Leadership – A Floor, But Not a Ceiling

Leadership Begins With You

OK, so I guess technically “Leadership” begins with “L”, but a pithy blog post title that does not make…

I have been blessed to have two leadership experiences juxtaposed across two weeks that drive home the idea that leadership is personal – and that leadership development is personalised. I am going to spend just a bit of space sketching out what those two experiences were and then see if I can meaningfully connect the dots.

Two weeks ago, we had our November PD (Professional Development, and although we prefer to use “Professional Growth”, “PG” is not the phrase people know) Day at the Ottawa Jewish Community School and we decided that in terms of both content and pedagogy, we wanted to lean into personalised learning. And that is how we wound up with…

A phrase I am fond of saying is that “we should at least treat our teachers as well as we treat our students,” which is my way of saying that oftentimes what is good pedagogy and practise for teachers teaching is also good for teachers learning. If we “own our learning” at OJCS [North Star alert!] than our teachers should have an opportunity to own their professional growth and, thus, “A Day of You” was born. Now it was not open-ended – if you look at the fine print you’ll see “Based on Teacher-Led Evaluation Learning Targets”. That is because although they had lots of choices, we did want to ensure that the day (like each and every other day) moves them and us closer to the OJCS Learning Target. [What is this “OJCS Learning Target” you speak of? Ah, yes. Click here for an important refresher.]

Here is what teachers were asked to do…

And what tasks did they have to choose from?

You might need to zoom in if you are interested in the details, but you can see that we provided teachers with lots of choices to grow themselves in each of the domains of our Learning Target. You also can see at the bottom that in addition to working on their own or in groups, the Admin (with support of a few of our “Leads”) offered direct coaching as well. Like a good old fashioned Choose Your Own Adventure book (you young folk can follow the link if you don’t catch the reference), our teachers were able to create a Choose Your Own Professional Growth Adventure by filling out…

The mood and the energy in the building was fantastic and we are already thinking about our February PD Day! More to say on this down below…

You either walk inside your story and own it or you
stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.

Brené Brown

This week, I was in Los Angeles for the Spring Retreat of Cohort 12 of the Day School Leadership Training Institute (DSLTI) for whom I serve as one of the Mentors. [I have written previously about this work, including how it contributes to my work as a head of school.] The title of the Retreat was “The Leader in Me” and it is not my place to share here the details of the readings and the learning that served as the anchor for the exchanges and conversations that anchored our time together. What I am capable of sharing, was that it was a rare opportunity for both the mentors and the mentees to take a deep dive inward as a means to staking out the next steps and stages of our individual (personal) leadership journeys. We studied text, we analyzed personality inventories and explored leadership theories. We journaled and we shared and we journaled and we shared some more. We made ourselves vulnerable and received caring feedback.

As is true with my rabbinical school journey, I carry a certain amount of guilt about the time I spend in DSLTI because I tend to believe that time is a zero-sum game – each minute not spent at school is a minute missed. But the truth is that these experiences make – I genuinely believe – me a better leader, which is to the good of our school, our teachers and, ultimately, our students. And the whole point of this retreat was to underline that idea – that when leaders don’t take the time to nourish and think and grow themselves, that their organizations run the risk of growing stale and declining. When the oxygen drops, we put our masks on first and then assist others…

What’s the connective tissue? Well. The last thing we did at our DSLTI Retreat was to create our own leadership quotes to summarize what we believe to be true about leadership. Mine (and I wish I could share them all!) contains some words that readers of my blog will surely recognize, but I think in some ways connects the dots from these two leadership experiences:

The goal of leadership is to ensure that there is an inspirational floor and an aspirational ceiling for each and every person in the organization – including you.

Jon Mitzmacher

Weeks like these last two are reminders that I have to keep learning and growing in order to achieve my ultimate leadership goal, which is to unleash the talent and passion of each student, teacher and administrator at OJCS. If we can do that, then we will hit those Learning Targets and reach those North Stars. It is a journey that I am blessed to walk, along with fellow travellers, both within my school and across the globe. It is a journey with both a clear destination and, yet, no endpoint. It is a journey whose momentum can only be sustained through pauses.

And with these pauses behind me and two action-packed weeks left before Winter Break, it is time to hit “play”…

The Rare Blessing of Stable Leadership in a Jewish Day School

I have had more than my share of leadership positions in Jewish Education over the years. And that is pretty par for the course. Some of that is to due to changing social norms about “careers” and it is the rare person in almost any field who has the same position or works for the same company from entry to retirement. Some of that is due to the more unique pressures of educational leadership and the average lengths of tenure for independent school leaders continue to be alarmingly low (like less than four years) and, post-COVID, trending even lower. Some of that is due to the special circumstances of Jewish day school leadership which suffers from its own kind of “grass is greener” phenomenon. [I wrote a lot about this during my time in charge of Schechter.] And, finally, of course, there are the individual idiosyncratic decisions that play their part as well.

I say all of this to provide context to just how rare a moment we are experiencing here at the Ottawa Jewish Community School. As I wrote about a couple of years ago, I am now in the second year of a (second) contract that extends for an additional three years – putting my minimum tenure as Head of OJCS at nine years. That, by itself, is pretty rare. But the more local folk know that our school’s success does not hinge on my leadership, and certainly not my leadership alone. Part of our success relies on the partnership I share with Keren Gordon.

When I came to OJCS, I was not the only person starting a new leadership position. Ms. Gordon was elevated from her Special Needs Coordinator role (a role in which she excelled) and was named “Vice Principal” with a contract that matched mine in length. We were constructed to be a team, match-made with the hope of complementary skills and personalities, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted how quickly our partnership would bear fruit and how deeply it is has evolved over time. From our students to our teachers; from our parents to our board – to anyone who has spent meaningful time working for or with our school – I genuinely believe it is clear how important this leadership partnership has been in helping getting our school from where it was to where it is. But where is it going?

I imagine a question has occured to you. If I am now working through a second contract that will end at a tenure of nine years, what about Ms. Gordon? If her contract was originally tethered to mine, what now? Well. I am very pleased to let our wider community know what our Board and our Faculty have now known for a few weeks. That after a healthy negotiation, we have come to terms on that second contract. And there are two features of that contract that I want to name…

The first is probably obvious at this point, but worth saying out loud. Ms. Gordon’s new contract will again match mine so that we are guaranteed at least nine years of partnership guiding the school. I cannot underline with thicker ink how unusual that is and how much it will contribute to our school’s current and future success. In a world with less and less stability, our school is blessed with more and more. It matters. Nine years literally represents the journey from SK to Grade 8, so for the families who began when we did (before we relaunched JK), Ms. Gordon and I will wind up being the only leaders they will ever know. Our knowledge of our students, our teachers, our families and our community grows each year along the way – so each year our ability to guide our school closer to its North Stars grows as well. So that’s the first feature – the length of time. But there is a second…

The job of being a “head of school” is ideally split between the “CEO-like” activities that one might describe as “outward-facing” (at least so far as the students and teachers might experience it) and the “principal” activities that one might describe as “inward-facing”. A head of school has to embody all the work of running a nonprofit while serving as instructional leader…aspirational at best, but some situations and some people do function more evenly between the two spheres. It has become increasingly clear that here, at least during this window, I have had to occupy a bit more “CEO space” than “principal space”. But luckily, Ms. Gordon has been here, and over the last five years based on the quality of her work and the relationships she has nurtured, she has begun to occupy more and more of that space. And that is why, with great pleasure, I am happy to share that Keren Gordon is no longer the Vice Principal of OJCS; Keren Gordon is our Principal. (Cue the applause!)

Although this well-earned honor doesn’t change all that much on the ground, it is still worthy of sharing with our community and of celebration. Ms. Gordon is my right hand and partner in all the work we have done, are doing and will be doing over the next three and a half years (and who knows from there!). Together we will have been blessed to co-author a few chapters in the narrative of this school’s story – and if that story is a story of “success”, then one of its main characters will surely be “stability”.

The Trauma-Aware Jewish Day School

Now that I have had eighteen hours of rabbinical school under my belt, I find myself becoming a bit self-conscious whenever I make a connection between something I am learning in school and the work we do here at OJCS each and every day. I am so barely into the first baby steps towards becoming a rabbi that it almost feels chutzpahdik to make mention of it at all. (At my current rate of taking classes, I can definitely pencil in my ordination for the Spring of 2037.) However, I am becoming a rabbi for a reason, and as I explained when I first shared this news, it was both likely and desirable that it lend a new perspective on my work.

One of the books for the current course I am taking is Wounds into Wisdom by Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. It is a terrific book that deals with the phenomenon of “collective trauma” and its impact on future generations. Without doing any of her work justice, it perhaps could be best understood in a Jewish context by recognizing that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors may very well suffer – consciously or subconsciously – the effects of trauma, even if they did not experience the original trauma. In the context of my course, where all my classmates are either already or will likely be serving in a pulpit or chaplaincy, or otherwise engaged in some form of pastoral counseling, the application is a bit more obvious. You will inevitably have congregants who suffer from trauma and, thus, let’s spend some time recognizing what trauma looks like and how one might think about managing/addressing/navigating it.

For me, the dots connected differently, but no less powerfully.

We are now into our second year of pandemic schooling. “Collective trauma” is not an abstract idea that only applies to the victims of genocides and terror attacks, it is literally our lives. For over a year, our students, parents, teachers and community have been – and continue to – live in and with trauma. I think this is something we know intuitively, but if you want a little evidence, let me share with you a chart I shared with our Educational Leadership Team this week:

Classic Trauma Reactions

Engagement dissociation ←→ vigilance

Control passive ←→ urgent

Empowerment victimized ←→ hyper-resilient

Emotion withdrawn ←→ hyper-arousal

Patterning amnesia ←→ recall & repeat

Does this not sound like, I don’t know, everyone you know right now (including yourself)?

I see these responses all around me, all the time. I see it in the normally vivacious student who is unusually withdrawn. I see it in the normally laid back parent who has grown helicopter wings. I see it in the normally contained teacher for whom everything is now on fire. I see all the reverses as well. I see different reactions from different people at different times in the face of different circumstances. I see it in the parking lot and I see it in emails and I see it on social media. And I most definitely see it in myself.

There are techniques and methods from the worlds of psychology, counseling and pastoral care that have proven to have some success in moving individual people through trauma. When it comes to collective trauma there is much less to fall back on. (When it comes to inherited collective trauma, even less than that, thus Firestone’s book.) When it comes to COVID-based trauma…

When I think about all those way-too-long “Weekly Update” emails I sent last spring to our parents and each blog post I have written as part of “The Coronavirus Diaries” series, I can see that I keep coming back to one saving gracenote – empathy. That’s what I mean when I say that we have to give each other space to make mistakes. It is what I mean when I encourage and express gratitude for patience and flexibility. Empathy. Empathy for the collective trauma of pandemic living doesn’t necessarily change outcomes, nor does it serve as an excuse. It doesn’t mean that we necessarily do anything differently. But it does help.

If in a Jewish context we can employ empathy by keeping the notion of b’tzelem elohim – the idea that each and every one of us is made in the image of God, that we each share a spark of the divine – front of mind, perhaps we can find the strength to take a breath and assume the best of each other.

At least we can try…

Choosing Ottawa Again: Writing My First Second Chapter

Not once in my career have I had the pleasure of welcoming children into school in Kindergarten, watching them grow and mature, creating lasting and meaningful relationships, and then graduating them while shepping naches at what and who they have become.

I have been in the field of Jewish day school since 2005 and the field of Jewish education since 1997. In those 23 years of full-time work, I spent three years at the BJE-LA, three years at the Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation, two years at Sutton Place Synagogue, five years at the Solomon Schechter Day School-Las Vegas (SSDS-LV), four years at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School (MJGDS), two years at the Schechter Day School Network, one year at Prizmah and I am in my fourth year here at OJCS.

Notice any trends?

I believe deeply in the human need to make meaning through stories and narratives and, thus, have always framed my career (and life) in terms of the chapters I have been able to co-author in the places I have been lucky enough lead. These chapters have had differing lengths and different degrees of consequence, and those two things are not always so aligned. I was the founding head of the SSDS-LV (z”l). That was pretty significant for both me and the school. My time at MJGDS was an extraordinary time of innovation and change -again both for me and the school. I was the first – and last – director of an independent Schechter Day School Network (also z”l). I was part of an amazing team of colleagues who helped birth Prizmah. The work we are presently doing at OJCS in my first chapter here has been well-chronicled in this blog and thanks to an extraordinary team has exceeded all expectations.

The last time I wrote a “life transition” post, I had described my career as a series of “happy accidents” and I still stand by it, at least broadly speaking. There is a lot of luck that goes into building a career. There is also a lot of risk. I have been fortunate that throughout most of my career, the choices have been mine to make and that when choices needed to be made, wonderful choices were available to choose. That isn’t always true in this profession and timing is everything. But to describe my career as a series of “accidents” is also a bit of a dodge. It absolves me of the choices that I did in fact make along the way and the impact of those choices on the schools/organizations and communities that I left behind, not to mention on my wife and children.

This career didn’t just happen to me. I largely made it happen and I am responsible for all the good, all the regret, all the accomplishments, all the unmet and unfulfilled expectations, all the extraordinary relationships, all the hurt feelings, and so on. And that’s just the professional impact. My children have had to move schools and start over more than once. My wife has had to reestablish herself in school after school, and here in Ottawa to reinvent herself altogether.

Why have I never stayed long enough to write even a second chapter?

Ego, ambition and wanderlust.

There is value in having an ego and ambition. They drive you towards achievement and success. They require you to learn lots and to work hard. And to be clear, I don’t begrudge anyone – including myself – for having ambition. When success begets success and that next bigger or more complex opportunity arises, there is nothing wrong with going for it. However, ego and ambition can also be dangerous, especially when they become ends and not means. If you are constantly looking towards the next shiny thing, it makes it really hard to appreciate and enjoy what you presently have. Ego also cuts both way. It is not a sign of stable ego if you are easily seduced by every new opportunity; it is the opposite. It is a fragile ego that needs to feel important and who reduces success to simple metrics (How big is the school? How prominent? How large the salary?). It is also a sign of a fragile ego to put your professional ambition ahead of your family’s quality of life. I have been that guy. I have chased the ring. I have picked up the phone. I have asked my family to sacrifice their peace of mind on the altar of my ambition.

I am also someone who is attracted to the unique challenges of the start-up or the fixer-up, which also explains my career trajectory. I have only really ever worked in places that were starting up or starting over. I thrive in bringing order to chaos. I do less well when order starts to take shape. The simple truth is that I love to write first chapters. That’s where a lot of the action takes place and the stories start to take shape.

But I am not the person I was five, ten and fifteen years ago. What matters to me most and the kind of stories I want to write have (finally) evolved. And so today, I am thrilled to share with you that after having worked with my board these last few months, that we have chosen here – the Ottawa Jewish Community School, the Ottawa Jewish Community and Ottawa itself – to finally write that second chapter. For reasons related to my housing situation – and because round numbers are awesome – we will be tearing up the fifth and final year of my current contract and will replace it with a new contract that will keep us here at least five more years.

Why now and why here?

I can give all kinds of personal and family reasons. My wife and children deserve some stability after 7 moves in 20 years. My daughters deserve an opportunity to go through adolescence without the added stress of reinvention. We believe that Ottawa (and Canada) is an ideal place to raise teenage girls in what is already a complicated and sometimes dangerous world. We have found a neighborhood and support system that facilitates our observant Jewish lifestyle. We think it will be wonderful for our children (and us) to eventually become dual citizens and for our children to have all the added opportunities (affordable and excellent universities!) that come with it. We are still just beginning to get to know this city, province and country, but from what we have experienced thus far we feel comfortable and safe and happy here. For those reasons alone, why wouldn’t we want to stay?

But please don’t think that I am simply settling. Just because there are compelling personal reasons to stay doesn’t mean that professionally I am simply content to settle. I may be slightly more mature, but I still carry lots of ambition. This is not simply a personal decision; this is a business decision as well.

Professionally, I am as happy as I ever have been. There were lots of challenges behind us and lots of challenges ahead of us (no chance of getting bored here!). If my first chapter was about helping guide the school from a state of emergency to a state of stability, the next chapter will be about moving from stability to sustainability. Please don’t think that my ambition about what can be true in Jewish day school has been lowered. I still believe that Jewish day schools are/can/should be leading the educational (r)evolution and I know that OJCS is on the vanguard. Our goal here at OJCS is to be the best school and even if we have not achieved it yet, we are definitely on our way.

I am blessed to work with a talented and growing administrative team, a gifted and dedicated teaching faculty, a strategic and nurturing board, supportive and committed donors, collaborative and creative institutional colleagues and a Jewish Federation that works hard to ensure that no one is left off the Jewish Superhighway. Are there bigger and more prominent schools and Jewish communities? Yes. Are there schools with more resources? Yes. Does that mean that OJCS cannot become an innovative leader amongst Jewish day schools or Ottawan private schools? Absolutely not. The future of education is being written right here. I am humbled to know that I will have a continuing hand in its authorship.

In the end, when faced with having to make a choice, the choice was clear.

I choose family. I choose community. I choose unlimited possibilities. I choose innovation and excellence. I choose the Jewish future. I choose this school with these administrators and these teachers and these families and this board and these donors and these volunteers and this Jewish community. I choose this time and this place to write a first second chapter.

I choose Ottawa.

Jewish Day Schools As Incubators of Jewish Leadership

What is “Jewish leadership”?

Does it refer to Jews who serve in leadership roles? Is it about Jews who lead in accordance with Jewish values?

The first is common; the second is rare.

We’ve been thinking about it a lot at OJCS. We have come to believe that Jewish day schools can serve as incubators for Jewish leadership because they have the opportunity to encourage and inspire both.

I had the privilege of addressing this topic last Shabbat when I spoke at Congregation Machzikei Hadas and it went well enough that I was encouraged to blog about it this week.

About three, four, years ago I had the opportunity to visit Donna Klein Jewish Academy in Boca Raton, Florida and I can still recall how each time we entered a new classroom, how a student would automatically pop up, come over, introduce themselves, tell us what was happening in the class, and then offer to answer any questions we may have. Class after class after class. No prompting from teachers. I further noted how each teacher had a personal mission statement on the doors of each classroom. The hallways were labeled in both Hebrew and English with each of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

That was how I was first introduced to the “7 Habits”. I further learned how CAJE-Miami helped provide training for many of the Jewish day schools in South Florida to receive training in The Leader in Me – which helps schools bring the 7 Habits to life – and provided some Jewish value translation work to ensure they could live throughout the Jewish day school experience. And, with some stops between then and now, that is how it came to be that OJCS began prototyping its own version of the 7 Habits this year.

I have been blogging about the details of this prototype as we have introduced each new habit (and, yes, I am actually now one behind) and in preparation for last Shabbat I came across an article from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks that helped me connect some dots. “Seven Principles of Jewish Leadership” is the title and the symmetry was too good to pass up. As a first step, I expanded upon a visual already created by CAJE-Miami and I created a visual that integrated Rabbi Sacks’ “Seven Principles” with the “7 Habits” with Jewish values. What I did conversationally, was link each of the “sevens” with Jewish text and real examples of what it looks like in a school or classroom. In a nutshell, I tried to answer the question of what happens when a Jewish day school moves Jewish leadership from the implicit curriculum to the explicit curriculum.

Here’s a graphic organizer to help you get oriented:

You may note that all of the “sevens” are further divided along Rabbi Hillel’s famous dictum from Pirkei Avot 1:14 (again borrowed from CAJE-Miami) – the first three focus on the individual, the second three on the relationship between the individual and community, and the final on, let’s say “timing”. So. How about we explore what this can look like in real life and in real classrooms?

#1: For me, the relevant texts are the juxtaposition between the lack of responsibility taken by Adam in the Garden of Eden (the serpent made me do it!) and Cain (Am I my brother’s keeper?) and how Moshe responds when he sees a Hebrew slave being beaten or when he discovers Yitro’s daughters being harassed by shepherds. In terms of examples, in our school being proactive and taking responsibility lives in both formal structures like Knesset (student government) and informal structures like prototyping. Two recent examples come to mind. A member of Knesset pitched us on letting a student co-own the school’s Instagram account to make it more student-friendly. Also, the entire Grade 4 pitched us on allowing them greater access to student blogging:

The prototyping culture we are creating encourages and incentivizes students to take responsibility, to be proactive and in the parlance of our “North Stars” to truly “own their own learning”.

#2: Here we look to Sefer D’varim (Book of Deuteronomy) in which during the last month of his life, Moshe sets out a vision and a set of laws to secure it. When we think at OJCS about the future, about “beginning with the end in mind,” we want our students to learn how to envision a future for themselves and then learn how to communicate and achieve it. We provide them with opportunities to develop these skills through a variety of student-led experiences with both high and low stakes. We collaboratively goal-set with each student around academic and behavioral outcomes, for example, as we head down a path that will likely end in student-led conferences (replacing parent-teacher conferences). We also provide students with opportunities to plan and run clubs such as our “Detective Club” and “Alien Club”.
#3: Thinking about “putting first things first” and an overall sense of timing leads me to Rabbi Tarfon who said in Mishnah Avot 2:16, “It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.” In the life of school, this resonates with all the ways we are trying to help our students navigate time management and executive functioning. We now offer a Study Skills Elective each week. We offer twice-weekly Study Hall. We are looking at an Executive Functioning Boot Camp model for next year. We are looking at tools like Google Calendar and Google Keep. Another way we think about “putting first things first” is building on the success of our Middle School Retreat in helping create a sense of community and shared expectations for our middle schoolers each and every year.
#4: This next one is a little dense, but is actually one of my favorite teachings about leadership. Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, a leading theologian and philosopher from the Reform Movement, wrote an article years and years ago in which he asserted that (religious) leadership should model itself on the kabbalistic notion of tzimtzum. “Tzimtzum” as described by Isaac Luria is the idea that in order to create the world, God had to contract Godself in order to make room for creation to take place. In other words, sometimes leadership is about making space for others to lead. These ideas are embedded in two of our North Stars – “We learn better together” & “We are each responsible one to the other” – and live in the commitment we have made to project-based learning and conflict resolution.
#5: The Torah teaches that a king must write his own Sefer Torah which “must always be with him, and he shall read from it all the days of his life” (Deut. 17:19). Leaders learn. At OJCS, this lives in the North Star of “A floor, but no ceiling,” and in our emphasis on personalized learning. This year we are prototyping “Genius Hour” projects as just one example of letting students lead with their passion and letting their passion lead to their learning. In terms of “seeking first to understand and then be understood” we are working with JFS to provide “Kindness Workshops” to our students to help them skill-build towards active listening.
#6: Here I am going to quote directly from Rabbi Sacks in his article when he says, “One of Judaism’s greatest insights into leadership: The highest form of leadership is teaching. Power begets followers. Teaching creates leaders”. We provide our students with lots of opportunities to learn through teaching and to learn leadership skills by “owning their learning”. Whether it is a Grade 6 WE Day project, leading a Rosh Chodesh assembly, designing a Hebrew Escape Room or interviewing residents at Hillel Lodge, our students develop the skills to see projects through, to dream dreams, to speak publicly, and to organize. These are all the building blocks of leadership.
#7: There are no shortage of examples of stressed out and overwhelmed leaders in the Bible. Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah and Jonah – just to name a few – all at some point prayed to die rather than carry on as a Jewish leader. That is certainly an extreme example of the toll leadership can take, but we acknowledge that stress is very real for our students and families. It is partly why one of our North Stars is “Ruach” – we have intentionally and explicitly named joy and spirit and wellness as a guiding value in our school. Studying in school (and teaching!) is supposed to be joyful. We do our best to provide wellness and mindfulness into the school day. It is why we remain committed to Art, Music and PE as part of a well-rounded experience. Students deserve to feel successful and joyful and not each student is going to find that in the traditional academic subjects. It is why we have a “Ruach Week” and a Middle School Retreat. It is also why we are looking at advisory and guidance models. The emotional and spiritual wellbeing of our students is important for them as human beings, and as future leaders.

We cannot take for granted that what was once true will always be true. It has been true for generations that the leaders of Jewish organizations, schools and synagogues have come from the ranks of Jewish day schools; and flourished as a result. If we want that to continue – if we want to secure the Jewish future – our schools will need to work to make what was once implicit, explicit. Jewish leadership requires Jewish leaders who know how to lead – not just as Jews, but Jewish-ly. Ken y’hi ratzon.