how do we create that environment? And, the culture, right, is a super important piece. And so we were trying to bring that to any school, public, private charter, wherever it is. And you've kind of done this now up into the ranks of college, right? And we've, we've had some college folks on the podcast looking at project-based learning within that, that realm.
And you emphasize developing autonomous and entrepreneurial individuals, which is a really interesting outcome. That kind of piques my interest right away, just the wording, but how does your program foster these kinds of qualities?
Yeah, well, there's a there's a line between so I ran that Montessori Elementary School for 27 years and then but my own interest in teaching was in young adults and so I started a summer program in 2009 in which I put everything I knew about optimal learning and I brought the Montessori principles up to the young adult level which she only wrote one one I don't know how much audience knows about Montessori but should I say should I
Speaker 2 (08:05.036)
Yeah, go ahead. Bring us into that. mean, we've got some Montessori schools that listen, I know for sure. But I'm not sure that we all know. So yeah, go for it.
So Maria Montessori was the first woman doctor in Italy. she worked in a, when she, also had, after she left medical school, in which she had a lot of problems, you know, getting through it because it was not considered right for a woman to be in a medical environment. She worked in what was called an orthophrenic school for what they called at that time, retarded and autistic children.
And she observed them and she saw that they spent a lot of time playing with their food. And she realized that was because they were in such a sensory deprived environment that that was the only input that they had. So she went out and read everything she could about education theory from the past 200 years before her.
She brought that to bear on what she did with the children. She developed materials, which are kind of like games to learn your concepts. The children did so well that they passed the state exam for normal children. And everybody thought this was great, but she was sitting there thinking, my gosh, what are normal children learning? so then she started a, story short, I won't spend too much time on it. She started a school in 1907 for
factory workers children and they had there was such an astonishing result from this in four months and after a year that she became world famous and people from all over the world came to see what she was doing and that's where the whole thing started. But Mansuri is about developmental appropriate materials to learn from so for the youngest children you want to concretize
Speaker 1 (10:04.576)
all of your concepts in materials. So that, for example, you have beads that represent the units in numbers, and then 10 together is a 10 bar, 10 of those together is 100 square, and 10 of those together is 1,000 cube. Your listeners can easily find these things on the internet now, videos about them. But all the concepts that you want to teach children are put into
some kind of material and they work with those materials. And then as they get older and older, they are more more abstract in what they're doing. She only wrote one article about universities and the function of them. So I'm bringing the principles of this individually oriented. One of the things that happens with children in Montessori schools is they love the work. They love what they're doing because it's exactly
given to them an exact amounts that are challenging but not overwhelming, that they work individually, they become self-disciplined because of it. And so we're bringing a lot of these concepts up to the young adult level. What does a young adult need to function in the rest of their life? And I put everything I knew into this summer program, but I was even surprised at the outcome because
the students at the end of a week would tell me that their life had been transformed because now they can judge anything for themselves. And you just saw this rising self-confidence and energy and collaboration with each other because of the way we did things. And that's what I'm bringing into the college. That program was basically a compressed version of it. So we're very oriented to what kinds, not only what
to learn, but also how to convey the learning. What kind of environment do you need? We consider every aspect of the environment, the social, the emotional, the physical, and how do you maximize that? So this is the kind of thing I'm bringing into the college level in order to help develop self-disciplined, autonomous human beings who can judge anything for themselves, not just in their area of expertise, but in anything in life, because
Speaker 1 (12:29.772)
You can't depend that you're going to be able to continue in whatever work that you've started in. everything changes, especially with our constantly changing economic situation.
Yeah, for sure. mean, I love the idea that you're preparing kids to, I kids to be adults, guess, young adults to really be adults and be able to tackle whatever's in front of them. Right. So it's those, probably call them employability skills to some degree, right? The collaboration, the self-advocacy agency, problem solving, critical thinking. So how do you balance those at your level with the, as you're bringing this to the college level, how do you balance that?
with the academic demands of a college, knowing that a lot of times those employability skills, those critical thinking, communication skills are often more important than I would claim to success than the academic side, but we're gonna mesh those together or use one as a vehicle for the other. How do you tackle that at the college?
Well, that's where the way in which you run the classes is so important. And the whole organization of the college environment. The classes that we use, we use a specialized form of what people call concisocratic seminars, but it's collaborative seminars in which it's very much emphasized that whatever you're talking about, whatever you're sharing with the other people in the group, you base that on reason and evidence.
So this highly increases the person's ability to think well. And you have to be very respectful of the other people in the environment. You have to connect what you're saying with the person said before you. And these kinds of skill, these kinds of practices really develop teamwork skills because you're spending a lot of time actually listening to what the other person says and responding to it instead of just sitting there and thinking about, well, what do I have to say next?
Speaker 1 (14:31.574)
In fact, very interesting. I had a case of a very bright 16 year old who came from an environment where, you know, what happens with a lot of these very bright students is they feel like they have to prove themselves constantly. They have to keep showing how much they know and how well they can do it. And they have to show how much they're ahead of everybody. And he had a very hard time listening to what the other people were saying. He was always sitting there thinking about what he was going to say next.
So what we did was used a dialogue statistics sheet in which one person is given the job of dialogue statistician and they have to keep mark who's saying how many times. In other words, okay, Ryan spoke five times and Betsy spoke three times and keep track of that. So he's really paying attention to what the other people in the class are saying rather than.
What do I have to say? At the end of that, he said, now I understand what I'm supposed to be doing.
It was really interesting. So you want to use as many tools as possible to raise their self-awareness so they can be more self-disciplined in that way.
Well, I like that self-awareness as a goal as well, because sometimes we get a learner like that, a point getter, right? That's kind of basically been trained to do that, right? Through education. But he had the aha of like, I get it. And we might've labeled him as arrogant, right? And he's just arrogant and doesn't get it. But how do we help him get it? How do we help him understand how these conversations work?
Speaker 1 (16:16.186)
Yeah, I mean in this respect, know teachers need to be very observant about what's going on in the classroom, how the people are interacting. I mean as well as whether they're talking about the say the text that you have in front of them. Do they understand the text? But also all these other elements, excuse me, about the way in which they interact and whether the person is learning how to interact well with other people.
So it's quite, I always think of Montessori teachers as very complex in the way that they have to implement the method.
Yeah, agreed, agreed. So if I pulled this back from kind of your origin story, you know, your son was going to Montessori school and if you get this teacher, it's really great. If you get this teacher, not so much. How are you training teachers in this so that they can kind of work on that balance?
Yeah. Well, in that circumstance I was talking to you about, it was in a public school and they were not really very concerned about implementing it well at that point.
Sure. But there's still this piece of like, if I want to be a teacher or a professor, even I would say what we've found is often it's more, if you're a professor at the higher ed level, I'm an expert in my field. I'm going to do research in this and oh yeah, by the way, I'm also supposed to teach. And I've never actually been taught any kind of instructional methods, right? It's just, I'm supposed to be this expert and do that. So every time we go into a higher ed environment, they're just so thankful for even having some pedagogical conversations and thinking through instruction.
Speaker 2 (17:55.278)
So what does that look like for you? Do you have some in-house processes that kind of bring people into the fold to start looking at the classroom differently?
absolutely. Because it really matters whether the person is receptive to this way of teaching. Because a lot of people who are professors really love their subject and they love to talk about it. But they aren't really comfortable with listening or just sitting back and guiding the students. Because being a teacher, a good teacher is a whole profession in itself. And it's ironic that, as you said, that people at
the college level don't get any training. So I carefully see what kind of person it is to begin with and then have them come and be a participant in one of our programs in one way or the other. They might be an assistant. And then we always have meetings almost every day. For example, during the week when we do the seminar, we have a meeting every day about what went on in the class.
Because the summer program is very intense. We have three seminars a day plus other activities. tend to do other, we do going out, for example, we try to connect what we're learning in the classroom with what's happening in the world. Try to raise the awareness of students of the world around them, because most people take for granted the world around them. They don't have any clue how it got here. And we try to connect what
we're learning in the classroom with what's happening in the world. So we do all these things together. So it's very intense. we as the teachers always have a conversation every day about what happened in the classroom, who did what, who maybe needs help, things like that.
Speaker 2 (19:51.224)
Well, I love the idea that, I think what I hear, you know, again, it sounds like you've got this adapted Socratic seminar method, but it's part of your culture. So then as the adults get together or as the teaching staff get together, you do a similar piece, right? There's some reflection. so you're modeling that. And then if I'm new, then I can kind of start to by osmosis, you know, and culture just kind of take in this idea of, we really want to hear what other people are saying. We want to reflect on this and I don't have to be perfect. Right. And those things can.
can meld in and cause sometimes I think meetings get a bad rap. Uh, cause it's just there to communicate something that could have been done in an email. But if, if you've really, if you're really wrapping culture into those meetings, and it's something that we really appreciate. Marsha, you're, you guys are doing some things different at reliance college. Uh, how, how do you explain this to, you know, your potential learners that are going to come in or parents that are looking for a place to send their kids to college? How do you explain the difference to them? We've, see sometimes.
our partners have a hard time with that. We all know it's good work, right? We know the outcomes are great work. And once kids get there, they agree it's great work. But how do you explain it before they've really felt it?
Yeah, I just want to mention that in the college program, not only do we have a specially designed liberal arts side of it, but for the academic side, and we also have psychological learning like self reflection and but we also have a whole component every year where the student does a real world research project in an area of their professional interest. so and then they get support from accomplished mentors who are maybe in that field.
and meet with their tutors once a week about this while they're doing the research and even implementing any kind of solution that they have. So that's how we're helping also in a practical, giving them practical experience and helping them develop entrepreneurship skills in that respect.
Speaker 2 (21:47.739)
Can you give us, can we go down that rabbit trail? Could you give us an example of one of those?
Well, we have Reliance College is not yet open. We're opening in September of 26. But what would happen is the first quarter of the year, the students are all in the specially designed liberal arts program, large science, math, music, literature. And then in the middle of the second quarter during the winter quarter, they would be doing research on a problem in their area of professional interest. So say their area is biological research.
They would have to find out, what's a problem that's in that area today? And then how to solve that problem and try to come up with a solution and either implement the solution or give a presentation about it and say, well, how you would implement it in the long run. And in that respect, they would get a lot of experience interfacing with people in that field, finding out what the problems are, learning more about it in a practical sense.
and being connected, networking with people in that field. So that's, and then the second, the third quarter, we do more liberal arts, which includes economics, finance, aesthetics, all kinds of things like that. What was I going to say? You asked me a question. but you originally asked me a different question. Then I started explaining this. That's I wanted to give context.
Yeah, we didn't go through. You know, yeah, that's great context. I love the idea that, you know, they're leaving with real world experience and that they get to go out and say, hey, is this really what I want to do? Exactly. do the work. But my question is really around the idea, you know, as you get ready to launch the college, how are you communicating this to parents and potential students?
Speaker 1 (23:38.136)
Yeah. Well, for one thing, one of our admission criteria is that a student has to participate in a summer program. We're probably going to make shorter ones, maybe three, four day ones, but in that way they try out what we have to offer and we try them out. It's interesting because I was talking to the president of the Claremont colleges last year, the ones in California, and he was saying how the typical admissions process is just not working very well.
Because the students, they're all gaming the system. Everybody's got an 800. I mean, the top SAT score, they've all been in a million extracurriculars. Everything, they write the essay to fit exactly what they want. And it doesn't help them, this college, really know is this the right fit between the student and the college. So this is why I think having something where they actually get a taste of what we're doing.
is good and then the parents too. We've been running what we call Reliance Days where we try to give parents and donors and other adults a taste of the kind of things that we do at the college and let them answer questions. So and those are the two things we've been doing to try to.
address the question of how do you convey to parents what the program is like?
Yeah. It seems like you're going to, you're going to be producing great work. Like there's no doubt there. And then the trickier part seems to be how do you convey that? Uh, like the idea of, you know, you get to, to taste and see, Come see what this is like, come feel it. There's a lot of feel probably involved. Um, and then word of mouth at some point of like, Hey, there's the graduates and being able to, you know, convey to those future learners, like this is what you really want to.
Speaker 2 (25:36.366)
gets you to where you really want to be. It's not necessarily the name of the college. It's going to get you the job you want. I always give the example. had a student and she thought she wanted to be a pharmacist. So she went to school. She went to the med school. She got to be a pharmacist and she didn't like it. like, well, that was an $80,000 gamble. it pay out. So it's like, that's, one of my big motivations for the work that we do through Magnify Learning is to help learners just figure out what they do and don't, and don't want to do like
on paper, being a pharmacist sounds great. It's good money. There's some respect to that. And at the end of the day, she just did, she felt like she was running her own business. She didn't want to do that. Right. So what, however it was, but if she could have spent some time with the pharmacist, maybe even an hour, right. She probably could have figured that out a long time before that. So anytime we give our learners these experiences, I think it's helpful.
Yes, exactly.
So Marsha on your journey, sounds like Montessori was a huge piece that kind of, you know, took you down this path and now you're going to bring it up to higher ed, which is awesome. Do you have a book that you'd recommend on the podcast? We like to just kind of see like, what's the book that maybe was a linchpin book for you or even a book now that kind of helps drive some of your thinking.
Hmm
Speaker 1 (26:56.376)
I have a lot of books.
I see a lot of books behind you.
It's hard to say one in particular. Well, if anybody wants to be introduced to the Montessori program, I would recommend The Secret of Childhood.
because she likes how she came up with the whole program to begin with. And it's really interesting, really interesting stories about what happened.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that everyone listening can learn from the Montessori method. So I like that idea of getting into the book and seeing, I mean, there's a lot of things we agree with. think the book might be a good starting point. And then we've got some friends that are in large public schools that are like, that's neat, but how do I do that? Right. So, you know, I think those are really good conversations to have though.
Speaker 1 (27:44.63)
Yeah, by the way, you know, it's interesting. I visited. So a girl that was babysat for me when my kids were little became a Montessori teacher. And then she went on and became head of the elementary program at school here in Chicago. And now she's the head of a program in a charter Montessori program in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago, Englewood. And I got to visit it. And it's just marvelous. I mean, what's what's going on there? So even in this environment where there
They have to deal with the Chicago public school system and go along with their requirements. And then they're dealing with an impoverished community. It's pretty amazing what happens. So I just want to say to anybody who's in public school out there, you can make a difference by trying to implement some of the principles.
Super good, super good. We'll take that message. So Marcia, if somebody wants to reach out or to study a little bit more about the work you're doing, where do we send them?
We have a website, Reliance College, and you can contact me there. There's also our seminar for the summer, be looked at at reliancecollege.org. And I also have an article that I published recently on teaching for freedom, which kind of explains my whole outlook on it, not just Montessori, but many other aspects.
of bringing in concepts about Shicks and Mihai's flow and Richard Feynman and all kinds of people.
Speaker 2 (29:25.398)
Okay, yeah, we'll make sure that we link that in the show notes. Marcia, thanks for joining us today. We appreciate it. Thanks. All right, PBL simplified administrators, this was a leadership episode for you to push your thinking. So wherever you're at, there's pieces here in the Montessori method that you can certainly glean from and bring into whatever environment you have and really move your vision towards something that's just super student-centered.
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (29:52.322)
that's addressing that whole child while they thrive academically. So thank you for tuning in. Thank you for getting better. Go lead inspired.
