Summer Institute is over and I have to say that my head hurts with the amazing amount of information I was asked to absorb.
The main speaker the second day was Shelagh Gallagher. She is a professor at UNC Charlotte, ha directed two Javits grants and served as project manager in the production of the William and Mary science units for elementary grades.
Now that the credentials are out of the way, let me just say she was awesome. The subject of her speech was project based learning. She ran the whole room through one of her courses in an abbreviated manner and I was quite frankly amazed at how much I learned and how quickly I learned it. The subject was the 1913 Child Labor law and the Shirtwaist incident.
She also showed a video of teaching all about the plague to a group of third graders. It was amazing. She had a ton of research that supported the method with results far exceeding traditional methods. She showed us how to adjust the project based on the size of the group all the way down to a party of one for those of us homeschooling.
In the afternoon she did another session about how adolescent development affects learning. One section was on the beliefs about the Nature of Knowledge and Epistemological reasoning.
I could have listened to the woman for hours. If any of you ever get the chance to see her, I highly recommend it!!
