She was born in Italy and was way ahead of her time. Montessori passed the baton to Bloom. She died the same time Bloom was developing his taxonomy and quoting Maria Montessori is how Brett Salakas of St Kevin’s Catholic Primary School Eastwood NSW (Suburb of Sydney) introduces why he and fellow teachers  undertook an Action Research Project in May 2014 using the Padagogy Wheel. This project was to research and report the results of a quite unique teaching and learning experiment. “A New Spin on Learning” is really worth a read.

Now we have an Italian Version of the Padagogy Wheel  and much of Montessori’s thinking and methods in an indirect way will be helping Italian speaking teachers again in their first language.

I asked Maria Cristina to share how she got interested in the Padagogy Wheel in her own words . She said: “My parents were Primary teachers, my grandad was a Primary teacher, too, and I thought that was going to be my job, because I saw their enthusiasm in helping pupils finding their way in the world and their need to find different, motivating way to teach. My father went to school with bags full of games and strange tricks and tools to teach Maths, and his students loved him…and his subject, too!

I’ve been teaching since 1984, but I used computers for teaching for the first time in a Course at CAVILAM, in Vichy, in 1982: I learnt how to write French exercises for students using a computer, but, being not so good with DOS, I thought that it was too difficult for me. But something started to work in my brain: it would have taken time, but that could be the future of teaching.

Many years and many courses from then, I came across the Padagogy Wheel thanks to a Professional Association  of teachers , ANITEL: I found it a fantastic tool that linked Pedagogy Theories and Technology to help students in reaching their learning goals in a more aware, creative,  involving way.

I visited the website and I was astonished when I found that there was no Italian translation! So I asked Allan if I could do it, and we started a long , enriching correspondence made of mail, messages, posts, a little bit complicated by the time zone offset!

It was not so easy to translate the Wheel: some words have no direct  correspondence with the Italian, and sometimes it is difficult to make a full sense without distorting the author’s idea, but I think this is still an important job: in Italy there are many teachers that could find too complicated to use the original wheel but I think they will make the most of it, thanks to my work.

I had the chance to present the Wheel  in two special occasions: The  2nd International Move Conference in Naples, in October and the TESOL Italian Conference in November, and everywhere I found attentive, interested, excited colleagues  that have asked for so much information on the wheel and its use that I decided to run a Webinar on eTwinning in February for the European eTwinning Ambassadors and in Italian for Italian eTwinning teachers.