Montessori, MS, Ed.S.

If you want to feel confident even when dancing with fish…

The three-year-old in the puffer fish costume did not want to dance. Neither did her friends the lobster and the clown fish. To encourage them, teacher Sophie Bengtsson, standing off-stage, danced vigorously to the music and mouthed the words with great exaggeration. It was something she never had the call to do in her former career in a Stockholm public relations firm.

But this occasion called for dancing. And patience. And enthusiasm in buckets. And Sophie Bengtsson delivered.

She’s becoming, she says, the “teacher I want to be.” 

The journey from PR executive to Montessori teacher – and from Stockholm to Miami – began with a passion for an Italian educator and her unique teaching method.

“After falling in love with the works of Maria Montessori I started to imagine myself changing careers,” says Bengtsson, who studied Montessori’s life and career first as a hobby, later as part of her master’s degree requirement at Barry University in Miami.

Bengtsson found Barry University’s Montessori program after she launched an international search. “My friends encouraged me to study in Italy,” she said, where Maria Montessori lived and worked. But after a phone call to Barry’s Adrian Dominican School of Education, in which she spoke to Associate Professor Ijya Tulloss, Bengtsson’s mind was made up.

“I felt so welcome,” she says. “It meant the world to me how they made me feel at ease with my far-from-perfect English, and gave me a crash course in the American college system. The slogan I had read on Barry’s Web page, ‘where you belong,’ suddenly had meaning.” The caring approach that Dr.  Tulloss, program coordinator Barbara Alderman, and other faculty and staff showed to Bengtsson and her husband – also a Barry student – helped the couple feel like part of a community.

Bengtsson finished her Master of Science in Montessori Education in spring 2007 after two years of study.  She is a teacher at Miami Shores Montessori School, where she completed her student teaching.

Her education and experience has made her transition to full-time teaching very natural. “I know what I’m doing and I know why I’m doing it,” she says. “It takes years of experience, of course, before I become the teacher I want to be, but as a rookie I feel confident.”