When I learned about Wildflower Schools I didn’t have much experience with Montessori education, and I didn’t expect our three year collaboration to broaden my understanding of Montessori as an entire framework of values, not just a way of teaching children. Wildflower Schools has a unique approach that empowers them to live these values throughout their organization. Values like transparency, self-governance, connectedness, and growth were all tenderly incorporated into day-to-day tasks like meeting, discussing, and making decisions. When they decided they were interested in developing technology to support teachers in the opening of new schools and I was brought on board, I was inspired by the opportunity to also incorporate these values into my technical and creative contribution.

The mission at Wildflower Schools is exciting: empower more teachers to open more Montessori schools by providing resources, knowledge, and financial support. Though simple at face value, this mission is actually quite complex. I learned that a lot of the complexity in this mission arises out of the need to address the specific and individualized needs of a teacher in their journey to opening a school. Each teacher is unique, with different backgrounds, abilities, and dispositions. The support Wildflower Schools provided was under pressure, not because it wasn’t a clear mission, but because of the customized support needed to bring new schools online over multi-year periods stretched their team thin. This is how My Wildflower, a completely custom internal platform, was born.

When I started, much of this support was expressed to teachers in the form of a program run by Wildflower Schools called the School Startup Journey. This multi-year program had been conceptualized as a way provide structured and targeted support to teachers as they went deeper down their paths toward becoming Montessori educators, split into three phases: Visioning, Planning, and Startup. But I quickly discovered that, while this program came with a wealth of links, files, instructions, and workflows, there was no one place where they could exist together or where progress could be tracked. Instead, much of content existed as links in a single 200 page slideshow that had organically grown as new needs and requests were responded to and incorporated.

I worked closely with Maggie Paulin, who had the difficult task of coordinating this knowledge and conveying it to teachers, to audit the existing School Startup Journey and look for opportunities together. We quickly landed on a set of clear improvements that we could explore: structure the journey’s phases into clear milestones and tasks which teachers could work on, and allow them to track their progress toward milestones in a digital platform. This became an editorial design question: how do we create a sense of hierarchy and order in a process that is, by design, meant to be flexible and open - suiting the needs of each teacher?

We started small, by generating a catalog of the material available, and working through initial design questions. As we built and launched the tool to internal stakeholders and ultimately to teachers, we embraced a flexible approach where feedback and ideas could be reincorporated into the design, developed, and launched. For example, we realized teachers needed easy access to certain resources only at certain moments in the journey, so we attached these to specific tasks and surfaced them at certain times, to avoid overwhelm. We also empowered teachers working in teams to open their schools to delegate tasks to one another, allowing a collaborative and open approach.

This work evolved over the course of three years of close collaboration and focus on the needs of teachers opening new schools. As this project was rolled out, many teachers in the network of Wildflower Schools expressed authentic gratitude for the structure it offered, and guidance it provided in the uncertain process of entrepreneurially opening a school. I felt heartened by this, knowing that the work was helping to express the values of Wildflower Schools in the world. With this technology, Wildflower Schools has been set up to onboard even more teachers than before, and expand their mission’s ambition and scope.

Katelyn Shore, Co-Founder, Wildflower Schools

Working with Taylor was transformative for our organization. As a mission-driven nonprofit, we needed someone who could help us design, build, and launch technology that deeply reflected our values while solving real challenges for our educators. Over more than two years, Taylor was a true partner - aligning our team around a shared product vision and translating abstract needs into clear, usable, and elegant solutions. His rare combination of product thinking, design sensibility, and technical skill made him an invaluable extension of our team. He brings ideas to life seamlessly, always rooted in mission, and was a joy to collaborate with.