About the Mind in the Making Staff

Three incredible individuals joined Families and Work Institute team on June 1, 2011 and then to work with us on Mind in the Making: Erin Ramsey as Senior Program Director, Jennie Portnof as Project Coordinator and Julie Riess as Consultant on Education and Child Development.

Erin Ramsey is the Senior Program Director for Mind in the Making at Families and Work Institute and is responsible for the overall implementation and development of partnerships for Mind in the Making.

Ms. Ramsey has worked for over 20 years in the early childhood field and began her career as a family child care provider and preschool teacher. She later served for 12 years as Executive Director of 4C of Southern Indiana, Inc., a child care resource and referral agency, where she developed the organization and several programs that were nationally recognized. Ms. Ramsey also served as the director of public relations for a statewide child care resource and referral agency and was the Director of Early Childhood for the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation, the third largest urban school district in Indiana.

Throughout her career, Ms. Ramsey has served on numerous national, state and local boards and initiatives to increase the awareness of the importance of early childhood education and to improve the quality and accessibility for families, professionals and communities.

She holds an undergraduate degree in Child Development and Psychology from California State University at Sacramento. She also earned a Master of Science in Public Service from the University of Evansville.

Erin is the mother of four children, has been happily married for 21 years, has three dogs and a cat and resides in Evansville, Indiana. She is an experienced public speaker and works to help others see their potential.

Jennie Portnof is the Mind in the Making (MITM) Project Coordinator at Families and Work Institute. She takes the lead on creating materials that are able to combine the rich MITM content with elegant and engaging electronic and print formats. She oversees the MITM website, acts as liaison to MITM Learning Communities, collaboratively implements MITM Seven Essential Skills Trainings, MITM speaking engagement and webinar content and provides support in the daily development of MITM projects, outreach, reports, proposals, and a growing range of interactive MITM resources.

While at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with Poet and Activist Professor June Jordan and 19 other student poets, she helped create Poetry for the People — a program for the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry, political vision and moral witness that thrives today. Prior to joining Families and Work Institute, she was part of the creative/production team of network and agency trained professionals for both Nickelodeon Creative Advertising and Branding, covering content for all Nickelodeon networks and a large portfolio of external clients. She is a founding editor of Fort Necessity, a small literary magazine. She holds a MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to exhibiting her art work, she is a published poet and writer.

Julie is at Vassar College where she is the director of their early childhood laboratory schools and serves as a professor of education and development psychology. In fact, she has been using Mind in the Making as the basis of her spring semester course. Julie also writes a regular Gannett column for parents and has extensive experience in teacher and parent education and curriculum development. She will work with us full-time over the summer and then as an advisor when the fall semester begins.

From Julie:

Even as a child, I loved teaching children. It started out simple. I would find myself helping a 5^th grade classmate with a math problem, or gravitating to read to the younger children in the school library. By high school, I spent every lunch period next door at the elementary school; by college, I was completely at home in the campus laboratory school. (I would return a decade later to become the director of that same school.) Graduate school created a platform to merge the depth of critical thinking with the creativity of problem-solving. Each experience helped me to better articulate and understand what I felt watching a child’s face come alive with the excitement of learning.

During my past seventeen years as director of Vassar’s early childhood laboratory schools and as a professor of education and developmental psychology, I have enjoyed a career which blended my interests into one position: I have developed curricula and implemented teacher training, parent support and research programs that reflected contemporary child development theory and research. In concert with teaching, writing has been a forum for me to consider real-life applications of the developmental psychology literature to the daily tasks of parenting. Over the past eleven years, I have been writing a bi-weekly column, The Early Years, distributed nation-wide through Gannett Publications.

Now, a new adventure awaits me as I join the Mind in the Making team with Ellen, Marijata, and Jennie. Regardless of the contexts, the challenge and exhilaration of helping parents and teachers, community organizations and schools learn about the wonders of child development are the same. It is what keeps the fire in my eyes.

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D. is a developmental psychologist, early childhood educator, author and mother. For the past seventeen years, she has been the director of Vassar College’s early childhood laboratory schools. As a faculty member she has taught courses on the applications of developmental psychology research in understanding children in the context of their lives at home and school. Riess is the author of more than 200 articles on parenting, which appear in her bi-weekly column, The Early Years through Gannett Publications’ nation-wide distribution. As an educator and developmental psychologist, Riess has conducted regional and national training workshops for early childhood educators, parents, administrators, researchers and health care professionals on matching teaching, parenting and health care practices to contemporary research in child development.

You can see why with Erin, Jennie and Julie we have an ideal team for this next phase of our work on Mind in the Making. They combine strong backgrounds in child development, in research, and in working with all of the players in communities to help children and families thrive. They are visionary, creative and practical and will work on our direct work with the growing number of communities with which we are working as well as in creating new materials and training. We feel incredibly lucky to set off on the next phase of our Mind in the Making journey with their leadership.

Daily Kid

Mind in the Making is now available as a Vook

Mind in the Making: Experiments in Children's Learning (DVD)

Here is a list of Mind in the Making researchers and educators filmed to date

Community Schools: “Mind in the Making and Community Schools: Crossing Boundaries and Creating Strong Linkages for Children Birth through Eight and their Families,” is a collaborative project with The Children’s Aid Society’s National Center for Community Schools and the Institute for Educational Leadership. (Read more)

Learning Communities: Throughout the country, groups of parents, educators, and other family support and health professionals have joined together to learn more about the research on children’s learning from birth through the early elementary school years, and about how to use this research to promote better outcomes for children. (Read more)

Learning Modules for Educators: Mind in the Making Learning Modules for Educators is an 11-part, facilitated learning process designed to bridge the gap between research and teaching practice. (Read more)

Seven Skills Modules: We have created new Modules from the book, called the Mind in the Making Seven Essential Skills Modules. (Read more)

Experiments in Children's Learning DVD: This two-volume series of 42 videos take viewers on a series of virtual “field trips” to laboratories in the U.S. and abroad. (Read more)
View a crosswalk of the experiments to the seven essential life skills

Download a companion Catalogue to Mind in the Making: Experiments in Children's Learning

Have you seen the Marshmallow Test?

What does eating marshmallows have to do with how your kid does on the SAT?
Watch the video

Ask a MITM team member to speak at your event.

The MITM staff is having conversations about Mind in the Making with audiences across the country. Click here to invite a team member to speak at your event.

The Seven Skills:

Calendar

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