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The Dreaded Bullet Point Blog Post

Yes, it is time again for another dreaded blog post in which I weave together a variety of bullet points, links, and thoughts representing the torn-in-20-directions this head of school is experiencing in the early dawn of 2012.

What can I do?  I have not blogged since we went into Winter Break and the clock is ticking on a Friday school afternoon!  Having been convinced that a less-than-perfect blog post is better than no post at all, I offer you a sample of what’s on my mind.

Yet another video from Talie Zaifert, our amazing Admissions & Marketing Director, debuted over the break celebrating another wonderful Chanukah Celebration.

http://youtu.be/ltOypX_zWEA

Thanks to our friends at AVI CHAI and PEJE for helping us promote!

I may need to reread my own blog post about the value of unplugging in a technologically obsessed era.  We spent one week in Cancun and I overspent my international data plan within the first two days.  How can I possibly deny the world my valuable tweets and status updates?  [Seriously, how could you have not wanted to see this as it was happening?]

Next vacation…no iPhone and no iPad and I mean it!  (Anybody want a peanut?  Click here if you need to know how that is funny.)  Other than my difficulty disconnecting and the fact that my daughter now expects to be serenaded by a Mariachi band at all meals, it was a great opportunity to relax and refresh for this new (secular) year.

I did manage during the break to guest blog on the PEJE Blog on the topic of “Entrepreneurial Educational Leadership: Seeking Excellence Beyond Our Resources”.  Thanks much to Ken Gordon (as always) from PEJE for the editorial work and the opportunity.  You are welcome to read it, comment on it, share it, etc., here.

Next week, Andrea Hernandez, our school’s 21st Century Learning Coordinator, and I will be off to Atlanta to participate and present at this year’s North American Jewish Day School Conference.  It will be a great opportunity to network, represent, learn and connect with colleagues from all over.  As soon as we finish our presentation (!), we will be happy to link to it for anyone interested.  And I will hope to follow up my last blog post from a conference (here) with another multimedia presentation describing my attendance experience through a 21st century learning lens.

Closer to home…between now and July 1:

  • Florida Council of Independent Schools (FCIS) Re-Accreditation Visit: March 12th-13th
  • edJEWcon 5772.0: April 29th-May 1st
  • Martin J. Gottlieb Day School 50th Anniversary Weekend: May 4th-6th
  • The launch of the “Academy” model at the Jacksonville Jewish Center: July 1  (Click here for a reminder.  Official press release coming next month!)

Four extraordinarily significant events in the life of our school will take place between now and July 1!  This is in addition to all the ongoing events that make school administration so rewarding.  What an amazing six months this is going to be!

We are right on track with each major item.  I am so grateful to my administrative team, support staff team, synagogue partners, lay leaders and volunteers for all their ongoing contributions to ensuring the success of these endeavors.  Each of them alone could take up a school’s yearly agenda – all four within six months?  (Plus two new ventures not yet ready to announce!  But amazing ones!)  It shall surely be transformational.

Next week?  I’ll be back with singular focus and a single topic: presenting an overdue “State of the School”.

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21st Century Conference Attendance – One Head’s Meta Experience

I spent this past Sunday through Tuesday attending the Day School Leadership Training Institute’s (DSLTI) Alumni Retreat in West Palm Beach, Florida.  It was the first conference I have attended this season, with at least two more coming up.  I will be in Atlanta, GA in January attending (and presenting) at the North American Jewish Day School Conference and we will be hosting edJEWcon 5772.0, right here at our school in May.  There have been years, when in addition to those, there might be other Jewish or secular conferences in education I have attended or presented at.  That is, admittedly, a lot of time to be out of my school and (particularly in this economy) a lot financial resources being spent for me to attend theses conferences and retreats.  It raises the very legitimate question, “Is it worth it for the school to have you attend or present at all of these conferences”?  My teachers, parents, students, board members, donors, etc., all have a very legitimate right to ask what benefits come from this investment.

I had thought (prior to the retreat) about writing a blog post describing what I would learn from the DSLTI Retreat with suggestions of ways it might impact my practice.  But then I remembered that I am supposed be Mr. 21st Century Learning and couldn’t I employ another method for delivering that content?

So…my first order of business was to ensure that I captured my experience of the retreat utilizing 21st century technologies.  We quickly developed a Twitter #hashtag to organize a back-channel for the retreat; for us to comment, and collaborate, and – for me – to experiment with using Twitter for my own personal professional development.  Every time I would have written a note, or typed a note, I sent a tweet.  For those who already follow me on Twitter (and you can click on the “Follow” button on my blog if you’d like to), it provided them with a running live experience of who I was listening to, what I was thinking, what questions it raised, and some cases what I was seeing (as I attached pictures to my tweets using my iPhone).

Whether you have a Twitter account or not, you can review the entire #DSLTI Twitter feed simply by clicking here or by going to www.twitter.com and searching for “#DSLTI”.  (You will notice that the conversation has continued past the conference – which means it was and will be a meaningful professional development vehicle.)  But for a taste, I am going to simply show you my tweets from the retreat.  [Warning: I have given this to you as snapshots – NONE of the links will work.  You would have to get that from going directly to Twitter.]  This is one answer to the question of what the experience meant to me:

So besides tweeting from the retreat, I also took “notes”.  Using the “Note Taker HD” app on my iPad, I was able incorporate my hand-written notes, typed notes, and photos.  Again, it may not all be legible (I am a doctor now) and it all may not make sense because I wasn’t writing it for public display, I do think it is useful to show for two reasons.  One, as above, is to ensure no one thought I spent my time sipping drinks by the pool.  But, it is also to provide some meta-analysis about the experience of attending a conference and how 21st century learning has impacted my experience.  It may also stimulate some thought about whether we need to train teachers or students about how they can adapt new ways of “taking notes” in a 21st century learning context.  Here’s what I came up:

The third thing I did was enter each new book I was stimulated to buy onto my Shelfari page, which you can see to your right on my blog as a widget or by clicking here.

I came back front the retreat jazzed up about what I had learned, how I had learned, and how I hope to have my practice informed by new learning.  I hope this blog post does a fraction of any of those things for you!

And if you are interested in where #DSLTI goes from here?  Follow us on Twitter!

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Is my school any better now that I’m a doctor?

Because isn’t that the only question that really matters to anyone outside my family?

Yes, I take a tremendous amount of personal pride in having reached this academic achievement.  It took me 8 years (6 of them ABD) to successfully defend my Ed.D. dissertation at the Jewish Theological Seminary – which was accomplished (pending minor revisions) this past Monday.  During that time, I helped found one Jewish day school and assumed the headship of a second.  When I started, my wife and I were a recently married couple living in an apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  When I finished, we were a family of four living in a house in Jacksonville, Florida.  But what matter does it make outside of my own world?  My parents are kvelling, but am I a better head of school having gone through this experience?  Are the schools I have been blessed with the opportunity to run any better off?  (And, therefore, would I recommend that other heads of school, principals, etc., pursue doctorates of their own for the purpose of improving their craft?)

I can only blog for myself, but as challenging as the process was, the answer has been an unequivocal, “yes”!

My research questions were how do theories of educational leadership help understand the founding of a new Jewish day school, and how does the head of school’s understanding and implementation of leadership theories impact the founding and growth of a new Jewish day school.  You can see that I had the opportunity to make my work the subject of my doctoral research and, therefore, I was not only able to further my own education, but (hopefully) I was able to contribute to the school(s) I was employed to head.  Had I chosen a different research topic, perhaps, I would feel differently, but I’m not entirely sure.  The discipline of doing doctoral research in education – the books I have read, the methodology I have mastered, the academic vernacular I have had to learn to write in, the necessity to defend my work to tenured professors of education – all of this has undoubtedly caused me to reflect more deeply on practice and, thus, made me a better practitioner.

Once my dissertation is published, I may (or may not) choose to edit it into an academic article or another vehicle for publication.  But because my work actually included an investigation as to to the worthiness of academic degrees in being a head of school, I thought I would share a snippet of my research to close this post:

The importance of credentials  

There was no doubt that my credentials, primarily being an alumnus of the American Jewish University (then called the University of Judaism), a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a member of the Day School Leadership Training Institute, played a significant role in my hire (as founding head of school).  The hope of the search committee was that I would bring best practices learned from those schools and programs to my job so that the school could be successfully founded.  To the degree that I was able to utilize my leadership skills, I believe this hypothesis has been proven accurate time and time again.  I have little doubt that without the training I received, particularly the experiences of the Day School Leadership Training Institute, I would have fallen on my face from day one.

My experiences were largely spent trying to move the school’s leadership and to understand and endorse the best practices I believed were, in fact, ‘best’ because of what I had learned through my academic and professional programs.  Founding committees should rightly consider the importance of academic credentials and that programs such as DSLTI should continue to be promoted and taken seriously.  There are no guarantees that it will take the specific skills mastered in the specific toolbox of each academic or professional program provides to successfully perform the job of founding a new school.  It is, however, reasonable to assume that the more skills available to the practitioner, the higher the likelihood is for success to occur.  Both the literature review and the data have clearly demonstrated how educational leadership is as much about knowing which skills to apply when then it is about mastering one best specific set of skills.

I do think it is reasonable to make a few conclusions about how academic and professional programs designed to prepare people for the headship could increase the odds for success.  There is great value to emphasizing real-world and real-work situations.  DSLTI does a terrific job presenting mini-case studies for fellows to struggle through in a learning environment prior to confronting them in the workplace.  Mentoring and coaching are essential components.  Opportunities to shadow and reflect with experienced heads would be useful as well.  It is impossible to replicate and role-play every situation that could occur in the headship, but it is possible to shift the emphasis from theory to practice, particularly in professional preparatory programs.  This also holds true for the schools.  New schools and schools preparing for new heads should seriously consider building coaching into the normal practice of professional development.

 

Discuss. 🙂

Dr. Jon Mitzmacher

A (Very) Transparent Thanksgiving

I have learned a lot of important lessons over the last month.  One of those lessons?  It is very easy to espouse “transparency” as a value when things are going well and/or when the issues are simple and non-controversial.  It is another thing altogether when things are more complex, risky and deeply personal.  As a complicated episode in my professional life has played out over the last few weeks, I have felt compromised between my professional desire for transparency and my personal desire for privacy.  I have struggled with the decision about whether or not it was appropriate to utilize this “professional” blog – property of the school, not the person – to discuss events which have had a profound impact on not just me, but my family.  With the episode (thankfully) resolved, it just did not seem right to pretend that it never happened (by its absence in my primary vehicle for reflective practice, this blog).  

[I realize that although the primary audience for this blog was and is the school family, there is an extended readership who may or may not be interested in some of its content. I try to manage those potential audiences through how I do (or don’t) promote the blog via social media.  Another side-effect of “transparency”?  If the boundaries were semi-permeable before, they sometimes feel as if they have disappeared altogether.  I’m not sure this is a good thing, but it feels like the truth.]

The facts are relatively straightforward and have been public knowledge since November 1st.  An unanticipated opportunity to compete as a finalist for the headship of Sinai Akiba Academy in Los Angeles, CA resulted in my exercise of an opt-out clause in my current contract.  My wife and I went to LA for our finalist visit and returned to Jacksonville. After meeting with my lay leadership here, I withdrew my candidacy for the position at Sinai Akiba and have renewed my commitment to remain here at MJGDS.

It seems so simple when you write it like that!

Both institutions handled this delicate situation with tremendous grace and with incredible transparency.  A series of public meetings here in Jacksonville with all concerned constituencies (parents, faculty, boards, etc.) resulted in the formation of a search committee charged with seeking out my replacement (since closed).  My candidacy in Los Angeles was a matter of public record on the school’s website and my finalist visit was conducted openly as all such visits are.

Needless to say, the situation left me (and my family) rather exposed on all sides.  That it was self-imposed did little to dull the piercing spotlight the month of November has brought to us.  Again, let me clear.  The choices were mine.  The responsibility for them was mine.  And the situation could not have been handled any more professionally or compassionately by everyone.  But I would be lying if I suggested that it also was not deeply and personally stressful.  It was, in fact, agonizing.

As I said to the search committee for Sinai Academy when I withdrew…

“…I write to officially notify you of my decision to renew my commitment here in Jacksonville, thus withdrawing my candidacy from Sinai Akiba.  I thank you all for your hospitality, your warm welcome, and the opportunity to have been a finalist.  I am confident with lay leaders like yourself and the high quality of your other candidates that only bright days lay ahead for Sinai Akiba.  I look forward to following your success and working with your next head as a fellow Schechter colleague.

Thank you again for the time and care you put into my candidacy.”

I have nothing, but positive things to say about Sinai Akiba Academy.  We met lovely people during our visit and our desire for their continued success is genuine.  But our decision and our future is here – at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, the Jacksonville Jewish Center and in Jacksonville, Florida.  And for that we are thankful.

We have barely begun to write a chapter in the book of the life of this remarkable school which turns 50 this spring.  The idea of leaving so much exciting work undone certainly contributed to my professional desire to continue as head of this school.  It has been a dynamic and satisfying year and a half since we came here, but the “job” of becoming the school we wish to be is hardly “done” (if such a thing in an organic learning organization could ever be accomplished)!  We have so many exciting projects in the near and long-term future. [I don’t want to use this post to re-list all the initiatives and ideas that are in progress or fomenting.  A quick scroll through this blog or our school’s website provides a thorough recap.]  I couldn’t imagine not being part of them.  And I am thankful that I don’t have to.

But more than the work are the people…

…as I wrote to my teachers last week:

“As we enter into a holiday week, let me take a moment to express my gratitude to all of you for the opportunity to be part of this team.  As you know, it has been a topsy-turvy few weeks for me (and for everyone) as events unfolded, but it is with genuine humility that I tell you that a most significant factor in wanting to remain here is the opportunity to continue to work together to make this the finest, most innovative, highest-quality school it can possibly be.  I come to work each day excited about what we can accomplish together.  I am thrilled to have the chance to continue this journey with you and look forward to brighter and brighter days ahead.”

And I gladly extend those thoughts to this entire community – parents, students, colleagues, communal partners, etc.

 

So as we head into Thanksgiving tomorrow…let me express how joyously thankful I am for the blessings in my life:  The blessing of a healthy family.  The blessing of a caring community.  The blessing of blossoming friendships.  The blessing of fulfilling work.  The blessing of committed and generous lay leaders and volunteers.  The blessing of extraordinary colleagues.  The blessing of dedicated and talented staff and faculty.  The blessing to have an opportunity to work each and every day with others to ensure a Jewish future.  The blessing to feel one’s roots dig a little deeper into sacred ground.

For these blessings and more, I am thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving.

edJEWcon 5772.0 – Ride the Wave!

It has been a topsy-turvy week in the life!  I have a lot to be thankful for and will make that the subject of next week’s blog post.  The benefit of rest and reflection will hopefully render me more articulate on the topic than I currently feel capable of.

In the meanwhile, let me thank those heads of school, foundation partners, researchers, and colleagues in the field for their continued interest and support for edJEWcon!  Your emails, tweets, Facebook comments, etc., has helped spark the fire and fuel the applications.

Check out the trailer here:

If you are interested in edJEWcon 5772.0 and want to learn more…click here.  If you are ready to apply while spots still are open…click here.  We are working on creating additional tracks and opportunities for those of y’all who are not part of school teams, but want to be part of the experience.

Our team is in conversation with many interested parties these days and exciting new ventures are brewing!  I have no choice, but to leave that as the simple tease it is.  As ideas become realities, we will have much to share in the upcoming weeks and months. But the snowball is cresting the hilltop…and the educational revolution is underway.  We look forward to playing our part and learning from those walking down the road with us.

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Leap of Faith – The Sequel

I wrote a blog post last year after returning from our school’s second annual Middle School Retreat (my first with the school) at Camp Ramah Darom in Georgia, entitled “Leap of Faith” (you can read it here).  One of the great 21st century learning pedagogies is the gift of reflection.  And one of the gifts of living by a school calendar (which, parenthetically, is equally true of the Jewish calendar) is that it often gives you the chance to experience and re-experience similar events on a yearly basis.  And so now after having had a week or so to reflect on this year’s Middle School Retreat, I wanted to spend a little time unpacking this most powerful of experiences.

[You may wish to reread my most recent blog post here and/or check out the brief video we made of it here for a taste of those experiences.]

The other advantage of having taken an additional week or two to share my thoughts is that I am not writing in the feverish afterglow of the experience.  We’ve come down from the high, but the carryover effect carries on.  And that’s what it is really all about isn’t it? Transferability?  The magic bullet of all successful informal educational experiences is how well they transfer back into “real life”.  Sure it is amazing, the best-time-of-my-life when you are in the middle of gorgeous scenery flying down the zip-line.  But is it still amazing back in the science lab?

Yup.

Or at least so far.  We have work to do to nourish the spark from the retreat and keep the flame lit through the peaks and valleys of a school year.  But when I walk the halls and see our Middle School students, I can see the bonds born from horseback and hikes remain intact. Similar to the positive impact on athletics in the small middle school (you can read that blog post here), our ability to create community is vital to our continued success.  We are not sixth graders, seventh graders and eighth graders…we are a middle school.  We are not just students, teachers and administrators…we are a family.

 

Final note: If you are an MJGDS middle school family reading this, you may be wondering what the big deal is with the Schnupencup.  If you are someone who has been a student, camper, teacher, staff, or participant in just about anything I have done in Jewish education since 1989…I hope you are smiling.  If you have no idea what I am talking about…it is just a matter of time!

Fingers up!

“We left as a school and came back as a family.”

Wow.

That’s all I can say.  We got back yesterday from our four-day Middle School Retreat and it was everything you could hope for in a Jewish informal educational experience. We had learning, games, athletics, prayer, social bonding, community building, hiking, zip lines, a campfire, and a friendship circle to boot.  It felt like we squeezed a summer’s session of camp into just four days…and we are all tired enough to prove it!

After having spent a good chunk of time, in between catching up with the rest of the school, putting together a video of our experience, I will let the video to the talking – for this week.  I will likely have more to say next week when I’ve had a chance to properly process and reflect.

The flip camera was held by lots of hands and so I apologize to parents and students that not everyone made it in – it is not a reflection of anything other than happenstance.  We will more than make up for it with the photos to be published on our website soon.  It is, I hope, a taste of why this retreat is such an important part of our middle school.  Our relationships are forever changed – for the good.  We will be able to do things within the walls of the classrooms that we never would have without having spent time together outside of them.

I am now going to go home and rest.

Jewish Holiday-Palooza!

How many Jewish holidays can we pack into a two and a half day school week?

Lots!

We are doing our best to pack both the authentic celebrations of holidays we are in school for (as you will see below) and foretastes of holidays to come like the mini-Simchat Torah celebration we will have later today (of which I will not have time to make a mini-movie of due to the half-day schedule).

If a picture is worth a 1000 words…hopefully, a couple of short movies of our students living the Judaism we teach in the classrooms outside their walls will a blog post make!  Here’s a brief look at our week.  Enjoy!

And the fun doesn’t end today!  We hope to see many families celebrating the holidays that are to come this week – especially Simchat Torah!  Don’t miss this opportunity to celebrate the gift of Torah – and to let your children see you enjoy the love of Judaism.

Monday?  Off on our Middle School Retreat!  I’ll blog all about it when I get back.

Chag sameach!

Marching with Fruits & Vegetables (5772 Remix)

We are deep into the holidays!  We have come out of Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur and headed straight into Sukkot.  It is amongst my favorite times of the year.

Not because we have a half-day and I have to sprint out of here to buy ingredients for cholent, finish my sukkah, and get ready for the holiday am I going to revise and update a blog post that I originally wrote last year here.  I am going to revise and update that blog post because I don’t know how to say what I want to say during this time of year any differently…and because I don’t imagine the issues it raises will markedly be different this year (but I am open to being wrong!).

So…without further adieu…

I love Sukkot!  Talk about “A Floor, But No Ceiling”!

This is absolutely my favorite holiday of the entire year.  There is nothing else like it on the Jewish Calendar – sitting outside in a sukkah you built yourself (which I actually did this year!), with handmade decorations from your children, enjoying good food with friends and family in the night air, the citrusy smell of etrog lingering and mixing with verdant lulav – this is experiential Judaism at its finest.

But here is a complicated truth: Even though our school will be closed on Thursday and Friday for Sukkot, it is reasonable to assume that the majority of our students will not be found in synagogue enjoying what is known as “The Season of our Rejoicing”.  But many or most were in synagogue last weekend for Yom Kippur.  So when it comes to “atoning” we have a full house, but for “rejoicing” we have empty seats?

If our children – if we – only experience the Judaism of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and not the Judaism of Sukkot, the simple truth is that we are not exposing them to the full range of beauty and joy our tradition has to offer.  So why, in fact, is this what typically happens?

I’m not entirely sure, but I think it has to do with the exotic nature of the holiday.  As someone who did not grow up celebrating this holiday, upon coming to synagogue as an adult and watching a congregation march in circles waving fruits and vegetables – well this was not the Judaism I knew!  Truth be told, there are surely pagan accretions to the way that we honor the harvest roots of this holiday which may seem alien to the typical prayerbook service.  But for me, that is precisely what makes it so unique, special and not-to-be-missed!

No one likes to feel uncomfortable and adults especially are wary of feeling uneducated or unprepared.  I know how I felt encountering Jewish ritual for the first time as an adult – it was scary.  I, however, was lucky.  I was pursuing a degree in Jewish education and, therefore, had all the support and resources I needed to learn and grow.  I realize that most adults coming at Jewish practice for the first time (or the first time in a while) are not so lucky.  The amount of “stuff” Judaism asks of us to do – building the sukkah with precise specifications, shaking the lulav and etrog in the proscribed way, chanting less-familiar prayers, coming to synagogue on unfamiliar days – can be overwhelming.

But don’t lose the forest through the trees…I’d simply ask you to consider this: When building your child’s library of Jewish memories, which memory feels more compelling and likely to resonate over time – sitting in starched clothes in sanctuary seats or relaxing with friends and family in an outdoor sukkah built with love and care?

You don’t have to choose just one, of course, that is the beauty of living a life of sacred time – there is a rhythm to the Jewish calendar, evocative and varied.  Come to synagogue for the High Holidays, to be sure.  But don’t miss out on Sukkot (or Simchat Torah or Shavuot or “Add Jewish Holiday Here”).  Let this Sukkot truly be the season of our great rejoicing.  I hope to see many students in synagogue this Sukkot.  I hope to see many parents push themselves out of their comfort zones and join the parade.  Pick up your fruit and vegetables and march with us in a circle.

Chag sameach.

It isn’t just good education; it’s good business.

I feel similarly to how many synagogue presidents must feel heading into Kol Nidre this evening as I prepare to write my first business blog nearing the eve of Yom Kippur!  The rationale is hardly the same.  Synagogues reserve Yom Kippur for their annual “High Holiday appeals” because this is the time they have the most people in the seats, not necessarily because the message of fundraising fits with the theme of atonement.  I do not presume that as families are preparing for the holiday that I will have a similarly huge burst in blog readership!

A personal note…

…apropos of the time of year.  Let me take this opportunity to offer my sincerest apologies to anyone whom I may have hurt or offended over the past year.  Let us forgive each other (and ourselves) for our all-too-human foibles and pledge to make this new (Jewish) year one of growth and community-building.

And now to the topic at hand…

I have been asked by our good friends at the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE) to become a guest blogger on the topic off  “How 21st century Jewish education is an issue of financial sustainability?”  First off, thanks to my new, good (and for now virtual) friend Ken Gordon, PEJE’s fantastic Social Media Manager for the opportunity!  I’m excited to wrestle with that question and share my thoughts with colleagues in the field.  [My posts with PEJE will appear here on their home page for blogs impacting the Jewish day school field.  I recommend the page for regular viewing or subscription if you are interested in the field.  I am cross-posting this first one in my own blog as a trial run.]

From PEJE’s 2009 strategic plan, they define “financial sustainability” as “increasing the resources available to schools and professionalizing the development capacity”.  This is part of PEJE’s overall shift in mission from an organization dedicated to growing the number of Jewish day schools to an organization dedicated to sustaining Jewish day schools.  (I’m oversimplifying a bit.)  So…how can being a 21st century Jewish day school increase resources and professionalize development capacity?

As I have been thinking about this question, my initial reaction is to try to avoid providing obvious answers.  If this is, however, to be my introductory blog post on this topic, I do want to share my initial thoughts on the subject because they may be crossing your minds as well.  This was my off-the-top-of-my-head response when Ken first asked me to blog on the topic:

…to me it fits very much with why we feel 21st century learning is so vital – with increased competition from Hebrew charter schools, independent schools, and suburban public schools AND a perilous economy – we have to brand Jewish day schools as being the kind of school most likely to provide a high-quality 21st century learning experience – that we are the future of SECULAR education because we are JEWISH.

Totally flips the script on prospective parents.  “Too Jewish?”  No such thing.  Parents looking for excellence in 21st century education should be more concerned with “Jewish enough?”

Now the truth is that I could not be more passionate about this idea.  Over the last year and change of my current headship, I have seen firsthand the power of 21st century learning in action and have been convinced that this is the only viable path forward for Jewish (particularly non-Orthodox) day schools.  To be financially sustainable really only (!) requires two consistent streams of revenue: tuition and fundraising.  You can only increase tuition revenue by adding students.  You can only add students if you have a great product.  So if embracing 21st century learning values increases the quality of your product, being such a school should drive enrollment and, thus, tuition revenue up.

And I absolutely believe this to be the case.  But as a philosophical concept, it doesn’t really answer the question.  Because all I’ve done is suggest that if you want your school to be really successful it should be a really good school.  You don’t need me to point that out.  The more interesting question, to me, is how being a 21st century Jewish learning institution impacts the business of schooling?  What I am interested in exploring through these occasional blog posts is how we can apply the pedagogies of 21st century learning to the managerial and business aspects of running a Jewish day school to ensure they maximize financial sustainability as defined above.

[Disclosure: I have been the head of two Jewish day schools owned and operated by synagogues.  Neither school has a dedicated “Development Director” or a “Business Manager” or a “Department of Institutional Advancement.”  Both schools outsource a fair amount of their business functions.  I do have an MBA from the American Jewish University, which has come in extraordinarily handy in light of those two prior sentences.  So the good and the bad is that I have, as a head of school, had a fair amount of experience doing development and business operations without a lot of the training.  I am particularly interested in seeing how development directors, business managers, fundraisers, etc., respond to the ideas I am proposing.]

What are the 21st century pedagogies I am suggesting be applied to the business of schooling?

Transparency, collaboration, technology, reflection, global connectedness, authenticity, and prosumerism (which I will define as the paradigm shift wherein the learner is the producer, not the consumer, of content.)

How can these ideas increase the sustainability of Jewish day schools?

Please lend your voice to the conversation – comment freely and often or email me directly ([email protected]) if you are still a bitsocial media shy.  With your feedback, I look forward to exploring these and other ideas at the nexus of 21st century learning and financial stewardship that will be focus of this yet-to-be-named blog to be published however-often!