We had a great event on May 14, 2012! 290 people came for the screening of Race to Nowhere, even on the warmest night of the year!
Some good questions were asked, after the screening, and the panel of Eric Murray, Cascadia Community College President, Pat Orrell, Executive Director of The Attic Learning Community, and Brian Bansenauer, Cascadia Community College Educator and Attic Board membe and parent, was a perfect balance of warmth, business, entrepreneur, experienced educator, and mama bear! And a huge thank you to Blake Ilstrup, Attic Board President, for being such a great moderator.
Several people signed up for brown bag meetings, to continue the dialog, and these will start in the fall. More info on this at a later date.
___________________________________The Attic Learning Community hosted Dr. Constance Kamii, Professor of Early Childhood Education, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, for a evening lecture and all-day workshop on March 9 & 10, 2011. The event drew over 175 attendees, who gave Dr. Kamii two standing ovations! Here's what participants said:
"What a wonderful and exciting presentation! You gave me a lot to think about and I'm excited for the future"
"I learned the importance of autonomy and decision making in developing children's logical thinking"
"I gained a better understanding of Piaget's constructivist theories and the nature time line for childrens development of structures"
About the Instructor
Constance Kazuko Kamii, Ph.D., is passionate about educating teachers, especially about educating them on ways to present mathematics so their students will “construct their own knowledge” rather than just memorize rules. Children learn math the same way they learn everything else, Dr. Kamii explains. They have to experiment with and think about numbers before they really understand how numbers work.
Dr. Kamii’s pioneering methods in teacher education grew out of her 15-year association with renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, whose lectures she attended as a student at the University of Geneva. “His books about his theory of thinking were dense, but when I heard him speak, he presented his ideas much more clearly,” she recalls. “I knew I wanted to work under him.” Dr. Kamii applied Piaget’s approach to thinking to the field of mathematics education. Over the years, her insights on constructivism, supported by extensive, comprehensive research studies of children, have become widely known and accepted throughout the United States as well as other countries. Her books have been translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish, and she speaks to groups around the world.