Claudia Díaz, an outstanding principal, is the head of Bogota’s Montessori British School, an institution with extraordinary academic results in four languages. These include Cambridge University tests’ (ours is the only school with six distinctions and the best average in the ICE), DELF’s (ours is the sole entity to put examinees forward from 1st grade), Mandarin test’s and the Saber 11 tests’ (we recently ranked 16th nationally). What is most surprising is that the students' curriculum does not focus on what they are asked about in these exams, since the school assigns an important academic weight to the arts—such as painting, dance, and music—, as well as to robotics, photography and high-definition video. In light of the above, we wanted to interview her.
Claudia Díaz is not like any other headmistress, neither in appearance nor in her way of thinking. She herself confessed to us that when she enters the United States and explains that she is the head of Montessori British School, she is always told that she does not look the part, because the stereotype that many of us hold true does not become her. She looks young, modern, and very athletic.
Asked how she has brought a school to this level so quickly, she explained: “I love what I do. For me, this is the best job in the world, because you can directly influence so many people, and it's amazing. I like my thoughts to be consistent with my actions. I like to surround myself with the best, and I carry out this policy at home and at school; here, only the most qualified people are hired, and only furnishings of the best-quality are bought. I take this enormous responsibility very seriously; that is why I keep studying, to provide the best education there is to my students.”
Claudia first graduated as an architect, and it was then when she learned about the magic of space and the close link between ambience and thought. For her, ambience is everything; that is why, when I got to visit the school, I was amazed by all that color and creativity. In this dream school, every classroom is different. This, she says, is one of the secrets of the excellent education they offer, for the constant change of your surroundings allows the brain to rest and stimulates the learning process.
Claudia has a master's degree from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), one of the universities with the most Nobel Prize winners in the world; also, a master's degree in Education from the University of Alabama. She recently graduated from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management's Executive MBA program. For Claudia, everything she learns has value, and what is magical is being able to transform it so that “small” students can learn it. With all her MBA experiences, she created a program for children, from 5th grade onwards, called Junior BA, where students learn to be entrepreneurs from a very young age. She also studied Photography and High-Definition Video at the New York Academy, and this served as a platform for her to create an analogous program for the Montessori British School students—something essential today, when most messages are transmitted accordingly.
Dr. Díaz too graduated from Singularity University, where she learnt about the exponential technologies that inspired the robotics curriculum imparted today to Montessori British School students from age 5 and a half. According to her, this is the 5th language taught at her school, and one of the most important for its academic project. She also received a scholarship for the Klingenstein program—from the prestigious Columbia University, in New York—, aimed at school headmasters from across the globe. She is also a coach from the ICC (London’s International Coaching Community). All of these studies rendered her school’s emotional intelligence program possible, one that’s already transcending the school’s barriers and reaching any parent on www.mind-driver.com.
Claudia is a firm believer in education for life; that is why she assigns great importance to health education. She has taken multiple courses on holistic cuisine, and she recently ended a tenure at New York City’s Natural Gourmet Institute, where she completed a course on sustainable agriculture. Her studies have helped her set up a mindful-eating program at Montessori British School, where students address disease prevention with healthy eating. The consistency of her ideas surprised me when I saw their healthy cafeteria, one that many schools would envy.
Without a shadow of doubt, behind a great school, there is a great woman who teaches us all that high-quality instruction can be provided based on an education for life.
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