Preparing Your Environment for Success: Using marketing strategies to organize your Montessori Classroom

Following Maria’s lead, who gave education a scientific approach, this workshop will connect marketing and education. Stores and businesses commonly use marketing strategies to prepare their environment and to better serve their customers. This workshop will approach these tools to our classroom and help us build the right classroom for our students. It will be an interactive workshop full of examples and will use accessible language.

During the workshop we will create our marketing plan following these steps:

1. Know your business: Who are your students? How can I get information about them (observation, surveys, heat maps, anecdotal records…)?
2. Determine Target Market: What are the values that you want your students to have? (grace and courtesy, peace education, imagination, creativity…)
3. Analyze Competitors: Don’t reinvent the wheel, invest your time in observing other Montessori classrooms.  Learn how other teachers have solved the same situations you encounter in your classroom.
4. Set Goals: What do you want your classroom to be? (long and short term goals, academics, personal growth.) Be creative, be ambitious.
5. Outline Strategies: How to define your classroom’s culture? How to communicate the classroom’s message to students/parents/administration? Define an independent strategy for each one of the goals you defined.

We will also talk about commonly used marketing/merchandising tools:

• Linear setups: Make your shelves more attractive to students: Popular strategies followed by supermarkets and big stores that will help you model your classroom environment (hot cold spots – diamond rule – head of linear…)
• Music: How music can alter the rhythm in the classroom and how to use it to create the right environment.
• Light / Illumination: Create different atmospheres in the classroom.

CGMS Alumni and Faculty registration is $35. To register, click HERE.

General registration is $45. To register, click HERE.

About Jorge Haro

I was born in Zaragoza, Spain and graduated with Bachelor’s of Arts in Economy (1998) and Sociology (2000). I worked in market research for 10 years directing my own company and participating as a guest teacher in several colleges in Madrid, Spain. In 2008, I moved to Lakeland, Florida and decided to pursue my career as an educator and received my Florida Teaching Certificate for K-6 and Spanish (k-12) in 2010. I have been a Montessori educator since 2010, first as an assistant and later co-teacher in the lower elementary classroom. I’ve always worked in charter public schools. I received my CGMS Montessori Elementary Certification (6-12) in 2014.

I am married to my wife Raquel since 2001 and have two children. Miguel is 14 and will start high school this year. He was in my classroom for three years and wants to become a professional guitar player. Cristina is 10 and is moving to fifth grade next year. She loves animals and wants to be a vet. I love to travel, read (mostly history) and music (I love to attend to concerts and festivals). I am looking forward to working and learning with you!