In addition to reading the cases and working together to understand the issues at hand, participants have rich opportunities to work on mathematics through a variety of activities connected to each set of cases. As a course for parent education, the DMI curriculum proves to be a powerful tool for helping parents understand the mathematics their children encounter in elementary school. In addition, cases can be an important vehicle for eliciting parents' beliefs about the nature of learning, helping parents reconnect and re-examine their own school histories, and for supporting images of new classroom cultures. Throughout the course, parents reconnect with their own schooling, with perceptions of themselves in regard to their abilities in mathematics, and with the emotions that accompany these reflections. Parents work through math problems, analyzing each other's strategies and ideas while coming to discover that they too, have ideas about number and ideas about how numbers behave on which they can build greater understanding.
Parents learn to listen to the other parents in the seminar, to their children, and to themselves.
The DMI seminar offers parents the opportunity to discover their own ideas about math, recognize that all parents in the seminar have developing ideas and that their children also have mathematical ideas with which a parent can engage. This experience, this climate, is one in which a parent can thoughtfully examine his or her beliefs about the teaching and learning of mathematics. The DMI seminar has been conducted for parents of children attending two independent schools. In the school year 1998 - 1999, the seminar will be offered in an urban setting for parents of children in public and pilot schools. Inc. All Rights Reserved.