All 2020 Events will be held via Zoom on the date indicated from 7:30-9pm. For each Zoom event you will receive a personalized registration link approximately 1 week before each event.
The Education Speaker Series features a mix of local and nationally-known speakers, addressing a range of topics related to raising healthy children and young adults, and promoting collaboration between parents and educators.
Please contact Info@PiedmontEdFoundation.org for more information.
January 26th - Zoom
Ariel Trost
Based on her 20+ years treating eating disorders and the scientific evidence to date, psychologist and Piedmont mom Dr. Ariel Trost, will offer parents practical strategies to nurture their children’s positive relationships with food, movement, and their bodies. The talk will focus on how to create a healthful home environment, how and when to assert boundaries around food and exercise, when to be concerned, and how to discuss all of these topics in age appropriate ways.
Many parents express concerns about how to talk about food choices and changing bodies - fearing “causing an eating disorder.” Dr Trost will address the ways parents should and should not discuss these topics - with specific emphasis on avoiding language that inadvertently invokes diet culture or the notion that there are good and bad bodies and instead focusing on fostering lifelong positive behaviors that fit every body.
February 9th - Zoom
Peggy Orenstein
Boys are subject to the same cultural forces as girls—steeped in the same distorted media images of female sexual availability and male sexual entitlement—which affect how they navigate sexual and emotional relationships. Based on over a decade of research and inspired by her New York Times best-seller Boys & Sex, Orenstein will discuss her work with high school and college guys, revealing how they understand and negotiate the new rules of physical and emotional intimacy in a changing world—and how parents can best guide their choices.
HOW TO RAISE SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE: HELPING KIDS FIND THEIR OWN PATH
Esther Wojcicki
Esther Wojcicki, an educator, journalist, author, and parent, offers a formula for raising successful people: Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness. The opposite of helicopter parenting, she advocates for letting children find their own path. She is the founder of the award-winning Media Arts program at Palo Alto High School, a leader in establishing the Google Teacher Academy, and was California Teacher of the Year in 2002.
PAST EVENTS
September 15th - Zoom
HOW TO BE AN ALLY
Rosalind Wiseman from Cultures of Dignity and Ina Bendich, Victoria Houston, and Harmonee Grace Ross from Piedmont Black Student Union
How do we make an inclusive community where everyone feels a sense of belonging? How can we have honest conversations about discrimination and bigotry that bring us closer as a community? Although this topic can be uncomfortable for White people, it is efforts like these that build our capacity to be a place of dignity for all.
This presentation and panel discussion will give increased knowledge and skills to support our schools’ and community’s efforts to promote equity and diversity by discussing the following topics:
- How to have hard conversations about race and privilege with your children and adults in your family and community
- How to support anti-racist work when you can’t relate to the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) or you have little education on how to have these conversations
- Knowing the difference between a curious question and a question that reinforces bias and discrimination
- Increasing educators' and parents’ skills to teach children how to contribute to a culture of dignity in their school setting
Attendees will have an opportunity to ask questions of the panel members.
PANDEMIC PARENTING AND THE ART OF SCREEN TIME
Anya Kamanetz
OPEN THE DOOR TO RICH DISCOVERY, BETTER MEMORY AND MORE FUN IN NATURE
John Muir Laws
How can we help children (and parents!) become more astute observers, curious explorers, creative thinkers, deliberate investigators, and better naturalists? At a time when our world has contracted and life increasingly revolves around our technology and screens, naturalist, educator and artist John Muir Laws will talk about the importance of nature — and how to pay attention, see, record and ultimately steward the natural world all around us.
Laws, who has written and illustrated “kid-tested” books art and natural history including, will help us reframe our thinking about attention and curiosity, the use of nature journaling (our brains on paper!) and how we approach nature, fieldwork and investigation.