master of education program
How The Program Works
The Learning Arc: Encounter, Integrate, Contribute
Deep learning—the kind that changes who you are, not just what you know—follows a natural rhythm. You first encounter new frameworks and ways of seeing. Then you integrate them through practice, dialogue, and application to your own context. Finally, you express and contribute your unique understanding back to the community.
Montessori educators will recognize this as the Three Period Lesson. Holistic educators understand it as the progression from awareness to embodiment to action. Indigenous wisdom traditions know it as the path from receiving knowledge to becoming a knowledge keeper.
Whatever language you use, the principle is the same: transformative progression requires time, practice, and progression from introduction through integration to authentic expression.
The TIES program honors this natural rhythm through three six-month semesters:
Asynchronous & Online
All course-work occurs online without the requirement to travel to any location during the program. Seminar dialogues are asynchronous taking place over two-week periods. Self-directed adult learners participate as best suits their personal schedules. In many ways, exploring classmates’ reflections while having thought-space to contemplate one’s own responses makes for deeper learning opportunities.
Semester One: Encounter & Context
Using dialogue as the medium of sharing, explore humanity’s relationship to Earth and Cosmos, through story and systemic-ecological thinking
In this opening semester, you encounter the foundational frameworks that will shape everything that follows: cosmic consciousness, ecological literacy, systems thinking, observation as practice, and dialogue as co-creation of meaning. You’re introduced to the essential question that animates TIES: What contexts and processes in education might liberate teachers and learners to become catalysts for a new human in right relationship with Earth?
You begin exploring what a worldview is and how yours shapes what you believe about learning, teaching, and human potential. You study cosmic history—how life on Earth emerged from 13.8 billion years of evolutionary unfolding—and begin to see yourself and your students within this vast narrative.
You also begin developing your Emphasis Area—identifying what calls to you most deeply (peace education, ecological literacy, adolescent development, contemplative practices, whatever resonates) and establishing the lens through which you’ll explore all that follows.
Semester Two: Integrate & Explore
Exploring levels of conscious awareness through deep observation, transformative process, and creativity
In the second semester, you work with the frameworks introduced in Semester One, recognizing them in your own practice, your students’ experiences, the systems you inhabit. You explore and integrate these ideas through deepening dialogue, observation practices, creative expression, and direct application to your Emphasis Area.
The work becomes increasingly personalized. How does understanding yourself as part of the web of life shift how you design learning environments? What becomes visible when you learn to observe yourself observing? How does knowledge change when it’s co-created through dialogue rather than transmitted? These aren’t rhetorical questions—they’re the actual inquiry you’re living.
Your Emphasis Area development intensifies as you discover how cosmic narrative, ecological consciousness, and holistic principles intersect with your specific focus.
Semester Three: Express & Contribute
Synthesizing the connecting branches of integrative learning
In the final semester, you express your integrated understanding through substantial original work. Your Culminating Project weaves together everything you’ve explored—the cosmic and ecological frameworks, your observational and dialogical capacities, your Emphasis Area research, your personal transformation—into work that represents your unique contribution.
This isn’t a traditional thesis defending arguments or proving hypotheses. It’s exploration that asks: What do you uniquely have to contribute? How has this journey shifted your worldview and your practice? What are you called to bring into the world?
You also present your work orally, articulating not just what you’ve learned but how you’ve been changed through this process.
The Culminating Project becomes the foundation for your ongoing work—something you’ll continue developing and contributing long after graduation.
Non-linear Model
Perhaps the most foundational concept that distinguishes TIES from more traditional university programs is the sequence of the seminars. Though happening linearly in time, they are designed for holistic and deepening comprehension. The campus is a “prepared environment” as each semester is created to engage learners in their own educational evolution in an organic way.
“Our present urgency is to recover a sense of the primacy of the Universe as our fundamental context, and the primacy of the Earth as the matrix from which life has emerged and on which life depends.”
~Thomas Berry
Systems Perspective…
The systems view of life enables humanity to experience the Earth as an integrated whole composed of interrelated and interconnected networks that maintain life as if it were a living system on its own. In fact, Gaia Theory states that the Earth is a living entity because it has been able to balance itself over hundreds of millions of years to sustain life… that is, until the more recent activity of humans.
HOW SEMINARS WORK
Two-Week Cycles of Inquiry
Each two-week seminar begins with curated materials—books, articles, videos—that students explore on their own schedule. They read, reflect, and notice what resonates or challenges – entering excerpts one want to remember in their personal annotation space.
Each member of the cohort makes an initial posting in the seminar, sharing insights and questions. The entire community, along with the faculty, begins a process of authentic inquiry which we call “weaving” responses.
These two-week cycles compound over 18 months as the web of understanding grows increasingly rich.
DIALOGUE AS PRACTICE
Co-Creating Meaning Through Authentic Relationship
At TIES, dialogue isn’t just a teaching method—it’s a way of knowing. We draw on physicist David Bohm’s understanding of dialogue as collective inquiry, where shared meaning emerges.
Just like with observation, dialogue seeks to explore assumptions. Listening deepens, space opens between reaction and response, and new possibilities appear. You begin listening differently, asking questions, and building on others’ thinking.
This capacity becomes fundamental to how you facilitate learning.
MENTORSHIP & FACULTY SUPPORT
Guides on Your Journey
Every student works with a faculty mentor throughout the program in a private space where they explore evolving ideas related to their Emphasis Area, papers, questions and applied learning (practicum). You may arrange one-on-one calls or Zooms as needs arise. Mentors are always available by text and email for quick questions or support.
In seminars, faculty participate as co-learners—sharing their own wisdom-insights and asking thought-provoking questions. They bring deep knowledge of Montessori philosophy and holistic education ,approching each cohort’s dialogue with genuine curiosity about what is emerging.
TIES faculty hold credentials spanning the entire Montessori spectrum and holistic learning, and have been involved in education since the 1970s. At their core, they’re deeply committed to sustainability, ecology, cosmology, and whole human development.
Collaborative Learning Communities
During the last 20 years there has been a proliferation of courses and degrees offered under the umbrella of distance learning. For the most part these academic pursuits are similar to attending a conventional university. The professor lectures and gives out assignments, students submit papers, there are tests and there are grades.
In contrast we promote an integrative view hosted by a uniquely designed online Campus where students work in collaborative learning communities; where faculty are mentors and co-learners; where creativity and self-direction are valued; and where there is a an understanding of dialogue as process.
Dialogue
Our premise is that humanity has the possibility of reclaiming a sustainable relationship with the Earth. One of the processes of communication that makes this possible is dialogue. In this case we refer to a variation on a particular form of dialogue described by physicist, David Bohm. Bohm’s constant thread that particularly relates to our dialogue is that we are investigating the possibilities for the emergence of shared meaning; increasing awareness of our own and others assumptions; increasing sensitivity and willingness to “listen”; the creation of space between our reaction and our response; and a willingness to experiment with the principles described.
Course Integration
Although students register for three or four courses within each of the three semsters these courses are seamless – integrated across the entire six month semsester. The first semster ceates a contextual framework for the Emphasis Area as well as the remainder of one’s studies. During the second smester students begin to share their personal insights as a refelection of their Emphasis Area work. The third and final semester brings together creativity and research and ends with a Culminating Project.
PROCESS
Integrative Papers and Culminating Project
Assessment is synthesis—demonstrating your capacity to integrate learning and articulate evolving understanding. In traditional academic models, a student defends or proves an argument. Within the TIES paradigm, our students ask open-ended questions that arise from their personal journey.
At the end of each semester, students craft an integrative paper that explores open-ended questions based on what they have learned during the seminars. Faculty provide extensive narrative feedbacks.
The Culminating Project synthesizes your academic journey through the lens of your emphasis area.
Creativity, Observation & Research
TIES integrates observation, creativity, and research as interconnected pathways to understanding—not separate skills, but dimensions of reflective inquiry that inform each other. Observation practices develop your capacity to see with clear, non-judging attention. You explore how perception shapes—and is shaped by—the act of observation itself. Creative processes open intuitive ways of knowing. These are essential for self-observation and discovery of patterns that rational thought alone can not reveal. Research emerges from this foundation. Your investigations describe relationships between self and other, subject and object, inner experience and outer reality. You create an exploration that ultimately serves the community you work with – grounded in both rigorous inquiry and embodied understanding.
Your Emphasis Area Journey
Every student develops their own Emphasis Area, a focused inquiry into what matters most to you: Some past examples include: peace through education, ecological literacy, adolescent development, contemplative practices, holistic leadership, permaculture, and the soul of education. Your emphasis area becomes the lens through which you explore all that follows.
Towards the end of the first semester, you identify your area and begin building a bibliography. Your first Integrative Paper articulates this emerging focus. During the second semester, each seminar may be explored through your chosen lens. Faculty mentors guide your deepening inquiry. Your Emphasis Area is the core lens for your Culminating Project—substantial original work synthesizing your research, learning, and personal development.
Papers
At the culmination of each semester students prepare an Integrative Paper that synthesizes the discovery and learning from the content and dialogue of the previous six months. In traditional academic models a student defends or proves an argument. Within the TIES paradigm our students ask open-ended questions that arise from one’s personal journey.
The final paper is called the “culminating project” and is a weaving of the entire, unique learning experience of each individual.
Two-week Seminars
The semester is divided into seminars typically spanning two weeks. Learners explore books, articles, videos and other media in preparation for online dialogues with faculty and fellow students. These dialogues are organic and, although the required content may remain the same, the outcomes of the inquiry vary considerably from one year to the next — reflective of the nature of learning communities.
TIES values open inquiry in juxtaposition to explicit answers. This allows learners to dive deep into topics of interest and observe the beautiful word-web that forms as the seminar progresses.
Creativity, Observation & Research
The program of studies integrates observation, creativity and research as reflective inquiry. Students explore the nature of observation and engage in creative processes to further self-observation and intuitive insight. This enables students to create experiences for the children or adults they teach. By participating in observation and creativity students have access to the intuitive aspects of learning, enabling them to create research projects that ultimately describe relationships between self and other, subject and object.
Emphasis Area
Within the M.Ed. in Montessori Integrative Learning and Integrative Learning programs every student selects an area of emphasis. The emphasis area is a personal, passionate interest enabling learners to situate professional development in a field of their choice. This “independent” portion of the work accounts for approximately one-third of the degree requirements. TIES integrative seminars provide a “catalyst or lens” for exploring this emphasis area. See the individual emphasis area options for the MIL and IL program.