Author: Jon Mitzmacher

Dr. Jon Mitzmacher is the Head of the Ottawa Jewish Community School. Jon is studying to be a rabbi at the Academy for Jewish Religion and is on the faculty of the Day School Leadership Training Institute (DSLTI) as a mentor. He was most recently the VP of Innovation for Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools.  He is the former Executive Director of the Schechter Day School Network.  He is also the former head of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, a K-8 Solomon Schechter, located in Jacksonville, FL, and part of the Jacksonville Jewish Center.  He was the founding head of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Las Vegas.  Jon has worked in all aspects of Jewish Education from camping to congregations and everything in between.

This Cannot Be Done Without You

Screenshot_2_15_13_9_17_AMNo Wordle’s.  No iPads.  No blogfolios.  No SmartBoards.  No Skype’s.  No 21st Century Learning.  Not even 20th Century Learning.  No amount of global connectedness or educational technology will make this happen.  And, it appears, no amount of money, seminars, interventions, blog posts, or acts of discipline can will it into existence.

This cannot be done without you.

Nothing extraordinary happened this week at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  This is not predicated on an event.  If anyone thinks this is connected to him or her, s/he is mistaken.  There is no crisis nor emergency.  There is simply honesty.

This cannot be done without you.

I have written 14 blog posts about “Community of Kindness”.  We have invested thousands of dollars in new programming and interventions.  We have hosted Parent Forums.  We have preached from the pulpit.  We have made faculty and student movies. We have meted out significant consequences.  We have accepted responsibility.  I have made a number of personally awkward phone calls or meetings with parents.

This cannot be done without you.

We are not unique.  Having recently returned from a national conference, I am reassured to note that issues of kindness rank high on all administrators’ lists of priorities and that we are all struggling with similar issues.  Although it is somewhat comforting to know that we are not the only Sisyphus pushing the kindness boulder up the hill, it resolves nothing.  We share resources and uncomfortably shrug shoulders.

This cannot be done without you.

There is nothing poisoning the water in Jacksonville.  The students, teachers, and families of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School are not uniquely unkind.  We want our school to live up to our highest Jewish values.  We want our children to feel safe, protected, nurtured and loved within (and without) our walls.  In my heart of hearts, I cannot believe that anyone doesn’t have the best of intentions.  And yet.

This cannot be done without you.

Facebook.  Instagram.  Twitter.  Minecraft.  Text.  Skype.  Who knows what else?  It is true that our ability to be unkind has gotten easier and faster.  It is also true that we have dedicated class time and coffee talks to digital citizenship.  Pushing unkind behavior from the playground to the PlayStation does not satisfy.  Our ability to be kind has not gotten harder.  We just have to remember to practice it.

This cannot be done without you.

Birthday parties.  Play-dates.  Sleepovers.  Concerts.  Virtual Gaming.  Who is included and who is left out?  Which children come to school having shared an out-of-school experience and which children come to school having lived through its exclusion?  For that matter, which parents?  And how many of our teens and parents are forced to confront their exclusion via social media as pictures and videos of what they are missing are paraded, exchanged, and liked before their eyes?

This cannot be done without you.

I am as guilty as anyone else.  I have children in our schools.  They have friends and they have acquaintances.  They have play-dates and sleepovers with the former, but rarely with the latter.  I use social media.  We have become obsessive self-documentarians and I am no different.  I want to provide friends and family a window into our lives and social media allows us to.  Have I unthinkingly posted pictures of such play-dates and sleepovers without thinking through the consequences?  Absolutely.

So this cannot be done without me as well.

I am not in despair.  We are not giving up.  We have had successes.  Students refer to “community of kindness” in the lunchroom and during their Bnai Mitzvah speeches.  We continue to reward kindness and penalize meanness.  I continue to push myself to intervene in the grey areas.  Our middle schoolers are attending an important play on the topic this very afternoon.  We have a movie screening coming up for our teens and parents.  And, most importantly, our teachers care deeply and are willing intercessors in the lives of their students.  When children are in our care we can, in fact, ensure communities and kindness.  But.

This cannot be done without you.

No amount of programs, interventions, assemblies, blog posts, sermons, coffee talks, dollars, hand-wringing, or complaining will make us into a community of kindness.  And no amount of saying “Community of Kindness” will turn us into one.  It will take simple, everyday acts of kindness, piling up one on top of the other, day after day, week after week, until one day we look up and realize that we are, indeed, a community that is a little kinder than it once was.

Please, God, let that day be soon upon us.

From Theory to Practice in One Photo

I recently returned from the annual North American Jewish Day School Conference, held this year in Washington, D.C.  It was a wonderful experience, and you can click here for links to the conference.  You can click here (even if you do not have a Twitter account) to see tweets from and about the conference.

There were many wonderful keynotes and sessions.  I had occasion to do lots of productive networking and project-planning.  And it was wonderful to reconnect with colleagues and friends from years past.

Whenever I return from a conference, my temptation is to push as much information about my experience as possible out onto my blog.  I have done so using words, Wordle’s, screen shots of tweets, pictures of graphic organizers, etc., etc.  And if you want to see examples of all those kinds of retro-diaries of prior conferences I have attended, please feel free to click here, here, here, here, and here.

But not this one.

No, in this blog post I simply wish to present one photo which, to me, represents everything I believe about education as it came to life before my very eyes.  What you see in this picture is the theory of 21st century learning (or as we now like to call it in 2013 – “learning”) in practice.

MJGDS @ SDSN/HHJThese are middle school students at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School in Jacksonville, Florida participating through a back-channel (TodaysMeet) as part of a crowd-sourcing dvar Torah that I was giving (that’s me in the foreground on the screen) in Washington, D.C. by way of introducing Heidi Hayes Jacobs (that’s her in the chair in the background on the screen) at the North American Jewish Day School Conference.

Torah.

Technology.

Global connectedness.

Authenticity.

Real-time.

Collaboration.

Amplification.

 

It is all there.  The reaction of the conference attendees was priceless and my pride was boundless.  Not for me.  (Although it was pretty cool introducing Heidi and leading the activity…but that wasn’t it.)  Looking at what our teachers and students have accomplished over the last couple of years amazes and astounds.  I am proud to be at a school where a picture like that and others just like it can be taken on a daily basis.

It is not a picture of the future of education.  The future of education is happening now. And it is happening here each day.

Stay tuned.

 

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Ready, Set, Ignite!

This is a very exciting weekend!

Our Kindergarten has its annual Shabbat Service & Dinner this evening.  First Grade has its annual Consecration tomorrow morning during Shabbat services.  In our local community, we will be participating in Federation’s annual Super Sunday (click here for more info).  The DuBow Preschool will be hosting a Magic Bubble Science Show & Open House that morning as well (click here for more info).  And I am off to Washington D.C on Sunday for the North American Jewish Day School Conference (click here for more info).  I will surely be Tweeting and blogging from the conference and will just as likely make it the subject of my blog post next week.  One highlight (and opportunity) comes Monday morning when I will be offering a Dvar Torah and introduction of Heidi Hayes Jacobs (click here for more info).  If you are available at about 8:45 AM (EST) that Monday, look for a tweet with a link to participate in a crowd-sourcing experiment.  The more participation the better!

And of course I will be avidly rooting for my San Francisco 49ers to bring home the sixth Super Bowl of my lifetime!  Go Niners!

That’s what’s coming up.

Today, I want to take one last look back at the third element of our MJGDS EdCamp that I have not yet shared.  I blogged about the big idea, here.  I blogged about the introduction of our new Learning Target, here.  I blogged about the EdCamp sessions, here.  But the middle of our day was one of those astounding moments where you see hopes and dreams come to life right in front of your eyes.  Watching our teachers deliver their hatzatot was like watching a child take their first steps or graduate college – it crystalized and validated in a very powerful way the path our school is walking down.  It was actually quite emotional; I told a colleague that we should just pack it in and go home – it couldn’t possibly get any better!  Now that they are all posted on YouTube, I want to celebrate the work these amazing teachers did by ensuring they are seen by as many people as possible.  But first, a recap…

הצתה    (“Hatzatah”= Ignition) is our adaptation of a popular presentation format basedHatzatahRubric on Pecha Kucha and Ignite.  Each presenter has 5 minutes to share their idea, broken down into 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds. Each MJGDS Faculty Meeting begins with a hatzatah. We find it a fantastic way to get our faculty to fulfill the moral imperative of sharing in a 21st century modality.  To celebrate and inspire our faculty to make more and better use of iPads in the classroom, we decided to host a Hatzatah Contest on the theme of “How has the use of iPads impacted my professional practice?”  The presentations took place during lunch on our EdCamp.

We found three interesting educators who agreed to be judges for our contest.  They were Mike Fischer, Lisa Johnson (AKA “Techchef4u) who is a great curator of educational iPad content and Richard Byrne, famous in the edublogger world for his “Free Tech For Teachers” blog and who has recently started an iPad in ed blog.  We videotaped each hatzatah and shared the videos, along with the above rubric, with our judges.  The winner was awarded an iPad and each participant was awarded an iTunes gift card.

But the judges found it awfully hard to decide because they were quite amazing…don’t believe me?  Then take 25 minutes (turn the volume up) and see for yourselves!

 

I know, right?  They were extraordinarily good.  But the judges did identify a winner…who do you think it was?

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Take My Wordle For It

A deep breath on a lovely day-of-Erev Tu B’Shevat here in Jacksonville, Florida.  Students throughout the school are engaged in different planting projects, seders, and celebrations of this “New Year for the Trees”.  And, for whatever reason, this week of the year has become my annual “New Year for the Blog”.  It is time, indeed, for my annual Wordle reflection of my blog!  [What’s a “wordle”?  From their website: “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.  The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.]

(For last year’s, you are welcome to click here.)

One year ago this blog’s Wordle looked like this:

And almost exactly one year later, it looks like this:

Having spent about thirty minutes or so comparing the two Wordle’s side-by-side, and factoring in the occasional random word or favorite idiom, there are indeed a few things that strike me as noteworthy:

  • The word that takes on the most prominence in this year’s Wordle is “conversation”.  I LOVE that!  To the degree that this blog represents my practice, I am very pleased to see “conversation” rise to the top.  I do believe that a significant facet to being an effective leader is engaging people in conversations, facilitating collaborations and fostering connectedness.  I hope that I am not simply blogging about it, but actually doing it.  I’m definitely trying.
  • So what might all these “conversations” be about?  Well, based on this year’s Wordle it would be “teaching” and “learning”!  Those sound like good things for a school to be conversing about, no?  But digging deeper, to me it actually reflects the possibility that we have successfully made the philosophical (and semantic) shift from “21st Century Learning” [which has almost disappeared from the Wordle from the prior year] to simply “teaching and learning”.  This has, indeed, been a major priority of ours – the complete identification of this thing called “21st century learning” as the core of “teaching and learning” in our school.
  • What is not there that surprises and disappoints me?  No appearance of “Community of Kindness”!  (I have definitely blogged about here, here, here, here, here and here.)  Maybe the word “kindness” is filtered out of Wordle’s logarithm, but I do want to honor the possibility that this important initiative has not received the attention it requires to impact our culture to the desired degree.  This demands deeper reflection and will receive it.
  • New initiatives or ideas that definitely reflect the facts on the ground include “iPads”, “EdCamp” and “target”.
  • Specific to this blog, this annual exercise asks me to consider and reconsider a foundational question: Who is my audience?

When I began blogging, I thought my audience would be almost exclusively parents of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  Little did I know that through the power of amplification, social networking, the amazing work our teachers and students are doing, and the happenstance of being in the right place at the right time – I am chronically surprised by who reads this blog.  I barely have time to cross-post; I do not have time to operate two different blogs.  So I try my best to write about topics (and in a style) that would be of primary interest to an ever-growing concentric circle of stakeholders, beginning with my parents and ending at the edge of the educational universe.

Am I succeeding?

I am not entirely sure.

I am sure that this weekly reflective exercise called blogging has made me a better Head of School.  I am all in on “reflection leads to achievement“.  So on my personal, annual “New Year of the Blog” I am thankful for the opportunity to be transparent.  It takes supportive and brave lay leadership and I got it in spades.

Next year’s blogging?  I certainly welcome and encourage feedback from readers of this blog.  If I am not meeting y’all’s needs, this blogger definitely wants to know!

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Live Blog of MJGDS EdCamp

This is my unplanned live blog of today’s amazing MJGDS Faculty EdCamp!

9:15 AM Sign Up for EdCamp

We gathered the faculty together in Library with our blank board.  After a brief introduction, teachers began to sign up!  After some shuffling, the schedule for our first “unconference” is ready to go!

My goal is to live blog 15 minutes from each of the nine sessions.  Off to camp!

9:30 AM Session #1 – The Daily 5

Second Grade General Studies and Fourth-Fifth Language Arts Teachers are explaining how they are piloting “The Daily 5” in their classrooms.

They begin by explaining how it works in their classrooms.

It is very important that children are given an opportunity to build stamina for reading. Each class has their own chime for transitions.

 

 

Do they pick their own books?  They use “I-Pick”.  They show a video of how they introduce the concept to the students.

I am struck watching the teachers bounce back and forth between each other how powerful EdCamp can be…the whole point is that there is nothing to prepare because you are already experts.  They are simply sharing their practice with their colleagues.  It is great as a principal to watch teachers be excited about what they are doing.  It is equally great to watch their colleagues inspired to ask questions.

They are reading their own books, no basal reader.  One reason why the Daily 5 is a great fit for our school is because it emphasizes authentic tasks which increase student motivation.  They aren’t doing simulated or artificial reading…they are reading.  Another reason?  Reflection is built in.

As I leave they begin a conversation about how the Daily 5 might expand into other grades…or Jewish Studies.

Off to the next session!

 

9:45 AM Session #2  – iPads or textbooks or both?

Walking into the middle of a conversation…

…what do we if students have a hard enough time keeping track of their books?  How can we give them iPads?

…sounds like a conversation about becoming BYOD is underway!

Is it a conversation about where information is read or what extra features come with use of iPads?

What would be the right year for students to come with iPads?  4th Grade?

We then move into a conversation between the school providing them at school, should parents be required to buy them,  or should the school buy them and then provide them to students in lieu of textbooks?

Challenges of filtering appropriate websites and apps!

Off to the next session!

 

10:00 AM Session #3 – diigo

Walking into the end of a conversation…

…everyone is actively practicing how to add bookmarks to their lists!

Wish I could have been there for the whole thing!  Everyone is working hard establishing their diigo accounts, their libraries and their lists.

Teachers are enjoying finding new lists, adding websites to their lists, etc.

How will MJGDS teachers use diigo?  We are going to have to find out!

 

10:15 AM Break #1

OK!  The first round of EdCamp is complete, but the conversations are not!  Snack is being put out and we have a moment to catch our breaths before the next round begins…

 

10:30 AM Session #4 – Student-Led Conferences

Very full session!  Our Fourth-Fifth Grade Math Teacher is describing the process she went through for our first pilot experience, which was Fifth Grade Student-Led Conferences, which we did last marking period.

It began with letters to parents introducing the idea.

It took a LOT of reflection – particularly for the students.  Who owns the learning?  MJGDS students (and teachers) do!

The surprising part was how willing and able they were to accurately reflect about their study skills and work habits.  We were concerned the more challenging students might struggle with this, but it turned out to be amazing.

“I never saw them the same way again.” – What a powerful statement!  This  forever changed the way this teacher saw her students.  And maybe vice-versa…

Teachers are making connections to curriculum (Language Arts) and to our use of blogfolios…

As a principal, this connects so many dots – reflection, ownership, blogfolios.  Student Led Conferences are a great fit for 21st Century Learning.

Off to the next session!

 

10:45 AM Session #5 – SMART Boards

How awesome is that our Art Teacher is facilitating a conversation about how to use SMART Boards for General & Jewish Studies Teachers!

Now she is showing them examples from SlideShare and Pintarest on where she does research, finds inspiration and organizes her own work.

They are moving into a practical sharing of favorite sites for game-making…and I am off to the next session.

 

11:00 AM Session #6 – Current Events

Students need to source their information!

How do you help students distinguish between opinion and fact?

Starting teaching Current Events at a younger grade may sharpen critical thinking skills that has cross-curricular impact.

We now move into a fascinating conversation about how we help students develop those skills in a world where one person’s fact is another person’s opinion and how challenges it is teaching these subjects in 2012.

Hungry?  Time for another snack!

 

11:30 AM Session #7 – Student Blogfolios

We are now in the Kindergarten classroom and we are now discussing how our student blogfolios which until this point had been restricted from 3-8 now begins in Kindergarten!

Let’s talk process…it started with categories.  Most of which will carry…some will be revised, new ones will be added.

 

The very first item placed into blogfolios in K are self-portraits.

Questions that need to be sorted out as they transition from K-2 to 3-8…

…when do they begin to use the “blog” part of the platform?

…when do they begin to help curate their material?

…when do they go live?

…when does it shift from “digital portfolio” to “blogfolio”?

Knowing where we were when we began…it is amazing to see how far we have come with this process!

I can’t believe EdCamp is almost over!

 

11:45 AM Session #8 – Art Collaborations

I walk into a great conversation about collaborating between subjects and art.

We are blessed with an amazing art program (and teacher)!  In addition to the Art Resource, we now have Open Art which teachers can sign up for, and Art Collaborations where teachers can partner on units or topics.

Moving from theory to practice…teachers are now brainstorming on new projects…first one up?  Black History Month in Grade Two.

What I am enjoying about the EdCamp model is the easy flow between conversation, demonstration and active collaboration.  We are now playing with Blabberize.

I need to head to my last session, but a great conversation about Tu B’Shevat has just begun!

 

12:00 PM Session #9 – Writing Scope & Sequence

I am very pleased that this conversation is happening!

They are deep into the details of how assessment can be more embedded, authentic and universal.

There is a conversation about revisiting our benchmarks and standards in light of new realities such as blogging and commenting.

Time is up!  We had just started a great conversation about when to teach keyboarding skills and now EdCamp is over!

 

What a morning!  Now it time for lunch, our hatzetah competition and we’ll close with our “target” conversation.

What a day!

UPDATE: Here is Andrea Hernandez’ video reflection on our awesome day!

 

The Transparency Files: MJGDS Learning Target

I blogged last week, here, about tomorrow’s exciting MJGDS EdCamp!  We are very excited for our day of learning and I will hopefully write a bonus blog next week reflecting and sharing the experience.  Since I will be unable to write tomorrow, I did want to take some here to preview (in a major exclusive!) the debut of our new MJGDS Learning Target and what it will mean for our teachers and students moving forward.

As I wrote last week, the final part of the day will be spent unveiling our new learning “target”.  Inspired by Jim Knight’s book “Unmistakable Impact“,  a committee of teachers and administrators have been working to put in writing a one-page “target” which describes how we believe teaching and learning ought to look at our school. That committee has been meeting for a few months and will be presenting the target to the full faculty as the culminating activity for our Professional Day.

For those looking to hear Jim Knight describe and define school learning targets, I invite you to click this link (I don’t have permission to embed this video in my post), here, go to 33:26 of the video and watch for about 8 minutes.

To read another school’s journey towards developing a learning target, I encourage you to check out this blog post, here.

The goal of tomorrow’s “target conversation” is for those faculty who worked on the committee to present their work to their colleagues.  We want out teachers to have a fuller understanding of what exactly the target consists of and what comes next.  In order to do that, we are going to have a very structured conversation, which in our school means the use of a formal protocol.  The reason why I prefer to use a formal protocol is that it ensures full and equal participation.  It also ensures that the conversation is structured and stays on track.

The last two “whip-around questions” of the protocol will begin the conversation about next steps.  Because the presentation of the target is the beginning of a conversation, not an end.  Everything we do must now be revisited in light of the target.  Workgroups, task forces, committees – call it whatever you like, should organically bubble up asking questions about everything from curriculum mapping to faculty evaluation to student assessment to “bring your own device” to professional development/instructional coaching to scheduling and everything else in between.

Obviously, I may have priorities of my own, which I will make transparent in due time, but for this conversation I will be satisfied if teachers walk away with a meaningful understanding of the target and that it necessarily requires next steps be taken.

So…wanna see the new MJGDS Learning Target?  With great thanks to Cathy Toglia, Judy Reppert, Shelly Zavon, Stephanie Teitelbaum, Karen Hallett, Andrea Hernandez and Silvia Tolisano, I am pleased to share it below:

We have a separate document providing detailing each cog in greater detail, which I will be happy to share upon request.  We are very excited to clarify what teaching and learning at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School ought to look like and to make it transparent to all our stakeholders.

Tomorrow we bring it to life!

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MJGDS EdCamp

Let me begin by giving full credit to this blog post to Andrea Hernandez, our Director of Teaching & Learning, not only for most of the ideas, but the links as well.  We are finishing up planning for next Friday’s scheduled “Professional Development” Day – an annual day of school without students, dedicated to professional development.  And thanks to Andrea, who has championed this day of faculty learning for the last couple of years, along with Silvia Tolisano, our 21st Century Learning Specialist, we have planned a very exciting three-part day which we think will not only inspire our teachers on their ongoing journeys of growth, but will impact what teaching and learning looks like at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.

The first part of the day will be an “EdCamp”.  What is “EdCamp”?

Edcamp is an “unconference” – an opportunity, without intense preparation or anxiety for teachers to “own” their professional learning.  Teachers will show up at edcamp and find a blank schedule – only time slots and locations.  They will then decide what topics they want to present on or which conversations they wish to facilitate and simply sign up until the schedule is complete.  And then the learning begins!

Sounds simple, which it is, but its power is in recognizing how much teachers already have to offer and how strong their desire is to learn from each other.  It is also an important acknowledgment that they are already experts in important topics and, thus, there is no need for intense preparation – simply share the work.

For those who are interested in diving deeper and being inspired, I invite you to watch this 16-minute TED talk by Kristen Swanson, a founder and planner for EdCamp Philly:

For a fuller written description of the EdCamp model, I invite you to read this article from Edutopia, here.  For a reflection on one school’s first experience with a faculty EdCamp, invite you to this blog post by Greg Miller, here.

We will have reflection built in to our EdCamp and I look forward to sharing mine once MJGDS EdCamp is complete.  But that’s just the first chunk of our exciting day!

The lunch hour will be spent in our first-annual Faculty Hatzatah Contest!  What’s a hatzatah?

הצתה    (“Hatzatah”= Ignition) is our adaptation of a popular presentation format based on Pecha Kucha and Ignite.  Each presenter has 5 minutes to share their idea, broken down into 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds.

Here are a few examples from edJEWcon 5772.0.

Each MJGDS Faculty Meeting begins with a hatzatah.  We find it a fantastic way to get our faculty to fulfill the moral imperative of sharing in a 21st century modality.  To celebrate and inspire our faculty to make more and better use of iPads in the classroom, we decided to host a Hatzatah Contest on the theme of “How has the use of iPads impacted my professional practice?”  The presentations will take place during lunch on our Professional Day, will be judged by an outside panel of 21st century learning experts, and the winner will be awarded an iPad.  We have a number of teachers competing and it should make for an amazing hour of faculty learning.

For educators who wish to dig deeper, I invite you to download the above graphic as a PDF, here, that we created through edJEWcon (which will be hosting its own Hatzatah Contest this spring) describing the rubric we use to judge.

The final part of the day will be spent unveiling our new learning “target”.  Inspired by Jim Knight’s book “Unmistakable Impact“,  a committee of teachers and administrators have been working to put in writing a one-page “target” which describes how we believe teaching and learning ought to look at our school.  That committee has been meeting for a few months and will be presenting the target to the full faculty as the culminating activity for our Professional Day.  I fully intend to make that target transparent because it will be a guiding touchstone for all important decisions moving forward.  How we choose curriculum, how we decide on new use-of-technologies, how teachers ought to be evaluated, what student assessment ought to look like, etc., – all of those questions and more will be reexamined in light of whether they move us closer to or farther from the target.

Needless to say it should be an extraordinary day of learning that I am looking forward to with great anticipation.  And I look forward to sharing it with you soon.

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What happens in the cloud, not only doesn’t stay in the cloud, it follows your child to school.

There is nothing like returning to school after winter break, midweek, to scramble your brain!  As wonderful as breaks are, returns can be equally wonderful.  It has been a pleasure welcoming parents, students and teachers back for a new, secular year.  We anticipate 2013 being a wonderful 52nd year at MJGDS!

A lot happened as we were heading into break…

 

…I invite you to revisit the exciting news of our new game development venture with Jewish Interactive by clicking here.  We’ll have an update on this groundbreaking new project soon.

…and I invite you, here, to join the ongoing conversation about the impact of Newtown and our plans to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all our children at the Jacksonville Jewish Center.  We are continuing to meet internally and I look forward to sharing updated information about preparedness shortly.

But today I want to revisit territory I first staked out, here, in a blog post titled, “Do I have a stake in who my students are when they are not in school?”

In that post, I asked the following question: “Do I or does the “school” have a responsibility to address behaviors that take place outside the bounded times and spaces of school?”

My answer was most affirmatively, “Yes,” and I will let you (re)read the post to see why.

But, I also qualified my answer in the following way: “Let me be clear that I am purposefully leaving parents out of this behavioral equation.  Not because I either blame parents for their children’s behavior nor because I abdicate parents of their responsibility to effectively parent.  I am simply asking a different question.”

Well…I think I would like an opportunity to ask that question: “Do I or does the “school” have a responsibility to address the role parents play in behaviors that take place outside the bounded times and spaces of school?

And, again, I think the answer is, “yes”.

But, boy, is that more complicated.

The simple truth to explore is how to help parents best partner with school to truly become a Community of Kindness.  The simple challenge is how to lovingly intervene when it becomes apparent that help may be required.

We are parenting in uncharted territory.  Our children have access to information and to each other in ways we, not only never anticipated, but in ways that continue to change – and we may, or not, even be aware that is happening.  Whether it is through texting, chatting, or gaming, our children are in constant contact.  And just like in reality-reality, their behavior in virtual reality provides opportunities for kindness and opportunities for its opposite.  And parents play a crucial role in determining the outcomes.

Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, if it finds its way to me, it means the outcome was not-so-good.  When it finds me, it usually means that a child has been excluded or disparaged.  When it finds me, it usually means that a child has been exposed to language or content which may be inappropriate.  When it finds me, it usually means that a parent is concerned about which influences are following their children from other homes to school to their home without an invitation.

And when it finds me, I have to ask myself what am I to do?

 

This is normally the point in my blog where I would proceed to ramble on for another 500 words or so and provide the answer to my own hypothetical question.

But in the spirit of partnership, I don’t want to answer my own hypothetical question. Why?  Well, it isn’t hypothetical and I don’t actually know the answer!

So, please, dear reader of this blog, whether you are a parent, educator or concerned party, make a quality comment and let’s collaborate on an answer.  You can take the time it normally would have taken you to finish this blog post to formulate your response.

How do I address my fully accepted responsibility to care about the role parents play in behaviors that take place outside the bounded times and spaces of school?

Let’s get crowd-sourcing!

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When Words Fail

I must have read 30 “Special Messages” from my colleagues in Jewish day schools and other Jewish institutions to their constituents over the weekend and into this afternoon. And with each one, I have felt the need to issue my own grow stronger and I have felt my inability to articulate grow stronger along with it.  Words typically come fairly easy to me, but not today.  I don’t know how to express as a principal or a parent the impact of last Friday’s events.  While our Day School spent the day celebrating the miracle of Chanukah and the advent of Winter Break, unspeakable horror was taking place at Sandy Hook Elementary.  The jarring juxtaposition was not lost on those of us tracking events with one eye on the computer screen and the other tracking dreidel scores.  With facts just coming in as students were checking out, we made the conscious decision to allow the day to proceed as normal and permit people to begin their Winter Break uninterrupted.  That was the last easy call to make.

What do we do now?

I am no different than any other parent in our Academy.

I have two daughters in our schools.  And I demand that when I kiss them goodbye and send them off to their classrooms that every possible security measure is in place to assure me that they are safe and protected.

I am no different than any other staff person in our academy or synagogue.

I work in a school.  And I deserve a workplace that recognizes risk and has in place protocols and procedures to ensure my wellbeing.

The Jacksonville Jewish Center takes its security responsibilities with the utmost seriousness.  I have been in constant contact with Don Kriss, the JJC’s Executive Director, since Friday and I can report that along with our lay leadership, the Security Committee, our contacts in law enforcement etc., all necessary conversations are taking place.  I have complete confidence that our students in Winter Camp are being watched over with all due diligence and that when all our schools reopen their doors in January, that all our security measures will have been thoroughly revisited with an eye towards heightened readiness.  There is nothing more important we do than keep our children (and teachers) safe and it is my sacred promise that all that can be done, will be.

It will be 18 days between the events at Sandy Hook and our first day back in school.

I am not sure if I should be more concerned about how our students are going to react about being back in school or that the world will have moved on to the next big issue or, God forbid, the next tragedy.  We will be prepared regardless.  Our tefillah will include words of prayer for those no longer with us and words of hope for those of us left trying to make meaning of the meaningless.  Our partners at Jewish Family & Community Services along with our clergy will be available to provide counseling to those in need. Our Preschool and Lower  School students will pick up where they left off.  Our Middle and High School students will tackle the topic organically – if our students have need to discuss, we will ensure appropriate discussion takes place.

I will leave the politics to those who know better.

I simply recognize that between last year’s local tragedy (we are still mourning our dear colleague Dale Regan, head of Episcopal School, gunned down just last March) and this month’s national tragedy that something is very much amiss.  I pray that we soon live in a time when “Special Messages” are no longer necessary.

Please God that it be soon.

Hamakom Yehanchem Otam Btoch Sha’ar Avlei Tzion Virushalayim – May the almighty comfort the families of Newtown among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

And may the memories of those who died in Sandy Hook Elementary School be always for a blessing.

It Just Got Real (MJGDS Got Game)

As you can see, the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School will surely remember this Chanukah season for years to come!  In addition to celebrating the joy of the holiday season and fulfilling the mitzvah of giving back to those in need, this will be the Chanukah that marks our school’s next step on the journey of 21st century learning.  This is the moment that the last few years of cutting-edge experimentation and (sometimes) lonely trailblazing begins to pay off in tangible, real-world ways.  There have been signs along the way, perhaps edJEWcon being the most significant, because that was the first clear and direct signal that the world of education was paying attention to what our Jewish day school in Jacksonville was doing – a minor miracle in its own right!  But with this week’s announcement, our school takes another, perhaps more significant leap into the future.

21st century learning just got real y’all.

In July, I blogged the following:

And I have been recently working with Nicky Newfield, Director of Jewish Interactive, on potential new projects.  Although I have no groundbreaking program or initiative to announce at present…I am quite confident that all this thinking and collaboration will yield exciting fruit, and soon.

You can read the entire blog post, here.  And although from July to December, some of the details have shifted, the big idea remains intact.  Allow me to refresh you…

The last three years in my position as Head of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, a K-8 Schechter Network Day School of nearly 130 students located in Jacksonville, Florida, has overlapped with an explosion of interest in 21st century learning and educational technology.  In large ways, our school has been shaped by the works of leading figures in this educational movement – Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Alan November, Mike Fischer, and Chris Lehmann to name just a few.  And in small ways, I believe our school has contributed to the movement as well, by serving as a living laboratory and our creation of edJEWcon – a yearly institute for 21st century Jewish day school education, launched in 2012 with 21 Jewish Day Schools throughout North America and representing the full ideological spectrum.  As our work in this area deepens each year, new opportunities for innovation arise.  It has become to clear to us that gaming and gaming theory represent the next frontier.

A leading feature of 21st century learning is giving students the opportunities to own the learning.  Knowing that Bloom’s Taxonomy recognizes “creativity” as the highest rung on

the ladder, we are interested in giving our students opportunities to create meaningful, authentic work.  From a motivational standpoint, gaming provides us with a tangible example of our target audience spending hours upon hours failing to achieve!  But rather than becoming despondent, kids find this kind of failure motivating – they will spend hours and days working on new skills and seeking new discoveries in order to accomplish their goal.  Deep gaming allows for the possibility of harnessing students’ desire for creativity and motivation for success to the curricular aims of a school.

Although this would apply to any aspect of the curriculum, it is in Middle School Jewish Studies where perhaps the greatest opportunity lies.  It could be because the current quality of curricular materials is less.  It could be because student motivation for Jewish Studies is oftentimes less in, at least, some kinds of Jewish day schools.  It could be that for some students virtual Jewish experiences may the only Jewish experiences (outside of school) available.  For those reasons, and for the benefits of creating integrated curricular learning experiences between secular academics, STEM and Jewish Studies that many Jewish Day Schools find desirable either for expediency, mission or both, we believe the creation of a virtual gaming environment built around Jewish studies has the greatest academic and commercial potential.

 

And that leads me to this week’s exciting announcement.  Our work with Jewish Interactive and with Rabbi Tal Segal in particular, led to today’s exciting press release. Again, you may read the whole post here, but allow me to quote below.

We are pleased to announce that Jewish Interactive will be embarking on a joint project with the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School of Jacksonville, Florida, where students will be designing from the ground up an educational Chanukah video game.  Jewish Interactive will actually build the software, to be released in advance of next Chanukah for use in their current network to more than 50 elementary schools around the world.

In this jointly planned and executed cross-curricular project, MJGDS students will first learn about the software development cycle and form project teams, each receiving a specific role, e.g.:

 Project manager

 Content expert

 Instructional designer

 Gaming expert

 Graphic artist

 Programmer

 Animator

 Sound effects

Students will research and gather the Jewish content to be included in their game, develop a curriculum and learning objectives, script an instructional game design, and develop characters and graphics. Every step of the process will be supported and guided by the team and educators at MJGDS and the Jewish Interactive team.

The MJGDS team has been a leader of innovation and entrepreneurship in the field, and a strong voice of change and advancement, most noticeably through their edJEWcon initiative, a conference for Jewish schools and institutions on 21st century teaching and learning, and the cross-curricular use of technology in their own school, sharing Jewish Interactive’s vision.

Jewish Interactive is thrilled to embark on this joint initiative with MJGDS and to pioneer the involvement of students at the very core of the learning experience.

 

Did you see their faces in the opening video?  Do you think those students will be excited to learn in years to come?  Do you think their motivation to excel academically will be at its highest?

In this Chanukah season, we’re betting “yes” and have pushed all our gelt to the middle of the table.  A great miracle happened there…but we have miracles up our sleeves right here in Jacksonville, Florida to celebrate as well.

Chag Chanukah Sameach!

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