Jenny is the Director of The Shop at Bay Farm Montessori Academy in Duxbury, MA. 

The Shop is the newest feature of the Bay Farm campus.  It serves as an innovation lab designed specifically for middle Schoolers but also impacts the students at all levels, allowing teachers to bring their classes for workshops and labs that integrate into the curriculum.

A former K-12 music teacher and performing artist, Jenny holds a B.A. in Music Education and Theatre from Samford University. She has 8+ years of teaching experience in a multitude of school settings and non-profit education programs. Jenny’s deepest passion is the pursuit and cultivation of individualized creative learning, and she is positive that the revolutionary pedagogical practices of Maria Montessori are the key to the future of the self-driven, innovative education students need to succeed today. 

She is excited every day to support Bay Farm Middle Schoolers with an individualized design thinking curriculum created to bring knowledge to action within the walls of the innovation space, The SHOP.  She feels fortunate to be a part of this community at the forefront of a novel movement in education.

The Shop at Bay Farm Montessori Academy defined: A responsive, creative plan is crucial to overcoming any obstacle. 

Students today are not climbing a ladder of success; they are navigating a maze in this ever-changing world.   Success requires preparedness and self-awareness, tools that students need to be able to fearlessly seek out problems and locate the tools needed to solve them.

A pivotal and divergent thinking process is what we teach our students every day at The Shop at Bay Farm Montessori Academy, a Pre-K through 8 school in Duxbury, MA.  The Shop is an innovation hub that opened fall 2020 custom made for the middle school program at Bay Farm and for positioning its students at the forefront of education by preparing them for a future we don’t quite understand.  The Shop is where middle schoolers bring their foundational learning and ideas to life in a collaborative, challenging environment, and gain the skills and confidence to take on real-world challenges. 

The SHOP is a prime example of how Bay Farm practices the Montessori philosophy of building independence through hands-on experience, though it was a different kind of shop that inspired the name. When first researching the teaching method in the early 1900s, Maria Montessori had adolescents work in her store where they engaged with customers, learned about supply and demand, balanced checkbooks, and how to run a sustainable business. By taking on a managerial role in a real business, the children would develop interpersonal skills and a sense of self-efficacy that would become the core of Montessori’s revolutionary approach to education.  She knew that middle schoolers needed a sense of agency and control to feel like they were important and contributing. We took her idea and updated that shop experience to make it current and flexible.

The highly adaptable space with writable walls and durable work surfaces will constantly evolve to fit the needs of students and be accessible at all hours of the day. A group of students may be interested in building a project around improving the water quality in Duxbury Bay. After studying water chemistry in the classroom, the students could go down to the Bay to collect water samples, analyze the data and design filters in The Shop and then presenting their findings to local conservationists in The Collective, a central space for collaboration and presentation designed for expert and peer-review, an essential part of a middle schooler’s development.

Students are encouraged to seek new ways to enhance their projects using all the unique tools Bay Farm has to offer. From a podcast incorporating their findings using state-of-the-art sound equipment in The Studio and experiment with water quality effects on local ecology in The Greenhouse, a natural laboratory on campus.

No matter what challenge students take on, Bay Farm’s mission isn’t for students to have all the right answers but to ask the right questions, recognize the right resources, and make the right connections. With those 21st-century skills in hand, students can envision what they will become—design-thinkers ready to take on the world.