Join us Saturday, November 5th for the 2016 Agency Based Education conference to be held at Thanksgiving Point.
This year’s conference is going to be great and feature more education options, programs, principles, and opportunities for you and your family. Whether you home school, public school, or want to start a school, you’ll be richly rewarded for attending this year’s conference.
Speakers at this year’s conference include:
Aneladee Milne
The Two Secret Keys to Happy Learners – What Scientists Know and Policy Makers Won’t Let Teachers Do.
The brain is the new frontier. Modern educational theorists spend most of their time delving into the inner workings of the brain. With the invention of the FMRI they are able to look at the chemistry of the brain while kids are learning. Brain chemicals are the programmers of the brain. What they have discovered is shocking. Compulsion is not as effective as they used to think. In fact, it may even be counter productive. Neuropsychologists believe that the key to great learning is happy learners and they have discovered two key happy juice creators in the brain. Let’s talk about these two key happy juice creators and why current policy causes teachers to poison the happy juice.
Aneladee Milne has been heavily involved in the field of education since 1999. She holds an undergraduate degree in Statesmanship and a Masters of Liberal Arts with an emphasis in Education from George Wythe University. Aneladee’s interest in education grew out of her love of homeschooling her own six children. As her children grew older and their needs changed she created a community school with several other homeschooling families which eventually came to be called A New Commonwealth School. This prompted her and her husband to develop their first project-based curriculum called Shakespeare Conquest. In 2001, she partnered with Tiffany Earl co-author of The Student Whisperer to create a mentor training company called LEMI – Leadership Education Mentoring Institute. Since incorporating, LEMI has created many Scholar Projects™ and has developed a very unique mentoring rich methodology for teaching classics and original source material in the classroom. She is the author of The New Commonwealth School, a source book for creating long-lasting educational communities and co-author of The Lost Davinci’s, an hilarious fictional read-aloud for homeschooling families. In 2012 Aneladee teamed up with Maurice Harker, founder of Life Changing Services and Director of the Sons of Helaman program – a pornography addiction recovery group therapy program for young LDS men. Together they developed the addiction prevention/self-mastery program called Eternal Warriors.
Kathryn Spencer
Launching an Education Revolution
The strongest leverage point in the education of our youth is to build up their parents! Education systems that attempt to “overcome” the influence of the family are common place and detrimental to society! The family unit is taking a beating on all sides, it’s time to not only “Defend the Family” but to educate and build up the family unit to be stronger and more unified. The current and future generations deserve an education system that both honors parents and inspires students to live a purposeful life. It is not only possible to have an organized community working together to educate our families, it is vastly more fun and efficient!
Matt & Kathryn Spencer met the summer of 2000, were married that December, and haven’t slowed down yet. They are raising 5 children and have been on a quest to live their God given purpose and honor the sacred stewardship of parenthood. Kathryn is the Director and founder of American Family Education. She is constantly mentoring with and learning from the top minds in education. Agency based, purpose driven education is her passion and she aims to make self-directed education accessible to everyone and to return control of our youth’s educational system to parents! She has inspired, taught, and lead many to true principles of education while inspiring them to understand their individual worth, talents and purpose.
Josh Daniels
Criminalizing Absence: The Injustice of Compulsory Education and Truancy Laws
Utah law holds students and parents criminally liable for habitual truancy. Do you know how many parents have been put behind bars for the truancy of their children? This criminalizing of absences from government schools creates a “school to prison pipeline” and does little good to actually help children. Learn the facts and how alternative approaches can solve this problem while respecting parents rights and substantively helping kids.
Josh Daniels is the policy advisor for Libertas Institute. He received his degree in political science from Brigham Young University and his law degree from the University of Houston. He has worked on a variety of state, local, and federal policy issues. He is a former senior aide to US Congressman Pete Olson, a US Marine Corps combat veteran, and currently the Sr. Director for State Relations for Connections Education. He has worked in the juvenile courts and mentored at risk youth and has a passion for education and juvenile justice issues.
Ian Cox
A Thomas Jefferson Education
Ian Cox is at the Leader rank in the Life Leadership company (LifeLeadership.com), and he teaches Leadership, Classics, and Innovative Thinking for high school students at Colesville Academy in Cedar City, Utah. Ian is a featured speaker for Thomas Jefferson Education (TJEd.org) and runs a one-on-one Mentoring Service by phone and online for youth and adults seeking a quality, classical leadership education.
Ian mentors students and business men and women of all ages and levels. He has mentored, both individually and in classes, book discussions, speech and debate, simulations, writing, economics, history, classical math, personal mission discovery, and classics—all mixed together with whatever fascinating tangential topics come along.
Ian is a popular keynote speaker at educational and business events. He loves reading, basketball, and discussing deep ideas on history and political science. Ian and his wife Emma have two sons. Ian blogs here >>
Wendy Hart
Real Education vs. Popular Education Fads
Multiple sources find that the latest fads in education are not substantiated with evidence. We like to hear certain things like ‘greater depth of understanding’ or ‘critical thinking’ or ‘grit.’ But how many of these nice-sounding ideas are based in evidence and research? How do they compare with some of the less flashy, more reliable methods from the past? Unfortunately, not as many. How do ‘good’ ideas get adopted without evidence? And how should we be evaluating the educational programs du jour?
Wendy Hart is the mother of three children. She and her husband, Scott, have resided in Highland, UT for 16 years. Raised in Cupertino, CA (home of Apple computers), Wendy received her B.S. in Mathematics from Brigham Young University. She has worked for several high-tech firms in Utah County and currently runs her own database programming business. Wendy is honored to serve the people of Highland, Alpine and Cedar Hills as their representative on the Alpine School District Board of Education.
Alyson Williams
Competency Based Education: Educating for human greatness or human capital?
Promoted as a way to leverage technology so students can move at their own pace and enjoy a more personalized education, CBE sounds like a trend that should be compatible with Agency Based Education. In the context of nationally aligned standards, assessments and data profiling however, the hype of an individualized education masks the reality of students enduring the most homogenous, micro-managed education experience yet. Can we recognize the difference between customizing experiences to fit the student and customizing students to fit the outcomes of CBE’s central planners?
Alyson Williams is a mother of five and an education policy parent activist. With a career background in data management for cross-media publishing and a Bachelor of Science in Education from Brigham Young University, Alyson takes a particular interest in the potential and the pitfalls of the increasing role of technology in education.
Audrey Rindlesbacher
Timeless Principles of Education
Philosophers, Politicians, Teachers and Parents have discussed the process of education almost from the beginning of time. What should children learn? When should they learn it? How should they learn it? Today homeschoolers and educators face a vast variety of conflicting methodologies and educational approaches telling them the what, when and how to teach their children and students. But who is right and who is wrong? Which way really works? The answer is to step away from the methodologies and rely on the timeless principles taught by the greatest thinkers and educators in history. Come learn what these principles are and how you can apply them right now!
Audrey Rindlisbacher has an intense passion for principles and the role they play in education and self-development. She has spent the last 15 years researching the tools for using lifelong learning to discover and live true principles. Audrey as homeschooled her 6 children for 20 years. She has a liberal arts bachelor’s degree and is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Education at Harrison Middleton University. You can find her book reviews and writings at TenBoomInstitute.com.
Dave Mallinak
The Trivium: Providing Students with the Ancient Tools of Learning
Berean Baptist Academy is one of more than 1,000 Classical and Christian Schools across the country. By “Christian,” we mean that we offer a truly Christ-centered education: that all subjects are taught as part of the whole of the created world of which Jesus Christ and His Word provide the center. By “Classical,” we mean that in all our levels and programs of teaching, we strive to emphasize the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of every subject. The Classical approach to Christian education insists that there are certain tools of learning, and that when we teach our students to learn those tools and to master their use, then they are equipped to learn for themselves. These tools have been lost in our generation: our purpose is to restore them.
After spending all his growing years in the Midwest, Dave Mallinak and his young bride loaded up the truck and moved to Utah in 1997. Dave spent four years teaching in the Christian school and serving as Assistant Pastor at Berean Baptist Church in Ogden. In 2001, Dave was called to serve as Berean’s tenth pastor and superintendent of the Christian School. That call marked the beginning of a remarkable journey in the field of education, a journey that carried the Christian School from a self-paced, self-taught program to a Classical and Christian School. Since arriving in Utah, God has blessed Dave and his wife with five children, all of whom can read, and none of which have spent any time in juvenile detention.
