Category: Teaching & Learning

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!

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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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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If You Are Thinking About Kindergarten

With the Thanksgiving holiday behind us and Winter Break looming, we are entering prime time for parents – particularly parents of pre-kindergarten aged children – to explore and make decisions about schooling.  With this age in particular, the conversations typically focus on two important ideas: “readiness” and “fit”.  With regard to “fit” the research is clear: the most important factor in determining a child’s future academic success isn’t the school, but the fit between the child and the school.

“Readiness,” however, is more slippery.

Young children’s development is irregular and episodic, and difficult to accurately assess, particularly using conventional tests at a single point in time.  Their performance is highly susceptible to immediate and transitory circumstances and can also be affected by physical health, nutrition, and living conditions.  Over time, these contextual factors may also affect their knowledge, skills, and behavior.  Children’s pre-kindergarten experiences are highly unequal, whether in the home and community or in preschool programs.  Thus, the “supply” of readiness skills children bring to kindergarten varies widely.  However, the impact of these variations depends on the demands that kindergarten and first grade place on children, and these also are variable.  There is a lack of agreement regarding the implicit and explicit demands of teachers, schools, state standards, and readiness tests. Children who are seen as ready in one classroom or community—whether the result of a cutoff date or specific assessment—may not be similarly viewed elsewhere.

Let’s bring “fit” and “readiness” together.  A definition of readiness must encompass what is “good enough” in each domain, while recognizing the unevenness of early development.  Every child need not meet the highest readiness standard in every domain, and a distribution of abilities is to be expected.  Despite our best efforts, some children will be less well-prepared than others.  By carefully defining readiness in terms of expectations for children and schools, it may be possible to improve the preparation of both, and create a much better match between children and schools so that more children succeed and maximize their learning during the kindergarten and first grade years.

That’s why it is so important for parents to really get the feel of the different schools they are considering for their child(ren).

Here at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, we are excited to think about all the wonderful new faces we are meeting and will be meeting as parents go about their due diligence to discover which is the right school for their child(ren).  We are always honored to be included in the search and we are confident that for many children, we will be that right choice – that best fit.  We are confident that no one will know your child better than us and no one will be better able to ensure that there truly will be a floor, but no ceiling for your child.

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I am proud to be included amongst the authors contributing to the Autumn 2012 edition of “Contact” magazine.

The theme is “Technology & Jewish Education” and it includes a wonderful range of articles dealing with issues of 21st century learning, technology, and the future of Jewish education.

You can click here to read it.

Reflection Leads to Achievement

Our mission is to achieve the academic benchmarks and standards that define success. Our philosophy is to provide each student with “a floor, but no ceiling” representing each student’s maximum success.  Our pedagogy is this “thing” we’ve been calling “21st century learning” (but is really just excellence in “teaching & learning”).  Our product are students who are lifelong learners.

We can never confuse our product (academic success as defined by standards) with our process (“21st century learning”).  So with that context in mind, please consider the following:

Blogging is process, not product.

I was tempted to be extremely hyperbolic, as an attention grabber, and title this post, “Students who blog are more likely to get into Ivy League colleges, nab their dream jobs, and live happily ever after.”

Not to suggest there is any evidence (yet!) that this is true, but to try to shine a light on this fundamental truth operating at the core of our school; that we believe reflective learners achieve at a higher level than non-reflective learners.  It is both that simple and that complicated.

It is why reflection is embedded into all subject matter. It is why students have blogfolios.  It is why teachers have classroom blogs and responsibility for blogging on a faculty ning.

It is because we believe that the process of reflection leads to the product of achievement.

If I accomplish nothing else in this post, it will hopefully be to have you click on Silvia Tolisano’s blog post on our 21st Century Learning blog, here, in which she lays out in the most compelling and convincing way the why of blogging at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  It is as good a post as you’ll read this year.  With clear analysis and data, she explains how blogging catalyzes achievement.  Not just for students, but for their “text-people” – their teachers.

Or as I put it in a comment to a teacher’s blog post:

..if your students don’t see “blogging” as integral to their ability to learn math – if they don’t realize that blogging helps them learn math better – then why should they want to blog about math?

…and to draw the larger point…if we teachers don’t see blogging as integral to our ability to be effective teachers – if we don’t realize that engaging in collaborative reflection helps us become better teachers – then why should we want to blog about teaching?

 

Our teachers blog because the process of blogging makes them better teachers.  We teach our students to blog because blogging makes them better students.  Better students will achieve higher academic success than non-better students.  Our students want to be successful.  Our teachers want to be successful.

Reflection breeds success.

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Vlogging What You Preach

I was meeting on Friday with Andrea Hernandez, our Director of Teaching & Learning (formally “21st Century Learning” – we are trying to message that “21st Century Learning” is synonymous with “Teaching & Learning”), who chided me for not role modeling what was expected of all our faculty.  Namely, where was my evidence for my own summer learning!

I blogged, here, about our faculty’s commitment to summer learning.  I blogged, here, about my own.  Silvia Tolisano, our 21st Century Learning Consultant (yes, I recognize the conflict with the above parenthesis; it is an imperfect world we live in!) wrote an amazing blog post on the edJEWcon website presenting a mosaic of our entire faculty’s summer learning.  You can click on it, here, and I have insisted it move to the front of the website.  It is a great post.

There is great diversity in how teachers presented evidence of their student learning.  One methodology that inspired me, pushes me a bit outside my comfort zone…so it is probably a good one for me to experiment with – vlogging.  It sounds simple, instead of sitting at my desk, writing, writing, writing and writing, I can simply look into the camera and speak.  But when the light goes red…so do I!  Not so easy…and you’ll be able to tell when you watch it.  But I did try!  [Another problem…I’ve become so accustomed to hyperlinking, that each time I mentioned a name, I mentally paused to hyperlink!]

[NOTE: I apologize if watching me rock back and forth in my chair made anyone seasick!]

Thanks for suffering through my first (and possibly last!) vlog post.  As we enter the season of repentance, you will surely find it in your hearts to forgive me.  🙂

A Sweet & Happy New Year to All!

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Putting it All Together

What a week!  I want to use this week’s blog post to add some closing thoughts to recent weeks’ blog posts, tying some threads together, as we officially open school on Monday.

Thread #1:

I blogged last week, here, about what we would be doing this week in our annual Faculty Pre-Planning Week and writing on a Friday afternoon, it has been a tremendously positive, energizing, motivating and informational week culminating in Thursday’s “Meet & Greet” for Grades K-5 and today’s “Middle School Orientation”.  We are ready to go!

Here we were on our opening World Cafe (click here for more info):

The lead question was about “mentoring” and here is one sample of how our conversation unfolded:

We collected all the creative output of our cafe and uploaded it to our faculty ning for further conversation and collaboration.

Another highlight was an opportunity to gather with our Galinsky Academy colleagues in the DuBow Preschool for some team-building activities:

We had a fantastic week and cannot wait until Monday!

 

Thread #2:

I blogged a few weeks ago, here, about our amazing cast of new and returning faculty & staff.  There were a few gaps that I updated through postscripts in future blogs, but one gap had until now been left unexplained.  While I was on vacation, Jessie Roman, who had served ably as our secondary support staff person in the Day School for over seven years, informed me that she had accepted an opportunity too important to her family’s well-being to pass up.  We understood and continue to wish her well in her new endeavor.  She is missed.

We have quickly gone through a search and interview process to find a capable replacement.  I am pleased to announce that we have identified a new employee and have signed her to a contract.  Technically we are still awaiting background data to confirm her employment, so I cannot, as of now, share her name.  But pending a surprise, she will begin her work a week from Monday.  I will share her name as soon as she clears!

Recognizing we have been one person short in our office this month and next week, we appreciate your patience.  We’ll be back to full speed soon.

 

Thread 3:

I blogged more recently, here, about the official launch of the first Galinsky Academy initiative: Creating a Community of Kindness.  It began this week with our teachers, and continues next Monday at our annual PTA-sponsored “Back to School” brunch for Preschool and Day School parents with information sharing on the new project.  [NOTE: This will be repeated for teachers and parents in the Bernard and Alice Selevan Religious School at their upcoming Faculty Orientation and PTA-sponsored “Back to School” brunch.  All Makom Hebrew High teachers also work in another Galinsky Academy school and received their information there.]

In the spirit of transparency, I wanted to share with you the overall vision for that program as has been worked out by the professionals of the Academy, the clergy of the Jacksonville Jewish Center, and our partners at Jewish Family & Community Services.  It is a starting point – a work in progress – not the entirety.  As data is collected (surveys in September across the Academy), we will revise to keep the project moving forward in the right directions.  Here, however, is at least where we will begin:

Outline for Curriculum for 2012-2013

Galinsky Academy

The purpose of this program is to create a community of kindness amongst students, teachers and parents within Galinsky Academy. This curriculum is intended to support what is already being taught with the message of Chesed throughout the religious institution.  The plan would be to kick-off this program prior to the beginning of the school year with teachers during pre-planning week and we would be available to do similar with parents.

For the DuBow Preschool:

  • Facilitating classroom activities based upon the themes of the monthly Character Words.  Examples of activities include assisting teachers in creating a monthly classroom bulletin board and leading an activity that corresponds to the monthly reading of a PJ Library book.
  • Utilizing the book Conscious Discipline by Dr. Becky A. Bailey as a resource to develop classroom activities to support teachers plan/agendas
  • How to take home what is being learned and processed in school: Examples include facilitating conversations with parents and teachers about how to create a community of caring, implementing specific projects that can be done at home with their children and brought back to school, classroom projects with teachers  (i.e.; creating Tzedakah boxes)

For the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School:

  • School-wide projects  (part of this will include engaging the student council—attending the monthly meetings with them to encourage their support and involvement in activities) Examples include: creating themed bulletin boards about definitions/examples of caring, implementing peer to peer support groups, implementing a school-wide award system/acknowledgment of students acts of kindness, an award system for teachers, implementing a system/plan for parents to recognize teachers/staff
  • Classroom workshops and projects— would include an activity (with processing upon completion), then leaving teachers with worksheets/mini-projects for follow-up to do in classroom and/or send home with kids

For the Bernard & Alice Selevan Religious School & Makom Hebrew High:

  • Teacher workshops.  Possible topics include: how to facilitate communication with parents and with students, how to recognize special needs and emotional issues in children, how to encourage peer to peer support amongst students, assertiveness training, bullying prevention ideas
  • In-classroom projects with follow-up activity for child to bring home and do with parent(s)
  • Teacher coaching–initial meeting with teacher about classroom issue(s), then observe classroom and make suggestions (behavioral management)

Examples of possible workshops for students

  • Value of friendship–how we choose friends
  • Hands-on sensitivity training—“walking in their shoes” (bring in guest speaker to help understanding physical and emotional disabilities—have students walk blindfolded, etc.)  Focusing on accepting differences and strengths, what makes each of us unique
  • Self-esteem/empowerment topics
  • Communication—how to talk to your parents or those in authority
  • Why do we bully? (classroom and cyber)—what to do when you see bullying occur
  • Dealing with conflict
  • Healthy boundaries/healthy relationships
  • Assertiveness vs. aggressiveness
  • Role-playing—practicing kindness—what to say to peers, processing discussion
  • Classroom project/team-building—how to make the classroom a safe place

Examples of possible workshops for teachers and parents

  • Recognizing signs of bullying behavior (including cyber and classroom); threats to our children
  • Recognizing possible mental health issues/needs
  • Coaching on how to talk to parents about sensitive topics (for teachers)
  • How to talk to student/child in a way they will understand

Putting into Action/Other learning opportunities

  • Field trips and Mitzvah projects: 1-2x a year kids will go off-site to volunteer with another agency which provides services to children (Sulzbacher, Community Connections, etc.)
  • Availability to meet with parents and teachers—before or after school day, during summer, before holidays, etc.
  • Acceptance of referrals for short-term counseling and/or crisis intervention
  • Availability for classroom management intervention/suggestions per request from staff
  • Availability for specific interventions with child and/or family related to bullying issue
  • Follow-up sessions with aggressors or victims of bullying on an on-call basis
  • Pre and post tests/evaluations of knowledge and resources available to students

Resources

Books by Dr. Becky A. Bailey—Shubert series and Conscious Discipline

Employee certified in training of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits

Stephen Covey— The Leader in Me

 

Tying those three threads, along with others, together helps create the fabric of what will surely be an amazing year in the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School and the Galinsky Academy.

Off to enjoy a restful Shabbat and to get ready for an amazing week!

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The Transparency Files: Faculty Pre-Planning Week

Here we are again!  It is the Friday before Pre-Planning Week and the building is full of energy and excitement as boxes are unpacked, files organized, plans established, etc., as we prepare for our teachers on the 13th and our students on the 20th.  Another summer has come and gone and the 2012-2013 school year is ready to begin!

I blogged, here, about how we intended to use our summer vacation for personal and professional development.  “Pre-Planning Week” is our first opportunity to come together as a faculty and staff to share the results and plan implementation into the next school year.  It is a week for preparation, planning and motivation.  It is a liminal week hanging between what was and what is yet to be.  How will we take yet another step closer to being the school we are becoming?  What new programs or ideas will take shape and impact the lives of children and families?  How will we be better teachers and administrators this year?  What will we learn from our students and parents?

The birth of a new year is always exciting because everything is possible!

In the spirit of transparency and constantly putting our schedule where our mouths are, I thought it would be useful to share a taste of what our teachers will be doing this week and link those topics to the major philosophical ideas that guide our school’s mission and vision.

We will begin our week with a protocol I use to kick off each year:

The World Café
Using seven design principles and a simple method, the World Café is a powerful social technology for engaging people in conversations that matter, offering an effective antidote to the fast-paced fragmentation and lack of connection in today’s world.

Based on the understanding that conversation is the core process that drives personal, business, and organizational life, the World Café is more than a method, a process, or technique – it’s a way of thinking and being together sourced in a philosophy of conversational leadership.

This year’s kick-off question: “How can our willingness to mentor and be mentored take our school to the next level?”

The DuBow Preschool (you won’t believe how beautiful it looks after its summer renovation!) will join us for annual team-building.  This year we will unpack what it means for us to be joined together as part of Galinsky Academy by treating this Wordle as a piece of text:

Other highlights of the week will include a training with Dr. Mae Barker, a Senior Behavior Analyst at Florida Autism Consultants & Educational Services entitled “The Recipe for the Successful Inclusion”.  This fits with our ongoing desire to meet the different needs of all our students – it is the very definition of “a floor, but no ceiling”.  [For a fuller explanation of “inclusion” and what it means at MJGDS, click here.]

Our teachers will present their summer “homework” in our first-ever “21st Century Book Club”.  For a refresher on what books our teachers read this summer and why, click here.

And in addition to the studying with our clergy, meeting in teams to plan curriculum and projects, and receiving training and coaching in iPad implementation, SMART Board instruction, blogging, etc., we will kick off our new “Creating a Community of Kindness” initiative (click here for a full description) with our first session with our partner in this project, Jewish Family & Community Services.

All of that AND a series of individual meetings with families, a “Meet & Greet”, and a Middle School Orientation…it will be quite a week!

Two quick bookkeeping notes:

Summers do bring their surprises.  Whilst I was away on vacation, we made a change in the Fourth Grade Assistant Teacher position.  I am pleased to welcome Sara Luettchau to our MJGDS family!  She graduated last year from UNF with her degree in education and brings great enthusiasm and fresh ideas to our team.

On a sadder note, we also said goodbye to Jessie Roman who had been an administrative assistant for the Day School (as well as our Youth Department and Religious School) for the last seven years.  We wish her well in her new endeavor.  As I type, we have narrowed our search to three excellent candidates and look forward to having a new person in place by the start of the school year.

The flip-flops have been replaced by socks and dress shoes.  It is go time!  Can’t wait for Monday!

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The Transparency Files: Lower School Schedule

For those of us in the Southeast, the snowball of summer has crested and is headed downhill towards the start of another amazing school year!  Teachers report on August 13th and the first day of school is August 20th.

Really!

A housekeeping note before diving into this week’s post:

We are fully staffed for the 2012-2013 school year.  I am pleased to introduce our “final four” who will round out the faculty of new and returning teachers I introduced here:

  • Cathleen Toglia will be teaching Sixth Grade Math & Seventh Grade Pre-Algebra.  She comes certified for teaching math in both elementary and high school and a has a wealth of excellent teaching experience.
  • Kara Alford will be our First Grade Assistant Teacher.  She comes certified for teaching elementary education and has experience as a lead First Grade Teacher.
  • Ryisha Flowers will be our Fourth Grade Assistant Teacher.  She is currently a student at the University of North Florida where she is working on her degree in Special Education.
  • Megan DiMarco will be our Kindergarten Assistant Teacher.  She is finishing up her Florida Teaching Certification at the Educators Preparatory Institute and has held a similar position at a school in South Florida for the last two years.

We welcome our final four and look forward to great things in the year to come!

Segue.

Well, it took a great deal of time to plan, plot and format, but as promised, I want to share the new schedules for Grades 1-5.  Similar schedules for K & 6-8 are being finalized, by the way, but for those grades it is more a work of translation.  Although I do not believe there is much new in these schedules, our desire to publish them stems from two places:

  • The desire to break down “General Studies” into “Language Arts”, “Math”, “Science” and “Social Studies”.  It is important that we have accountability for a complete secular academic schedule, particularly for Science and Social Studies.
  • We want to dismiss once and for all the idea that students in (at least this) Jewish Day School have a “less than” secular academic experience than our friends at other secular independent schools or public schools.  With our extended day, careful scheduling, and mission-driven choices, we believe our students have similar time on task with regard to secular academics as anyone else.  To repeat – families who choose the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School are not sacrificing secular academics for the sake of Jewish Studies.  They are choosing a full secular academic program (and a pretty excellent one at that!) with the benefit of a world-class Jewish studies program.

The proof is in the pudding…or, in this case, the schedule.

[Now this is our first go around with the new format so there are some kinks that need to be worked out.  Not every teacher included every activity (recess) on the schedule.  And a few teachers have some features unique to them.  So please don’t sweat the small stuff or make assumptions…if you have a specific question about your child(ren)’s schedule, go right ahead and shoot me an email or make a call.]

Without further adieu…

I will be off next week on a family vacation, but back working and blogging the week after.  Enjoy these last weeks of summer…but be excited by what will be waiting for you when you come back (I wonder if they did any work on the second floor this summer)!

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