Thirty-seven years.
One question.
What does it truly mean to follow the child?
Karen Pearce has spent her professional life asking that question, and helping other guides find their own answer to it.Β
She trained at the Maria Montessori Institute in London in 1989, mentored by the world-renowned trainer of trainers Mrs Hilla Patell.
She went on to lead a model children's house for eighteen years, spent seventeen years as course leader in the Post Diploma Course in Observation, and now serves as Co-Founder and Director of Pedagogy at The Montessori Place in Brighton, where she mentors first plane guides and lectures across Europe and Asia.
Karen also for the last five years delivered a weekly online mentorship programme, Montessori Unwrapped, to support guides in putting theory into practice.
But credentials only tell part of the story.
What has shaped Karen's work more than anything is a conviction that Montessori practice, at its best, is not a method to be applied. It is a disposition to be developed; a way of seeing, questioning, trusting, and stepping back. It is, as she returns to again and again, the work of staying true to Montessori's Montessori.
That conviction is what Open Monteversity
is built on.
WHY OPEN MONTEVERSITY EXISTS
For years, Karen has worked with guides who are qualified, committed, and genuinely devoted to the children in their care.
She has seen how, when educators continue to grow beyond technique and training, Montessori becomes something more: a path to greater clarity, confidence, purpose, and the ability to profoundly impact the lives of the children they serve.
The confidence to trust what they observe. The depth to hold their practice against Montessori's original vision. The settled understanding of why what they're doing works, or why, on difficult days, it isn't.
The live programme that became Montessori Unwrapped was built in response to that. Sixty hours of coaching, reflection, and professional development, not as instruction handed down from above, but as a shared and unhurried exploration of what genuine Montessori practice looks and feels like from the inside.
Now, for the first time, a new programme, Open Monteversity, has been created, an online coaching programme. Wherever you are in the world, and wherever you are in your practice, you can access it in your own time, return to it whenever you need to, and allow it to settle at whatever pace feels right for you.
Β
WHAT THIS IS, AND WHAT IT ISNβT
Open Monteversity is not a training course. You don't need it to qualify.
It is a place to go deeper.
Six modules. Sixty sessions. Each one an invitation to stop, to reflect, and to see your practice with fresh eyes. To revisit theory and feel its daily implications in the Children's House. To sit with the guide's role; the art of observation, the courage to disappear, the language we offer children, and the stillness we ask of them that we must first learn to find in ourselves.
The programme closes the way the best professional development always should, not with an exam, but with a celebration. A self-evaluation. A moment to look back at how far you have come, and move forward, with renewed trust in the journey ahead.
