We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jesse McCarthy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jesse below.

Jesse, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

When I first thought of starting a podcast connected with my work in early education, I had some doubts, including self-doubt.

-I don’t know anything about recording, so what will I do with that?
-I don’t know if this thing will be successful, so what if I just make a mess of things?
-Do I even have the time for this??

But I had a lot I wanted to say about early education and parenting, especially in Montessori, so I thought, ‘Let’s just hop in and see if people find value in this..’

They did, and I enjoyed doing it.

Lots of work, no doubt, from initially setting the show up to ensuring I get an episode out regularly (every 3 weeks now), but it’s a joy.

I’ve been going over 4 years strong now, which is crazy to me because it kind of feels like just yesterday in a way.

And the show, The Montessori Education Podcast, has aided in my reaching more and more parents and teachers. I get letters all the time from listeners saying how much they enjoy the podcast, and it’s led to so many speaking engagements — which I just love doing.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

What I do generally is help parents and teachers aid in the flourishing of their children, while growing as adults right alongside them.

I do this through online content — videos, a podcast, mentoring — and through talks and workshops at schools and organizations.

My development related to all this began shortly after college, when I got a job teaching vocabulary to a small class of junior-high students.

The experience was a blast, and I fell in love with teaching. I’ve been keeping at in some way or another ever since, working with teenagers to infants.

Along the way I got really good at understanding children and the problems we adults (e.g. us teachers and parents) can cause at times. At my school, I became a kind of go-to guy for issues that couldn’t be solved, whether with a child or with a parent or even between colleagues.

And this, step by step, ultimately led to my becoming a school director and later executive, for infants to 8th graders.

During this time I realized that some of the youngest children in our school, in the Montessori classrooms, were the most joyfully independent ones.

So I really jumped into Montessori — trying to understand the philosophy while observing in A LOT of classrooms and talking with A LOT of teachers. (We had about a dozen schools in our network at that time.)

I was ultimately trained in Montessori, for ages 2.5-6+, and I started to speak on the educational approach more broadly. Eventually I started MontessoriEducation.com.

It’s been nearly 20 years since that first classroom I was in, and everyday I’m still growing, deepening my understanding of children and of us adults.

A unique element I bring to the early-education and parenting field is my approach, which combines practical, everyday skills for improvement as well as the “looking within” development that’s necessary for our children — and ourselves — to truly flourish.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

When I was working as a more traditional private school teacher, a dad of a 5th-grade girl once came to our head of school and said he didn’t want his daughter to have grades.

We gave him our best reasoning of why we had grades, but he wasn’t having it. He said something like, “That’s all fine and good, for anyone else, but for my daughter I don’t want you giving her grades.”

We talked trash behind this dad’s back, about how he had all these theories but didn’t understand children, etc.

Fast forward five years, and I became good friends with the man and came to realize that he made good sense about grades (though he was a little kooky and still is in other ways :)).

Two things this situation led me to unlearn: 1) I now watch out for a false sense of confidence in positions I take, or put another way I’m always on the lookout to ensure I have deep understanding of a topic I feel emotionally invested in; and 2) I now spend A LOT more time listening to and understanding other people’s opinions and arguments, before trying to counter them with my own thoughts. Super helpful!

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

This is a kind of wild story.

A new mom and dad were touring a school I was doing admissions at, with the potential of enrolling their infant in our Montessori 3-18mos program.

They noticed that we didn’t have any security system, and the mom asked, ~”Will you be putting up high fences surrounding all the classrooms?”

This concern and question came at the end of our tour, after A LOT of what one might call overprotective questioning by the mom. Think helicopter parent. (Any new mom or dad can probably relate!)

Well, I’m sitting across from this woman and her husband, with her daughter in her lap, and I’m thinking to myself that I can just do what most do, tell a potential client what she wants to hear — or I can speak from the heart and the mind, giving her my genuine self and very experienced take on what she’s asking.

I did the latter and said something like, ~”The truth is, we value community and a sense of freedom more than a false sense of security with prison-like fences that the children will look at every day. Our school is in a fairly affluent area with very low crime [which was true], and over my decade of work in our schools I have never seen someone attempt to break into them and harm a child [which was also true]. Not that crazy, super rare “bad things” don’t happen in the world, even in nicer areas, but even with that the reality is that big fences aren’t going to stop anything.”

This mom had already heard how we ensure the children are actually safe while at school. She had met the wonderfully sweet, caring and knowledgable staff we had. And she had learned just how awesome the programing was for infants there. So I had a hunch that all of this would outweigh her somewhat irrational fear of a “bad” person trying to get into the school to kidnap or harm her infant daughter (something that is soooooooo exceedingly rare, at least for certain in America).

My hunch was right. I’d taken a chance by being direct yet real with her, and it worked. She enrolled the next day. :)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.montessorieducation.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/montessoried/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MontessoriEd/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVNWLHK0-o6FnqzpCGl26rA