Category: Jewish Education

Getting Ready for edJEWcon 5773.1

Who was the smart guy who didn’t build a travel day into this year’s Passover Break?

This guy!

It has been quite a short week recovering from Passover and preparing for a tremendous amount of important events and programs to bring us from now through the end of another terrific year at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  We are engaged in annual parent and faculty surveys.  We are finalizing financial aid decisions.  We have many important and exciting Jewish holidays to celebrate and experience.  Our Middle School is off next week to Washington, D.C.  We will have standardized testing to analyze and disseminate.  We will have a graduation.  We have our annual L’Dor V’Dor spring event (save the date coming soon!).  We have a faculty to hire and new students to enroll.  We have a gaming project to embark upon and we are just opening up our K-2 digital portfolios to sit alongside our existing 3-8 blogfolios.

Needless to say, there is plenty to do!

And smack dab in the middle of it all comes edJEWcon 5773.1!

Thanks again to the generosity of the AVI CHAI Foundation and the support of the Schechter Day School Network we will again welcome over 100 participants representing schools, agencies, foundations and universities from all over North American and Israel who are coming to Jacksonville, Florida to learn, reflect, share and co-create the future of Jewish day school education.  Want to get excited?  Check this out.

Want to get excited if you are not a Jewish educator, but care about education?

Even with the difficulty in scheduling between Jewish holidays, we are thrilled to not only have great turnout, but we have changed the conference from last year to this in a few important ways:

  • Requests for presentation were offered and we received back more than enough high-quality proposals to allow edJEWcon to be a conference by the field for the field.
  • We have built in reflection and collaboration to ensure the conference is simply the beginning of an ongoing conversation about teaching and learning.
  • We closed school on the Monday so that our faculty can more fully participate and benefit from the conference.
  • We have expanded our outreach to ensure that Chris Lehmann’s Keynote: “Building School 2.0 Creating the Schools We Need” is well attended by our local school community as well our larger Jewish and educational community here in Jacksonville.
  • Working with DSLTI, we will have a post-edJEWcon experience focused on leading cultural change in a 21st century learning organization facilitated by Jonathan Cannon.

So much gratitude and thanks goes to our 21st Century Learning Team who does the bulk of the conference preparation.  Thanks to all the students, teachers, parents and stakeholders at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School whose hard work allows us to host an edJEWcon.  Extra thanks to those MJGDS teachers who are presenting this year!  Much thanks to Karin Hallett and Silvia Tolisano for innumerable hours of work.  Extra special thanks to Andrea Hernandez who steers the ship and who will very deservingly be giving the opening keynote.

We have a lot of work to do over the next three weeks to ensure edJEWcon’s success.  But it is inspiring to know that the future of Jewish education is happening now…and it is happening here.

Stay tuned!

Setting Limits: Jewish Approaches to Parental Discipline

As far back as the time of the Mishnah, we have been faced with the challenge of setting limits for our teens and children.  Archeologists have unearthed clay tablets, dating back more than six thousand years, that describe how the adults of the ancient Babylonian community were completely confounded by the behavior of their children.

Clearly, this is an old and familiar problem!

Great teachers remind us that our children’s behavior often may reflect more about us than about them.  Children raised in a household permeated with tension, manipulation, dishonesty, distrust, or depression may act high-strung, deceitful, morose, uncaring, rebellious, unsure, listless, inattentive, or angry.  A classic rabbinic parable tells of a man who opened a perfumery in a marketplace frequented by prostitutes and unsavory businesspeople.  One day, the man caught his son in the company of prostitutes and in the midst of a deceitful business deal.  Incensed, he began to shout insults and threats at his son.  Finally, one of the merchants retaliated by asking the man what he expected his son to do and who he expected his son to become when he placed these influences in his environment.

Do you deal with conflict by exploding, pouting, surrendering, bullying or ignoring?  Well, if you do, chances are that your children will study your responses acutely and imitate them consciously or unconsciously.  As Saadia ben Joseph, the tenth-century gaon of the academy in Sura, Babylonia, observed: “Little children do not learn to lie until they are taught to do so.”  Similarly, it is often the case that little children do not rant and rave, yell and scream, hit and pound, ignore and flee, or bully and bluster unless significant people in their lives do the same.

The Hebrew word for parents is horim, which comes from the Hebrew word hora’ah or instruction.  We are the ones who gently guide our children to proper behavior by demonstrating it for them consistently and persistently.  We are the ones who teach our children about appropriate responses to disappointment, threats, challenges, and provocation as much by our actions as by our instruction.

The Jewish approach to discipline advises us never to shame a child or attack his or her character.  We are challenged to teach our children that particular behaviors, words, and attitudes are inappropriate, immoral, unjust, or unacceptable while at the same time showing them love, patience, and sensitivity.  Guidance and instruction are best achieved in a relationship.  If we hold them, hug them, and honor them as human beings in the eternal process of becoming, we manifest the divine, supernal qualities of compassion and wisdom that sustain Creation even when flawed.  We become our children’s models and mentors and by our example and influence, contribute to the world’s blessings and our children’s health and wholeness.

What? No “model seder” this year?!

Regardless of whether the thought of not having a “model seder” to attend this year Kitah Gimmel Model Seder 2012makes you happy or sad, it is time to revisit the “model seder”.  What, exactly, is it supposed to accomplish?  Do we need to do one in each grade?  And if not, are there other Passover experiences we can offer families that might be nice to experience as well?

At the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, we have been pretty consistently offering pretty consistent-feeling model seders for quite a while.  Are they rehearsals for the main event?  Are they just-in-case some families have no other Passover experience?

I admit that last year I hit a bit of a “model seder” wall.  I had my own children’s to attend in both Preschool and Day School.  And I had to make meaningful appearances at all of them.  By the time we got to Passover itself, I really wasn’t in the mood for two more!  I mean I love charoset, gefilte fish, and matzah as much as the next person…

We do believe in the “model seder”.  The seder itself is amongst the most powerful pedagogies ever developed.  Celebrating a holiday through reenactment is experiential education at its finest.  We like it so much we have created them for Tu B’Shevat, Yom Ha’Atzmaut and holidays!  And we do in the Jewish day school feel a certain pressure to provide Jewish experiences of holidays to ensure all our families have opportunities to participate.  Hence, our monthly “All-School Kabbalat Shabbat” services and this year’s Shushan Purim (even though we lack walls, we felt we needed to acknowledge Purim in school even though it fell on a weekend this year).  Outside of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we celebrate the entire Jewish calendar in school – whether they fall during school or not.  So we are not going to get rid of Passover.  But maybe we can provide a differentiated educational experience?

The Jewish Studies Faculty and I met last spring after Passover to reflect and again this fall to plan, and we are pleased to share our plan for a K-8 differentiated Passover experience for MJGDS students and families:

  • Kitah Gan: First “Model” Seder
  • Kitah Alef: First Hebrew “Model” Seder
  • Kitah Bet: Hebrew Passover Play
  • Kitah Gimmel: Historical Reenactment “Model” Seder
  • Kitot Daley & Hay: A Passover Experience
  • Kitot Vav – Chet: Lead Seder at Mt. Carmel in partnership with JFCS

Each grade (or grade grouping) has its particular theme or experience (or both).  Every student will have learned appropriate Passover material and each family will have a chance to have an appropriate Passover family experience.  Hopefully, the differentiated experience will give our students something new to look forward to each year…and give our parents and families (particularly those with multiple children) something different to experience with each child.

Looking forward to all the pre-Passover excitement coming soon!

 

Postscripts:

  • We finished (except for makeups) our standardized testing this week!  Click here for last year’s results and background information on our approach to testing.
  • We will soon be issuing our annual Parent Survey.  Click here for last year’s results.

A Purim Prescription for Pediatric Judaism – A 5773 Remix

When we think about Purim as parents, we probably think most about this: What shall I Eiliana Purim 5772dress my children as this year for Purim?  But in a hopefully growing number of families,  including ours, the question isn’t what are we going to dress our children as for Purim. In our family, we ask ourselves what are we going to dress as for Purim?

I would wager a bet that no more than 10-15% of families attending Purim services and/or carnivals this year will come in costume.  Why?

The phenomenon is often referred to as “pedicatric Judaism” and I find that Purim is its paradigmatic Jewish holiday.  I recently Googled “pediatric Judaism” to see who should get credit for its coinage and the best I could come up with was the following from a Reform Judaism Magazine article:

Why, then, the emphasis on what Rabbi Larry Hoffman, professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, calls “pediatric Judaism”?  “We have planned for our children only,” he wrote in 1996.  “In our understandable anxiety to pass on Judaism as their heritage, we have neglected its spiritual resources for adults, leaving ourselves with no adequate notion of how we too might draw sustenance from our faith as we grow up and grow older.”

That sounds about right.  Far too often, even those who are the most engaged – the ones who do affiliate with synagogues and do try to provide their children with Jewish educational experiences – we work to ensure our children experience and participate, but neglect to include ourselves.

When as a graduate student in Los Angeles, I first attended a synagogue in which adults participated in Jewish holiday celebrations as adults – active, joyous and engaged – it was almost surreal.  This was not a Judaism for children – costume contests, parades, pony rides and candy (although that may all have been there as well) – but a Judaism that adults took seriously for themselves.  They were not lining the walls watching the children within; they were celebrating the joy of being Jewish for themselves.

What’s the danger of “pediatric Judaism”?  For me it is the perpetuation of the idea that being Jewish, or perhaps more accurately doing Jewish, is something that is only for children.  We are our children’s most powerful role models and teachers and they are surely paying attention.  When they can see that we take something seriously, it is a signal to them that they ought to as well.  Children learn how to be an adult by watching our adult behaviors.  We understand this as parents and so we think carefully about how we behave in front of our children, what kind of language we use, and what kind of values we express and try to live by.  So, too, it is with being a Jewish adult.  Our children are looking to us to see what adult Jews do and it presents us with a big opportunity and a huge responsibility.

I don’t wish to pile on parents.  Jewish schools and institutions play a part as well.  If Rabbi Hoffman is correct that adult Jews do not see in Judaism a resource to find their spiritual needs met, we have to be willing to ask the difficult question of why?  What programs, classes, experiences, outreach, etc., have we not successfully offered or facilitated that have led to this situation?

We will all need to do more if we are ever to cure ourselves of pediatric Judaism.  In our schools and our synagogues, we need to reach out to parents and provide them with the support, education, experiences and love they will need to find the courage to try on new ideas and behaviors.  We will need to present a Judaism worthy of the education and sophistication of our parents.  Luckily, Judaism contains within it all that and more.

One example of taking our adult population more seriously at the Jacksonville Jewish Center?  This year’s “Purim Unmasked” (click here) is a concrete attempt to reach the needs of adult Jews – an evening celebration sans children to celebrate the joy of being Jewish!  We are hopeful for a strong turnout.

Proof us adults can let our hair down come Purim time?

So this year…what are you going to be for Purim?  Don’t let your children have all the fun…and don’t let them think that the fun of Purim is only for them!

And if you live here in Jacksonville and are looking for a place to celebrate…join us!

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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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!

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With Mixed Emotions

Here is a blog post whose title I would have like to have stolen, “How Can We Be Thankful As Others are Suffering?“.  [It is a little off-color, be warned.]

That is how I feel on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving having just come from an amazing Intergenerational Day Program at our school.

It was a spectacular morning – and the although the theme was honoring American veterans and those currently serving in our armed forces, events in Israel required our attention as well.  And that, along with Hurricane Sandy, makes it a difficult time for full glasses of joy.  Those glasses are somewhat emptied by the sadness, grief, anger and helplessness we feel about those in harm’s way in the current conflict in Israel.  (As I type a cease-fire is being announced, click here, but events are constantly shifting.)  Our Middle Schoolers yesterday were simultaneously cooking a Thanksgiving feast for our veterans while hanging informational posters of support for Israel around the school.  It was an important reminder of what it means to be an American Jew at this moment in history.  Both our countries remain at war – as Americans we honor those presently serving in Afghanistan (and other places) and as Jews we honor all Israelis who face the constant threat of missiles and other terrorist acts as part of their “normal” existence.  Helping our students – and families – understand, cope and respond to these challenges of American Jewish life is part of what makes the Schechter Jewish day school experience so unique and important.

And so it is with a heart beating with pride for our school and its many ongoing accomplishments and programs…

…and breaking for our brothers and sisters in Israel as they navigate a tentative ceasefire that I pause for a moment to give thanks for the many blessings I have in my life.

I am thankful for my beautiful wife and children.  I am thankful for my parents, my children’s grandparents, and all our extended family and friends.  I am thankful for our community into whose roots we sink deeper each year.  I am thankful for the parents who entrust us with the sacred responsibility of providing their children with a Jewish education.  I am thankful for mentors who force me to reflect and allow me to grow.  I am thankful to the students who challenge, push, and motivate us to be and do better each and every day.  And I am thankful to my teachers who inspire me to come to work each and every day to give 100% (even if much of it regrettably happens behind closed doors or off campus) of all I am to do my part to further the ongoing journey of this remarkable school we call home.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Transparency Files: Community of Kindness Parent Survey

First off…here is some exciting news:

MJGDS Teacher Selected to Become

“Google Certified” at Google Teacher Academy

Google has selected Andrea Hernandez as an attendee at the next Google Teacher Academy, to be held in Mountain View, CA on December 5, 2012.  The Google Teacher Academy is a free professional development experience designed to help K-12 educational leaders get the most from innovative technologies.  Each Academy is an intensive, one-day event where participants get hands-on experience with Google’s products and technologies, learn about innovative instructional strategies, and receive resources to share with colleagues. Upon completion, Academy participants become Google Certified Teachers who share what they learn with other K-12 educators in their local regions and beyond.

Google Certified Teachers are exceptional K-12 educators with a passion for using innovative tools to improve teaching and learning, as well as creative leaders and ambassadors for change.  They are recognized experts and widely admired for their commitment to high expectations for students, life-long learning and collaboration.  The Google Certified Teacher program was launched in 2006 with the first Academy held at Google headquarters in Mountain View.  The program has since held several academies across the US, expanding the ranks of Google Certified Teachers.  The Google Teacher Academy is produced by Google, in collaboration with CUE an educational non-profit organization.

There will be 62 attendees from all over the US as well as Canada, Mexico, India, Singapore, Ukraine and Dubai.

Of course we know how much we are leading the 21st century learning revolution at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, but it certainly is nice to be recognized by Google for the groundbreaking work we do!  You can see it in the video Mrs. Hernandez made as part of her application:

I look forward to reading her reflections on the experience and to the impact it has on her work and on our school in the weeks and months ahead.

 

The Community of Kindness initiative at Galinsky Academy is well under way.  We have, with our partner Jewish Family & Community Services had trainings with Preschool Faculty, sessions with Religious School, Makom and Day School classes, and we are prepping for our first parent forum.  And at least as important, the language of “community of kindness” is making its way into the common vernacular.  Last Shabbat, for example, it found its way (un-prompted!) into a Bat Mitzvah speech.  It has also come up in our Parent University courses [you may click to enlarge].

In fact, in one of the courses, we are reading excerpts from a book (and author) very much connected to this topic that I met through my experience at Harvard’s Independent School Institute (which I blogged about, here.)  We are currently reading [you may click to enlarge] Richard Weissbourd:

As the work continues, survey data is also coming in.  For the sake of transparency, I wanted to share some preliminary results and indicate the first tangible result.  Here are some data from the Parent Survey:

Parents with children in multiple schools were encouraged to fill out one survey per child.  We had a fairly decent  (25%) return rate, although higher is always better.  Here is the first critical data point:

Although we would have preferred the answer to be unanimous that “I don’t think there are any issues,” I think it is interesting that “bullying” scored on the low end that “social exclusion” scored the highest.  This was something that we intuitively predicted at the beginning and correlates to results we published year (click here).  With “social exclusion” and “improved awareness in accepting others” as high scorers, the feedback we are getting from the Weissbourd book, and in combination with what is bubbling up from our ongoing work, we have decided to move forward with the following parent forum:

We are looking forward to strong turnout and an even stronger program.  Working together we will ensure that “Community of Kindness” is not a slogan, but a way of life, at the schools of Galinsky Academy.  More results and more programs to follow

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BTW – if you are a Martin J. Gottlieb Day School Middle School parent and your child is still singing “Schnupencups”…thanks to Hazzan Holzer rare footage of the story is now available.  And if this makes no sense to you at all?  You had to be there (or with me in any camping setting since 1989)…

 

Crimson and Shofar (Over and Over)

Yes, that is a horrible pun to kick off this week’s blog post.  And in case you were wondering, I am more inclined to the Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ cover than the Tommy James &  the Shandells’ original, probably because their drummer lived down my block in New Jersey in 1981 when it came out.

All this to give me the opportunity to ask, “What do “crimson” and “shofar” have to do with each other  (besides not really rhyming with “Crimson and Clover”)?”

Well, I hope to find out later this month when I attend Harvard University’s Independent Schools Institute (ISI) along with a small cohort of other Jewish day school leaders as part of a new initiative by the AVI CHAI Foundation.

 

From the ISI page (click here for a fuller description):

Designed specifically for independent school leaders, the institute provides a practical perspective on current research about independent schools guided by expert Harvard faculty. The curriculum covers topics ranging from personal leadership to innovative instructional strategies to financial sustainability, providing a rigorous and intellectually challenging experience. You will look closely at the challenges of strategic and instructional leadership with top researchers in the field and learn how to apply these findings in your school.

The Independent Schools Institute combines large group sessions with small-group peer discussions. The smaller working groups create a forum for thoughtful discussion, helping you to synthesize new ideas and gain unexpected insights from your colleagues.

For a taste of how extraordinary this opportunity is, here is the full ISI Faculty:

Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Senior Director of Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. He has received honorary degrees from twenty-six colleges and universities. In 2005 and again in 2008 he was selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. The author of twenty-five books translated into twenty-nine languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. He has also written extensively on creativity, leadership, professional ethics, and the arts. His latest book Five Minds for the Future was published in April 2007. His latest co-authored book Multiple Intelligences Around the World was published in the summer of 2009.

Monica Higgins is Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She joined the Harvard faculty in 1995. Her research and teaching focus on the areas of leadership development and organizational change. Prior to joining HGSE, she spent eleven years as a member of the faculty at Harvard Business School in the Organizational Behavior Unit. Her recent book, Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry (2005), focuses on the leadership development of executives in the biotechnology industry. In education, her research interests straddle higher education and urban public schools. Specifically, she has a multimedia project underway on the careers and social networks of the Harvard Business School Class of 1996. In addition, Higgins is studying the conditions that enhance the effectiveness of senior leadership teams and organizational learning in large urban school districts across the United States. While at Harvard, Higgins has taught in the areas of leadership and organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, self-assessment and career development, and strategic human resources management.

James Honan is Senior Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Honan’s teaching and research interests include financial management of nonprofit organizations, organizational performance measurement and management and higher-education administration. Honan serves as a consultant on strategic planning, resource allocation and performance measurement and management to numerous colleges, universities, schools and nonprofit organizations, both nationally and internationally.

Susan Moore Johnson is the Jerome T. Murphy Professor of Education. She studies and teaches about teacher policy, organizational change, and administrative practice. A former high-school teacher and administrator, she has a continuing research interest in the work of teachers and the reform of schools. She has studied the leadership of superintendents, the effects of collective bargaining on schools, the use of incentive pay plans for teachers, and the school as a context for adult work. Currently, Johnson and a group of advanced doctoral students are engaged in a multiyear research study, The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, that examines how best to recruit, support, and retain a strong teaching force in the next decade. The project, which is funded by several foundations, includes studies of hiring practices, alternative certification programs, new teachers’ attitudes toward careers, and new teachers’ experiences with colleagues. Johnson served as academic dean of HGSE from 1993 to 1999. She has taught in the school’s summer institute programs for administrators and teachers since 1989.

Richard Light is the Walter H. Gale Professor of Education. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in statistics, and in recent years has focused his work on higher-education policy analyses. Light has been invited by four Harvard presidents — Derek Bok, Neil Rudenstine, Lawrence Summers, and now Drew Faust — to lead a team of faculty and students to explore the effectiveness of undergraduate education, and how to strengthen it. His most recent book, Making the Most of College, won the Stone Award for the best book of the year on education and society. Light has been elected president of the American Evaluation Association, elected to the board of the American Association for Higher Education, and elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; he was also appointed to the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. Currently, Light is chairing a project at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that explores the changing demographics at American colleges and universities. He also is currently chairing a new project at Harvard that works to help 14 distinguished colleges become “learning organizations.” Light received the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for distinguished contributions to scientific practices, and was named by Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor Lecturer Series as one of America’s great teachers.

Leah Price is Professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, narrative theory, gender studies, and the history of books and reading. Price is Humanities Program Director at the Radcliffe Institute; she also co-directs the faculty seminar on the History of the Book at the Harvard Humanities Center. In 2006 Price was awarded a chair in recognition of exceptional graduate and undergraduate teaching. Price’s books include The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel and (co-edited with Pamela Thurschwell) Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture; she has also edited (with Seth Lerer) a special issue of PMLA on “The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature.” She writes on old and new media for theNew York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. Unpacking My Library: Writers and their Books was published by Yale University Press last year; How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain is just out from Princeton. Price is at work on a new book, Book Fetish: How Rethinking the Printed Past Can Transform our Digital Future.

Richard Weissbourd is currently a lecturer in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and at the Kennedy School of Government. His work focuses on vulnerability and resilience in childhood, the achievement gap, moral development, and effective schools and services for children. For several years he worked as a psychologist in community mental health centers as well as on the Annie Casey Foundation’s New Futures Project, an effort to prevent children from dropping out of school. He is a founder of several interventions for at-risk children, including ReadBoston and WriteBoston, city-wide literacy initiatives led by Mayor Menino. With Robert Selman, he founded Project ASPIRE, a social and ethical development intervention in three Boston schools. He is also a founder of a new pilot school, the Lee Academy, that begins with children at three years old. He has advised on the city, state, and federal levels on family policy and school reform and has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications. He is the author of The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America’s Children and What We Can Do About It (Addison-Wesley, 1996) and The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development (Houghton Mifflin, 2009).

 

So, you can see that it would be amazing enough to have the opportunity to attend ISI. What is really exciting, however, is that AVI CHAI is sending us five Jewish day school leaders along with what they call an “LRP Facilitator” – “LRP” being “AVI CHAI-speak” for “Jewish literacy (L), religious purposefulness (R), and peoplehood (P)”.  The facilitator is Jonathan Cannon, Head of School of the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, MD, and I am very excited to have an opportunity to work with and learn from him.

Why is AVI CHAI making this investment?

According to new Program Officer Rabbi Steven M. Brown, Ed.D, and connected to the subject of my blog post last week (click here):

Day schools have been fairly successful in the cognitive domain, seeing student learning accomplishments of high order in Jewish studies and Hebrew language. But I raise some questions:

  1. How can we create Jewish day schools or summer camps which truly affect students’ commitments to seeing the world through Jewish lenses (in whatever denominational form), making Jewish life and practice part of their daily lives now and in the future?
  2. If you are connected to a Jewish day school or summer camp, what are examples of religious purposefulness that you can see and can describe in your school or camp?
  3. What are the biggest challenges in cultivating religious engagement and purposefulness in the Jewish educational context you know best?

So the investment in sending Jewish day school leaders to ISI along with an LRP Facilitator is being made to begin to answer those questions.  Because…

    • Independent schools can address character education and values in school
    • AVI CHAI is looking to see if this cohort can create an LRP wrap-around for future ISI cohorts
    • We can explore how the sessions can contribute to Jewish Day School Leadership

Needless to say, I am beyond excited to be attending ISI, to be attending with other Jewish day school leaders, to be working with AVI CHAI on creating this “LRP wrap-around”, to working with colleagues to translate ISI into the field and to applying what I learn to my practice.

You can expect lots of blogs and tweets October 16-19!

 

Journey Through the Jewish Holidays Update:

We had more students (nearly 45% of the school) in attendance over Sukkot on both days!  We offered a special program on each day to accommodate the large number of students.  It was wonderful to see so many families in synagogue…let’s see if we can keep it up next week!

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Religious Purposefulness: A Community of Kindness Reframe

First, let me thank those who offered encouraging, and candid, feedback on my first attempt at vlogging.  [If you want a recap, pop a dramamine, and click here!]  Separate from the technical feedback (perhaps staring at myself in the webcam was not the most useful technique) and the performance feedback (perhaps rocking incessantly back and forth in my chair was not the best staging), useful as it is, it is the form and content feedback that I found most interesting.  Awkward as it may have been to watch (and shoot), I think the occasional vlog post will be a helpful way to ensure the tree of my voice finds its way through the forest of words I generate most weeks.  There is an intimacy that sound and image brings that no typed sentence can match.  I may have plenty of room to grow as a vlogger, but I think I am convinced that it is worth the investment of time and energy to accomplish.  I imagine the blog will remain my primary vehicle of communication, but supplemented with targeted vlog posts.

And I promise to sit still next time.

Second, as I am typing the afternoon that will soon become Erev Yom Kippur, let me take this opportunity to offer my sincerest apologies to any and all I may have inadvertently harmed or hurt during this last year.  I will try to do and be better in the new Jewish year just begun.

Third, let me offer my annual hope for parents to make Sukkot as much a part of your annual attendance as Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur. Please click here for an impassioned plea for marching with fruits and vegetables.  New this is year is an incentivization program that will provide an extrinsic motivation designed to ensure sufficient attendance to allow for the much preferred intrinsic motivation of celebrating the joy of Jewish holidays with friends and community.

If any parents have questions about the new program, please email or call me at your convenience.  We are looking forward to seeing you on our most joyous of holidays.

Now onto the business at hand…

Dr. Steven Brown, now a Program Officer at the AVI CHAI Foundation, wrote a wonderful blog past last week called “Religious Purposefulness on the High Holidays” (click here for the whole post), in which he issued the following challenge:

Day schools have been fairly successful in the cognitive domain, seeing student learning accomplishments of high order in Jewish studies and Hebrew language. But I raise some questions:

  1. How can we create Jewish day schools or summer camps which truly affect students’ commitments to seeing the world through Jewish lenses (in whatever denominational form), making Jewish life and practice part of their daily lives now and in the future?
  2. If you are connected to a Jewish day school or summer camp, what are examples of religious purposefulness that you can see and can describe in your school or camp?
  3. What are the biggest challenges in cultivating religious engagement and purposefulness in the Jewish educational context you know best?

He then asked the field to contribute examples of religious purposefulness in Jewish day schools, and I said to myself, “Community of Kindness“!

Utilizing the questions Dr. Brown asks provides me with the perfect opportunity during this period of reflection to reframe “Community of Kindness” as an example of religious purposefulness in action.  As we move from the initial phase into surveys culminating with calls to action, I find it helpful to remind ourselves of why we are doing this in the first place.  Although there is nothing new in what follows, I find the reframe a useful way to reorient and refocus on what is most essential.  Without further adieu…

Religious Purposefulness Vignettes

Goal: To begin a national conversation on the nature of religious purposefulness in Jewish day schools by providing succinct examples in the form of vignettes about practices in our schools.

What is the activity or learning experience?  What does it look like?

I am pleased to share the first-ever initiative of the new Galinsky Academy [the home for all the schools of the Jacksonville Jewish Center including the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, the DuBow Preschool, the Bernard & Alice Selevan Religious School and Makom Hebrew High] will be an exciting pilot program called “Creating a Community of Kindness”!  We launched at the beginning of the school year and are partnering with Jewish Family & Community Services to create a sustained, meaningful, comprehensive program that will not only include our schools, but also our clergy, to ensure the fullest participation and the maximum impact possible.

Why is this an example of teaching or modeling religious purposefulness?

The purpose of this program is to create a community of kindness amongst students, teachers and parents at Galinsky Academy.  This is intended to support what is already being taught with the message of chesed throughout the religious institution.  Jewish schools are in the character-building business.  It is a significant motivation for parents to enroll their children in our schools.  We care at least as much about who our students are as we care about what they can accomplish.  We utilize Jewish value language across the curriculum to reinforce the idea that being a mensch is not something one does only in certain classes, but something one is all day long.  Our teachers, along with our clergy, work hard all day to ensure that our school lives up to the ideal of being a community of kindness.  And even during school we struggle to achieve our goal.  That’s precisely why we launched the “Community of Kindness” initiative in the first place.  We recognized that in order to become that community it required all of our schools working together with our clergy to build the safe, loving environment our children deserve.

Where and when does it sit in the life of the school (classroom, shabbaton, school-wide, extracurricular, one-time occurrence, ongoing) and to whom is it directed?

Our plan from the beginning, has been to avoid the one-shot assemblies or training that have some, but fleeting impact on the lives of our students, teachers, and parents and move to something deeper and more powerful.

We began last month month with teacher workshops during “Preplanning Week” and “Faculty Orientation”.  We also presented information at PTA-sponsored “Back to School” brunch. Student, parent and teacher surveys are in creation and are scheduled for October.  Depending on the data, programs, trainings, workshops, town halls, etc., are scheduled to begin in November.

What is the context enabling this activity to happen?  How does the school administration and staff lead and manage this activity?  How do you measure success?

Prior survey data from our schools indicate that the most prevailing form of “bullying” or “mean” behaviors throughout our institution are those of social exclusion.  Our students, academically, know what the right thing to do is.  But many suffer from a pervasive “by-standerism” that prevents rightful action from occurring.

The schools are capable of responding appropriately once behaviors happen.  The reactionary system is working appropriately, by and large.  We need to create a culture that reduces, if not eliminates, those kinds of behaviors from happening in the first place. We lack a proactive system.  It will take students, parents, teachers, administrators, volunteers, and clergy working together to create a common vocabulary and to build a culture where a child of 3, a teen of 15, and a parent would each be equally willing to come forward when faced with “mean” behaviors and articulate that this is not how we behave here.

We will know we have succeeded when we hear peers tell each other that…

“We don’t let friends eat by themselves here.”

“We don’t let our classmates play by themselves on the playground.”

“Of course you could be my math partner!”

“No one works by themselves on class projects here.”

“We invite all our friends to birthday parties in our community.”

You can supply your own appropriately positive quote.  But we will know the culture has shifted when those kinds of expressions are voluntarily offered, not teacher prompted.

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