December 2012 – A Floor, But Not a Ceiling

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 21^st 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 21^st 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 21^st 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!

A Pedagogy for Chanukah

Some blog posts are inspired by real world events; others by thoughts that bubble up. Occasionally, however, blog posts are inspired by thought-partners and this one falls into that category. I received multiple emails yesterday encouraging me to respond the following:

Last year, in his blog post on Chanukah, Yossi Prager (AVI CHAI Executive Director – North America) concluded with the following:

Unlike all other Jewish holidays, Chanukah has no sacred text to be read in synagogue. The Book of Maccabees is part of the Catholic Bible but not the Jewish one, and is largely unknown to most Jews. Instead of public reading, we communicate the story of Chanukah silently, with the act of lighting candles at the window so that Jews and non-Jews alike recognize our celebration of the miracles that occurred. What can parents and Jewish educators learn from this method of teaching about how to inspire others to more active participation in Jewish life and connection to the State of Israel?

For me the pedagogical takeaway isn’t so much the “silence” as it is the “act”. It is an action that anyone can take; it is not so ritualistically complex that only the most knowledgable amongst us can perform it. It is an action performed publicly and in the home. And it is an act through which the meaning can be found through the doing. It is truly and act of “na’aseh v’nishma“.

This quotation from the Torah (Exodus 24:7) has been interpreted in many ways in Jewish tradition. The meaning which speaks most deeply to me is: “We will do and then we will understand.” This meaning comes from a rabbinic story (also called “midrash”) that explains Israel’s unconditional love for the Torah. The midrash is as follows:

When the Children of Israel were offered the Torah they enthusiastically accepted the prescriptive mitzvot (commandments) as God’s gift. Israel collectively proclaimed the words “na’aseh v’nishma “, “we will do mitzvot and then we will understand them”. Judaism places an emphasis on performance and understanding spirituality,
values, community, and the self through deed.

Simply put, we learn best by doing.

This idea has powerfully stimulated my own Jewish journey and informs my work as a Jewish educator. I think there are two major implications from this: One, regardless of the institution, we have a responsibility to provide access to informal Jewish educational programs to our young people. Two, our formal educational institutions can stand to learn from what makes informal work. [This is precisely why the Jacksonville Jewish Center will be hiring a new full-time Director of Experiential Education to join our educational team!] Namely, I believe strongly in education that is active, interactive, dynamic, and most importantly experiential. It is one thing to teach Judaism; it is something more powerful to teach people how to live Judaism.

It is one thing to teach social action; it is identity forming for our middle school students to go out into the world each Friday and in lieu of their Jewish Studies Curriculum make the world a better place by doing social action.

It is one thing to read about Israel; it is transformative to visit Israel.

And for this time of year?

It is one thing to study Chanukah; it is something infinitely more meaningful to light a menorah in the window, surrounded by family.

So please next week let’s gather together in our windows to light the Chanukah candles. And by doing so let’s celebrate the historical and religious significance of Chanukah with joy, festivity, and yes, presents. In addition, this Chanukah, let’s not forget our Jewish values of tzedakah (charity) and kehillah (community). Along with your normal gift-giving, consider donating a night or two of your family’s celebration to those less fortunate than ourselves.

Happy Chanukah from my family to yours!