Cultivating a Community of Kindness

This is a busy, busy time!  Let me give a few headlines before picking up the thread of the conversation begun two weeks ago…

  • edJEWcon 5772.0 is officially closed and a waiting list has begun to fill!  Over 20 Jewish day schools from across North America and the ideological spectrum will be coming to the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School to collaborate and create.  Official press releases announcing the first edJEWcon cohort to come!  Thanks to the AVI CHAI Foundation for their generous support and to the Schechter Day School Network for its valuable assistance.
  • Our 50th Anniversary preparations are well underway!  Thanks to our extraordinary team of volunteers and professionals, we are preparing an event of a generation.  If you want to know more about this historic event, if you would like to volunteer, attend, or donate…please click here on our 50th Anniversary website.
  • Purim is coming!  Please click here for my blog post entitled “A Purim Prescription for Pediatric Judaism”.
  • Community University is coming on March 11th!  Click here for more information and to register.  I’ll be teaching a course this year called “Tiger Moms & Panda Dads? A Conversation about Jewish Parenting in the 21st Century”.
  • And finally, our school will go through its 5-year Florida Council of Independent Schools (FCIS) Re-Accreditation on March 11 – 13.  I’ll have more to say about this in an upcoming blog.

That’s a lot of headlines!

But now I want to pick up with the incredible responses that have come in since I blogged two weeks ago, here, about Creating a Community of Kindness.  It was picked up very quickly on Twitter and Facebook by other schools and foundations, which is a sign of how relevant and important this issue is.  But this initiative is not about garnering attention – it is about changing a culture.  And even though it will take time…it is beginning.

Here is some proof.

Rabbi Jesse Olitzky blogged about it here focusing on the importance of not only being reactive in issuing swift and decisive discipline when behaviors erupt, but being proactive in creating a community of kindness.  He also contributed a 2-minute video of his own:

But that’s not all!

Demonstrating that the entire Jacksonville Jewish Center is on board, we have our first contribution from the JJC Preschool, who have two amazing parents who wrote and preformed a play on the value of Gemilut Hasadim (acts of lovingkindness) for our preschool students this week:

But that’s not all either!

Better than anything the adults have done are the extraordinary blog posts our students have begun to write about this important topic. ( You can link to all our student blogfolios here.)  There are more than I can highlight here, but I want to acknowledge a couple of wonderfully written posts in my blog.  I urge you to comment directly to the students.  I am also issuing my “2-minute” challenge – I want our students to start creating their own 2-minute Community of Kindness videos and posting them to their blogfolios.  I will share them in future postings.

Here’s a terrific post from a fifth grader named Shoshana:

Things are happening.. but you might not know it.

Posted February 29th, 2012 by shoshanah

Has your child ever wanted to talk to you about someone bullying them, pushing them around, or calling them names? Well, the secret is revealed. Some children hide it from you, but yet they don’t know how to stop it. I am going to give all of the kids that have to deal with this some advice.

 Some children are sad when someone says something to you like ”You are so dumb!” or”Why did you say that! You made us loose!”. Others for reasons like they are feeling left out, or they are physically or mentally being bullied. Those are all reasons why. The problem is, if they don’t let a parent know, then they’ll just be bullied the whole year, or more. If an adult doesn’t know, then there is no way to deal with it, and it might just get worse.

A way to deal with this is by talking about it. Don’t keep it to yourself, if you do, the outcome will not be good. Stick up for yourself. You don’t needANYONE bossing you around, pushing you around, or saying things that insult you. You have courage in you, and don’t hide it. If something happens outside on the playground, don’t just stand there. You can tell a teacher. Go ahead!

If something happens to you when you are not with an adult, you might have a problem. Here’s an example. Lets say you are in the mall with your friends and you got dropped of, no adults you know, or no parents. Something happens to you, but you don’t know what to do. Look for a phone. If you don’t have a cell phone, then there should be one there. Call a parent, and ask if you can get picked up. Tell your friends that you aren’t feeling very well, wait for your Mom or Dad to call you back and tell you they’re outside. Tell them goodbye, and then go to your car. There are other ways that you can handle this situation. It depends what happens to you. If all they do is call you a name like “stupid”, then ignore it, or say that it hurt your feelings. If they bully you, that’s a WHOLE different situation.

I hope this advice helps for those of you who need it. Everyone else, I’m so glad that there is nothing wrong. I hope that the people who need advice take this into consideration, and I hope that the problems end, and peace is on earth. Parents, I hope that you will be able to see your children smile. Have a great day, and stay out of trouble!

 

Image credits:

Peace Sign http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredmikerudy/4885331980/

Kids hugging http://jamma.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/5

 

Pretty terrific, no?

Here is one from a fourth grader named Yoni:

lying is going very serious in most schools, especially public schools.  The types of bulling are physical bullying, teasing, and cyber bullying.  Physical bullying is when someone is trying to hit you, and  hurt you.  Teasing is when someone is trying to mock you (making fun of you).  Cyber bullying is when someone says something bad to you on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or on your E-mail.  In third grade, our class learned when someone teases you, or cyber bullies you, you will remember it for the rest of your life.  If you cyber bully, you can get yourself in big trouble.

I got experience physical bullying, and was teased by some people, but I did not get cyber bullied yet.  When someone teases me I feel very sad.  When I got physical bullied I had no choice, but to just defend myself.  I really do not like people bullying each other.  When people are not bullying me, but bullying someone else, I feel miserable.  Without bullying kids get a much better life.  Some people are sensitive from teasing, and cyber bullying.  I am sometimes sensitive when someone teases me, even if it is just a silly joke.

When you are about to hit someone, tease someone, or type something mean online; think before you do that!  A bully starts when someone bullied them.  If you see a bully, you would usually not see them by themselves.  You would see them with other people, because a bully is not strong in the inside; but a bully tries to feel strong.  Some kids get bullied in all ways physical bullying, teasing, and cyber bullying.  If you do nothing, a bully can still be very mean to you.  If you tease someone, or cyber bully someone it is also making fun of G-D, because G-D is inside everyone.  You do not want to make fun of G-D, because G-D is infinite times stronger than anyone.  If someone bullied you an any type, you should go to someone that got bullied in the same type, so he, or she can tell you how to stop the bully.  If a pack of bullies are surrounding you, and you cannot run away you have to fight back.  My dad told me if that happens fight the the leader first, because if you defeat the leader the rest of the pack will get scared, and leave you alone.   Only fight when you have no choice.  Bullies usually bully kids that are lonely, because it will be easier to bully them.  If a pack of bullies are bothering you and your friends, you, and your friends can say, “Leave him, or her alone! ”   That is a way to stop bullies.  If someone bullies you, you can tell an adult you trust, especially your parents, or your older sibling.  You can be friends with a bully, and help the bully to think before he is about to bully someone.

That is all about how to stop bullying.  Bullying happens in a lot of places.  You can stop bullying.  You can tell the principal to make a no bully zone.  If you have any question ask me, and I will tell you.  If you follow the ways to stop bullying it will help you.  Bye!

Do not Bully!

 

This is just the beginning…we still have to finish scoring the bulk of our surveys and report back (it isn’t through lack of effort, they are a bear to score).  But in two weeks we have seen our Day School students, Center clergy, Preschool parents, just to name three different constituencies make their first contributions to making us a community of kindness.  I look forward to sharing more examples and to having more examples shared with us.  This is no quick fix, but a struggle to ensure the safety and health of our children in all our sacred spaces.  Let’s keep the momentum going!  Keep blogging, Tweeting, posting on Facebook, commenting on blogs, emailing, sharing, talking, learning and caring.  Each act of lovingkindness builds on the next until one day we’ve created culture of caring in which acts of intentional harm are not viable – the day we become a Community of Kindness

May that day be soon.

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Creating a Community of Kindness

We have been engaged in a yearlong investigation into how to address the difficult issue of bullying in our school and in all the schools of our synagogue.  I explained the rationale and the plan here in September in a blog post entitled “Sticks and Stones”.  The mantle was taken up by Rabbi Jesse Olitzky in a powerful blog post here, entitled “Sacred Space is Safe Space”.  The next step in the process was performing an institutional assessment for all students in our schools in Grades 2-12.

We surveyed students in Grades 2- 4 in both the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School and the Bernard & Alice Selevan Religious School, using a pencil and paper instrument chosen particularly for that grade range.  A series of questions about verbal, physical and emotional acts experienced by students and performed by students were asked to measure the degree to which our students feel safe and protected.  Questions were also asked about faculty and staff to measure the degree to which students feel their teachers are available and prepared to act on their behalves.

It is not a perfect survey and it was not proctored perfectly.  It is, however, a starting point.  Issuing the survey on a yearly basis should give us something to measure the degree to which we are succeeding in changing the culture of our schools.  I would like to share just two results from the survey to start the conversation.

By the by, the schools graded out well.  Although, it is difficult to suggest that any degree of failure is acceptable.  The area where students self-reported the greatest degree of negative behaviors came not in the physical or the verbal.  It came in peer exclusion.

This graph reports that 35% of students in Grades 2-4 in both schools feel they have been purposely been excluded by their peers.  No other area of the survey scored anywhere near this high.  This is an indication, to me, that when it comes obvious acts of harm – we are largely successful (although complete elimination is required).  However, when it comes to the much more subtle, but equally painful act of social exclusion, we have work to do.  Let’s add context by examining students’ perceptions of their teachers.

Again, the percentages look good.  The overwhelming response is that by and large students believe their teachers are available to help and support.  However, the fact that we have ANY students who believe their teachers would NEVER be there to help is unacceptable to us.  It is not a perfect survey and I am sure there are margins of error included.  But when it comes to creating a safe and sacred space for our children there can be no margin of error.

And so the difficult work of institutional change moves forward.  (Results from the other surveys are forthcoming.)

Based on the data (not merely this survey, but disciplinary records, communication with parents, teachers, students, clergy, etc.) we believe we have to change the conversation. “Anti-bullying” (to us) means that we wait for bullying behaviors to take place and then act appropriately when they do.  That is a defensive posture that admits these behaviors are inevitable and the goal is damage control.  We can do better.

We need to build and grow a Community of Kindness.  Instead of waiting for something bad to happen and respond, we need to go on the offensive with an all-out assault of lovingkindness.  We need to recognize that only by becoming a community of kindness can we truly eliminate bullying and hurtful behavior within our walls.

This is much harder to achieve, but there are no quick fixes.  All the surveys, assemblies, and teacher trainings in the world cannot get us there by themselves.  On that all the research agrees.  We are going to have to do the hard work of changing the culture one student, one teacher, one family, one act at a time.  It is just as much the work of the office staff as it is the National Junior Honor Society.  It has to happen on Sunday mornings in the Religious School carpool line and on Wednesday afternoons in the Day School lunchroom.

I am issuing a call to all my colleagues in the field: We have established “Communities of Practice” (CoP’s) for just about every aspect of running a school – Development, Admissions, Educational Technology, etc., in order to share and grow best practice.  I think in an age where the click of a button can do irreparable harm, we would be well-served with a CoP for Kindness.  Where better than in Jewish schools to ensure students a culture built on kindness?

We will be creating a series of 2-minute videos on this topic to stimulate conversation and begin the movement.  I encourage parents, teachers, clergy, community members, colleagues and friends to make your own and share.  There’s nothing more important and there’s no reason to wait.  It begins now.

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#What Matters Most

These are heady times for our school.  The inevitable anxiety and excitement of the open enrollment period.  The gathering rush of a 50th Anniversary weekend.  The powerful reflection through impending re-accreditation.  The tidal wave that is becoming edJEWcon.

I write a lot.

And when I do, I tend to use lots of words. This is not so very different from how I speak.

And I speak a lot.

A lot of my speaking comes with the position and some of it from my natural proclivity to be wordy.  (Anyone familiar with this blog or with me is likely nodding their head.)

One side effect of producing so many words – and between conversations, emails, blogs, letters, etc. I put out into the universe a lot of words – is that you run the risk of losing the forest of what matters most through trees of verbiage.

The blogging platform lends itself to endless writing for those so inclined.  One interesting (and almost poetic) byproduct of Twitter is that it forces a 140-character structure onto the writer.  As someone who cannot text in anything less than complete words, sentences, proper capitalization, grammar, etc., Twitter becomes an exercise in self-discipline.  I almost never get the first or second tweet to fit the space and I wind up having to edit and edit to get a thought down to its essence.

With two liminal rites of passage to celebrate this weekend (our annual Kindergarten Shabbat Service & Dinner on Friday and our First Grade Consecration on Shabbat) in the heart of all the planning for the major events to come, I want to take a moment and engage in what I hope will be a collaborative exercise.  Beginning here, I am going to encourage y’all to express #WhatMattersMost about @MJGDS and @JewishDaySchool.

[I am putting it “Twitter-speak”  both for those who already utilize Twitter AND to use Twitter to solicit responses.  I am going to offer some of my own thoughts here.  I am also going to tweet out the request.  And I encourage you to add your own 140-character suggestions either on Twitter using the #WhatMattersMost OR as comments to this blog post.  I will update the post with responses I receive (both from our school and the field) from Twitter.]

#WhatMattersMost @MJGDS from @Jon_Mitzmacher

Each child deserves a floor, but no ceiling…

No one will know your child better or work harder for their success than we will.

We may not get it right the first time, but we will partner with parents until we do.

The audience for student work was once the teacher; now it is the world.

21st Century Learning is not a slogan, it is a revolution.

The future of education is happening at a Jewish day school.

Having a child with special needs should never

preclude an inclusionary Jewish day school education.

A parent should never have to choose between the

best secular education and Jewish day school.

We are proud of our graduates, not because of what they

know and what they can do, but because of who they are.

 

Your turn!

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Quality Comments

I spend about an hour each Friday morning commenting on our student’s blogfolios.  Having begun last year with our Middle School, we now have active student blogfolios for students in Grades 3-8.  [You can click here to access the ones for students in Grades 5-8.]  I start at the beginning and make my way through as many as I can.  During that hour, I can see which spelling words are being emphasized in a particular grade.  I can see which kinds of writing forms and mechanics are being introduced.  I learn which holidays (secular and Jewish) are being prepared for, celebrated or commemorated.  I see samples of their best work across the curricula.

But what I enjoy seeing the most is the range of creativity and differentiation that expresses itself through their aesthetic design, the features they choose to include (and leave out), and the voluntary writing.

This is what we talk about when we focus (not obsessively!) on students’ ability to create meaningful work.  It isn’t just about motivation – we can imagine that more easily.  But when you look closer, it really is about doing their best work and reflecting about it.  Look at how much time they spend editing.  Look at how they share peer feedback, revise, collaborate, publish and reflect.

Seriously.  Look at it.  Take whatever time you would have spent reading my typically wordy and repetitive post and not only read one of their posts…post a comment!  It brings them such joy…pick a few at random and make their day.  Just click here and begin!

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Transparency in the “Abstract”

I blogged here about what the impact of my successful completion of my Ed.D. from JTS might mean for my work as a practicing Head of School.  What I did not do, at that time, is share my work.  That is because although I had technically earned the degree with a successful defense of my dissertation, I was required to make “minor revisions”.  Those revisions were made over Winter Break, submitted, and accepted.  The dissertation is complete.

The final step in the process, is having that dissertation “published”.  Doctoral dissertations are published through ProQuest/UMI Dissertation Publishing and when you submit your dissertation you are required to choose between “Traditional” and “Open” publication.  “Traditional” means that only your abstract is available to read or download – anyone wishing to access the entire dissertation would need to pay.  “Open” means that the entire dissertation is available for reading or download.  Our school’s attitude towards transparency might lead you to conclude that I would have opted for “Open”.  I did not.

I may change my mind, but because I am unsure as to whether or not I wish to see my research published in another form, I have opted – somewhat uncomfortably – for the “traditional” mode of publication.  I write this with all due hubris; I am quite confident that there is no line of people awaiting my dissertation’s publication.  And I am very aware of the mild hypocrisy involved with insisting my school’s “product” be completely open and transparent, but my own “product” reserved only for those who choose to pay.  So, as I said…I might change my mind.

However, in honor of my dissertation’s official publication, I will post here, its abstract and offer anyone who might actually wish to read it, the opportunity to email me directly.  I would be happy for anyone who might be interested in this topic to have a chance to take from it what value there is to be found.

Next week?  Updates on edJEWcon 5772.0 and the results of our first-ever survey on bullying and its impacts.

THE FOUNDING OF THE “ZION ACADEMY” DAY SCHOOL,

2002 – 2007

ABSTRACT

JON MITZMACHER

In this study, I examine the founding and first five years of the Zion Academy Day School, which was created in 2002 as a new Schechter Network Day School to serve as the third Jewish day school for the Jewish community of San Marino, a fast growing community located in the Southwestern region of the United States.

The questions I sought to answer through this study were how theories of educational leadership impacted the founding of the school, and how the head of school’s understanding and implementation of leadership theories impacted growth.

To answer these questions, I examined all minutes and published documents of the school, interviewed many of the key stakeholders connected to the school to learn about its history, mission, and changes over its first five years, and analyzed the personal journals and autoethnographic writing selections of the founding head of school (the researcher). I framed my research in the context of the relevant literature. First, I placed Zion Academy within the history and current state of Jewish day school education and San Marino within the history of emerging Jewish communities; I then examined my data through the lenses provided by the literature on educational leadership, institutional politics and organizational culture.

My analysis of the data addresses the reasons behind Zion Academy’s founding and examines how and why Zion Academy grew and emerged over its first five years.  I found that over the course of Zion Academy’s first five years that its vision and culture were largely determined by best practice as determined from the university and professional programs that provided credentials to its founding head of school.  I found that Zion Academy’s culture was profoundly shaped by its relationships to other schools and institutions in its local community. I also found that leadership sometimes required spurning best practice and that risk-taking may also contribute to successfully founding a new Jewish day school.

Notions from #NAJDSCONF 5772

This seems to be the weeks of sequels!  Last week, I revised my love of Wordle with a second-annual graphic summary of a year’s worth of blog posts (here).  I am still waiting for comments (hint, hint parents & teachers!) to see how comparing the first and second Wordles reveals anything about a shift in emphasis or direction.  I love hearing that someone is reading the blog…I really love when someone comments on the blog.

This week, I will try to creatively share and reflect on my experiences in Atlanta from which I just returned from the North American Jewish Day School Conference.  This year’s theme was “Current Landscapes, Changing Horizons” and you can read all about the conference and find links to presentations and materials from the conference, here.  You can check out all the official conference tweets, which includes links, photos and videos not on the website, here.

Coming on the heels of another reflective blog post about Jewish day school conference attendance (here), I don’t want to be repetitive.  I did a fair amount of tweeting from the conference, which you can check out, by either clicking above to follow me on Twitter, or by clicking, here.  And you will find pictures, videos and thoughts from the conference that I may not get to in this blog post.

I attended the conference with our school’s 21st Century Learning Coordinator Andrea Hernandez and we co-presented a session on the first day called “21st Century Learning in Jewish Day Schools – A Conversation”.  It was well attended and augured well for the rest of our conference experience.  If you would like to see the presentation, you can click here and scroll down to the entry entitled “NAJDS”.

On Day 2, I had the pleasure to be a part of a panel discussion hosted by DeLeT on the topic of “Teacher Leadership”.  The rest of that day was spent exclusively with the Schechter Day School Network.  Sitting next to Andrea, I was captivated by a new app she was using and I immediately purchased it and started playing with.  As she says on her blog post from the conference,

 I am trying to build fluency with my iPad, so I used the Corkulus app to take notes. Not only do I feel that the practice was good for my iPad fluency, I am happy with the notes that I am able to share, not only here on my blog, but I was able to email the notes to the person sitting next to me, as well as others who were not at the session.

I spent the rest of the conference playing with it and loving it!  So, for something different, here is my summary of Day 2 of the conference via Corkulous:

Depending on how you are viewing this, I realize it may be a little blurry (even after clicking on it).  If you cannot blow it up, and would like to see it (or if you have the app and want me to email it to you in format), please feel free and email me directly.  It includes thoughts from a text study, the new branding initiative for the Schechter Network and DeLeT.

On Day 3, I had the honor of playing a (very) small part in Michael Mino’s morning keynote.  I don’t have permission to share the presentation, but I can share my small part of it, which you can find here under the heading “Mobile Learning”.

I spent lots of time networking about edJEWcon!  I suspect we will be fully enrolled by the end of the month.  I look forward to announcing the schools and partners who will be joining us for this exciting opportunity.  Our thanks again to The AVI CHAI Foundation for their generous support.  Stay tuned!

I closed the conference by live blogging a fascinating session on Games-Based Learning facilitated by Barry Joseph.  Here is my Corkulous-produced live blog from the session:

We are in the process of exploring bringing gaming theory into our repertoire of 21st century skills and literacies.  We are engaged in serious conversation with a few thought-partners in this field and look to make some announcements of new initiatives soon.

After the conference ended, I stayed on for an extra night to participate in a board meeting for the Schechter Day School Network.  Despite all the negative press, the future for Schechter is quite optimistic.  We struggle, as all Jewish and private schools do, in a down economy and increased competition.  But we also offer a unique and valued product.  Good things are coming.

All in all, it was a wonderful opportunity to learn, share, reflect, connect, collaborate, present and feel the power of being with over 600 people who care deeply about securing the Jewish future.  I plan to bring the positive energy and innovative ideas I got from this year’s conference back to help secure our own school’s future.

But tonight I rest…

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Wordle Up – The Sequel

Please click here for my blog post about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Jewish community.

I’m off on Sunday for the North American Jewish Day School Conference in Atlanta!  (Click here for my reflections on last year’s conference.)  I am one of many official live-blogger’s for the conference, so please look for posts next week.  You can also follow the action on Twitter.  You can follow me @Jon_Mitzmacher or the conference @najdsconf.  I will share an overall reflective blog post on the experience afterwards.

My first Wordle appeared as a means to summarize my blog post and appeared about a year ago:

I thought it would be a fun way to see what the “State of the School” is by comparing the above Wordle to the one below, which is based on this year’s collections of blogs:

Interesting hmmmm?  What do you think it reveals (if anything) about our priorities this school year?  Please comment!

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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