The old will be renewed, and the new will be sanctified. - Avraham Kook, Igrot HaRa’ayah 164

This famous expression of Harav Kook, cited in this issue, would make a perfect mission statement for the field of Jewish day schools. It captures the magnificent, heroic efforts the teachers in our schools make every day. They expertly choose from our ancient writings and traditions, endowing students with the skills they need to read, understand and interpret them, giving students a platform to articulate their thoughts and, in the process, develop self-understanding as old-new, 21st century Jews. They also fearlessly incorporate the new, in the form of new thinkers and artists or new technological platforms, while helping students elevate the new, and use new media selectively, wisely, to find the wheat and discard the chaff. And that elevation takes place largely through the guidance and insight derived from our ancient wisdom.

The articles in this issue represent the balance between the old and new, sacred and profane embodied in Jewish history. The issue tells the story of the drive for innovation, an imperative in modern education that has gained strength on theoretical and practical levels in recent decades. It features efforts to learn from, adopt and adapt innovative programs and pedagogies from the larger educational universe. However, even as they adjust to shifting times, some authors advise caution, patience and planning around such changes. They observe that innovation often requires an enormous investment of time, people, money and more to achieve lasting success, and that sometimes, investing in deepening what already exists may be the wiser move.

In the first section, “Innovation Infrastructure,” Jakobovits writes of a visionary program implemented in a chareidi women’s school in Israel that enables inclusion on an unprecedented scale. The next two articles describe ambitious collaborations between day schools and university education schools: Stowe-Lindner on Bialik College in Melbourne and Harvard regarding the “Cultures of Thinking” project; Malkus and Sikorski on Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland, and George Washington University regarding STEM and Jewish studies. Next, Cohen, the “Tech Rabbi,” gives advice for creating capacity for student innovation, and Mendelsohn Aviv discusses the creation of a new blended-learning school. Goodman and Frim present a Jewish multicultural school as a model that may appeal to millennial Jews. Articles by Kress and Truboff approach the challenge of making innovation stick from different perspectives, and English shows how some innovative day schools market themselves.

Our center spread features innovative ways that schools ignite student passion and inspire student ownership in tefillah. The next section looks at innovative initiatives within and beyond the classroom. The first two articles concern assessment. Soleimani explores how her school conducted a a curricular audit that gave direction for change and improvement, while Arcus-Goldberg charts the transition to student portfolios. Five articles then portray a variety of innovative educational programs. Marson takes principles of gifted learning into arts education; Jacobs and Spector detail the workings of I (Integrated) PBL; Nagel showcases her updated approach to modern Jewish literature; Reiss and Westman present a game-based app for biblical literacy; and Matas features a school that takes time off to solve real-world problems. In an excerpt from a recent book, Couros and Novak riff on cultivating creativity, and Freundel displays the creative energies and vision of day school leaders. Freundel's article represents the launch of a partnership between JEIC and Prizmah, including a series of articles on the Jewish Day School of the Future that will be featured in the months to come.

May this new year be one in which the innovative ambitions of school administrators and the innovative skills of teachers enrich and nourish the growth of our students’ capacities for innovative learning—while renewing the ancient wisdom of our tradition.

Havruta,“two scholars sharpening one another” (Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 7a), is arguably the richest way to study Jewish texts. Yet until recently, it was a minority pedagogical style; it took change within the yeshiva education system to become the norm. According to Israeli historian Shaul Stampfer, havruta-style learning (pairs of study partners learning text together), although practiced since ancient times, became the predominant form of Jewish study only after World War I, when yeshivot opened their doors more widely. As described by Rachel Gelman Schultz, “Once yeshivot were no longer only for the elite, the students needed to learn in havruta in order to understand the difficult texts, and this mode of learning spread.”

Educational innovation is nothing new for Jewish education, whether related to sacred texts or general study. Innovation for Jewish day schools means applying new, or perhaps existing but under-used, ideas in search of continually delivering better learning for students. No matter a school’s educational philosophy or preferred pedagogy, all teachers want to improve and respond to the dynamic ways students learn.

At Prizmah, we see educational innovation as an important pillar of our work with the Jewish day school field. Our Strategic Plan calls for “fostering a culture of continuous educational growth and experimentation, and identifying and scaling promising new ideas.” On a daily basis, this is accomplished most readily through the myriad points of connection throughout the Prizmah Network. Whether in Reshet conversations, through a presentation at a Prizmah Gathering, in the informal learning at our summer pop-up learning hubs, or through the JDS Collaborative model, educators connect with each other to seek out and to share resources and knowledge.

This past summer, Prizmah co-hosted an Innovators’ Summit where educators and innovators from day schools and beyond were able to “show and tell” how technology and techniques such as Makerspace, Firestorm, CoSpaces and Virtual Reality are changing the way day school students learn. Innovation allows middle schools students in Indianapolis, for example, to collaborate with peers near Nahariya in a Virtual Worlds project and travel to Jewish communities around the globe. Participants learned about The Jeremiah VR Experience, a virtual reality application that takes students through the book of Jeremiah in an immersive experience, while also getting an overview of the current virtual reality market. Upcoming gatherings this year will include opportunities for the growing number of educational leaders in Jewish day schools to share and learn about both technological and other pedagogical opportunities to advance learning.

We know that a commitment to educational innovation pervades all levels of school leadership and is certainly not limited to, or even primarily centered on, educational technology. Our plan envisions a field where schools are able to enhance their educational visions and goals for academic achievement, social-emotional development and Jewish identity. We are committed to strengthening schools’ efforts to educate more students, by expanding their learning support, and by developing pedagogy to differentiate learning.

There may (mistakenly) appear to be a paradox in enlisting innovation to support and maintain connection to ancient traditions. Judaism itself, however, has always been inextricably linked to changing realities, as new questions arise and new answers are fashioned that build on the past. The opposite of tradition is not innovation but rather stagnation. When we adopt innovative approaches in our day schools, we integrate the best of new ideas with the values from our tradition. This can take many forms across many different types of schools: interdisciplinary approaches to Jewish history, for example, or child-centered study of Gemara. When we adopt a “what if” attitude, we usually see a result that exceeds even our wildest imagination.

Jewish day schools are unique in the landscape of the Jewish world as institutions where every day, new ideas blossom in the minds of young learners thanks to the careful and deliberate efforts of teachers who seed connections to tradition with the most innovative of techniques and approaches. Prizmah is encouraged by all that we see and honored to create settings where these ideas and practices are promulgated.

Dear Prizmah Coach,

I can deny it no longer: My staff hates faculty meetings.
What can I do?

Sincerely,

Well-Meaning Principal

Dear Well-Meaning Principal,

I hear you. We have all inherited systems that no longer serve us, but they remain ingrained in the school schedule, so we use them because:

• We are afraid that if we write an email, no one will read it. So we use meetings to announce things instead.
• If we stop having meetings, we will never be together, and it is important to at least see each other and build community.
• If we only have meetings “when needed,” then no one will come. Therefore, it is better to keep those we have on the schedule so people expect them and plan accordingly.
• Staff will be staff… they will complain no matter what we do, and there is nothing you can do to change that, so do not change the meetings.
• There is too little time to actually accomplish anything real, like professional development, during a short faculty meeting.
• And more…

Here is the truth—and I am going to tell it to you simply: YOU ARE WRONG. Yup. There it is, my friend. All of those reasons not to change—they are based on incorrect assumptions. But do not worry-we can help you. It’s time for a PARADIGM SHIFT.

Imagine, if you will, a faculty meeting where the team shows up, eager to get together. The administrators greet the team members at the door, welcoming them in by name. An agenda has been sent out in advance, and as teachers walk into the room, there is food, maybe music, and an atmosphere of welcome. What? You say this is too difficult? It takes too much time? Well, my dear principal, THIS meeting is YOUR lesson. This is your chance to model what you want to see in the classrooms. If you are late, unprepared, frontal, boring, and do not seem to have put in time to design a worthwhile program, then you are saying to your team that this is OK. Do not allow yourself those excuses. If you have a meeting planned, then make it count.

At Prizmah, our Educational Innovation team and coaches work with school leaders to rethink what effective, meaningful—and dare I say it—FUN faculty meetings might look like. We would love to hear about your success stories and challenges. Please be in touch at [email protected].

Something I have been focusing on quite a bit as of late is the idea of innovation in education being more focused on depth rather than being something new. For example, a lot of organizations (including education) are always touting being on the “cutting edge” as they are embracing the “latest and greatest” technologies or perhaps strategies. The problem with this focus is that if you are too focused on doing the “new” thing, you probably never had a chance to get good at the last item or initiative. It is a cycle that continues over and over again in too many spaces.

But if you stay focused on something too long, how can that truly be considered innovation? Think of it this way. The original iPhone was a marvel when it first came out over ten years ago, but if you have had any of the iterations since, you probably would not be excited about the limitations of the original today. Each iteration of the iPhone to the product we have today is an innovation. The more time we have to
focus on depth creates an environment where we can bring out the true artistry within teaching and learning.

George Couros,
“Innovation Focused on the Ability to Improvise”

Casey Suter, Elementary School Division Head, The Shlenker School, Houston

Educators are inundated with “innovation” on a daily basis. Companies contact schools with the latest and greatest new programs that guarantee outstanding student outcomes. Staying current with educational trends is important, but we know that just because a program promises excellent student outcomes does not mean it delivers on that promise.

Our school seeks out research-based programs and curricula for our campus. Each year, we develop a needs assessment to ensure that we are providing teachers with proper teaching methodologies to strengthen current programs. Our teachers are required to attend 25 hours of secular and eight hours of Jewish studies professional development each year. Our focus is to provide teachers with professional development that deepens their understanding of current curriculum. We have learned from experience that great teaching comes from teachers with deep understanding of curriculum, knowledge of targeted planning and strong delivery of instruction. Educators, not programs, change student outcomes.

Bracha Rutner, Assistant Principal, Yeshiva University High School for Girls, Holliswood, New York

In education, we have often rushed to embrace new technologies such as smartboards or 1:1 computers once they became affordable, mostly through grants. We have found them to be useful, sometimes, in a specific context. But they remind us that the real way students learn is when they feel safe and comfortable with a person with whom they have a relationship.

I often wonder if educational innovations are really so different than what we did in the past. How did teachers often begin their class? Many midrashim employ a petichtah, a story or idea with which a rabbi would begin a class with to entice the student. Today, we call that a “do now.” Students needed to know Tanakh well before studying Talmud—i. e., “scaffolding.” And then the rabbi would delve deep into the learning, using examples to initiate questions—a variety of “inquiry-based learning.” And how do we know that we needed to personalize learning? çðåê ìðòø òì ôé ãøëå. Today, we know that students learn better in small groups as opposed to constant frontal teaching; earlier, we called this chevrutah. The Tannaim and Amoraim were not afraid to embrace difficult issues and neither should we in education.

If we look at new ideas through the prism of the past, we may find that they are not as much of a fad as they seem. And it is helpful to address new ideas if we use them to build on the sound foundations that we have created.

Rabbi Jonathan Berger, Associate Head of School, Gross Schechter Day School, Pepper Pike, Ohio

The world of education often oscillates between two poles: innovation and tradition. The unstated message is that we must choose between being progressive educators, constantly changing, or “old school,” proudly and cautiously reliant on the tried-and-true. Embracing progressivism means that we can’t stand still; being traditional entails a stance of suspicion towards anything new. And of late, educators’ understanding of innovation has been shaped by Silicon Valley’s model of “Move fast and break things.”

George Couros’ alternative to this model accords well with Jewish practice. On Simhat Torah, we finish reading the Torah and start it again the very same day; when we celebrate finishing a tractate of Talmud, we declare that we plan to return to it. In both cases, the goal is to discover new interpretations and perspectives when we reread. Our practices mirror Couros’ idea of seeking new insights and greater depth, not just moving on to something new.

But this model of innovation can lead to complacency. Sometimes, small, iterated improvements aren’t enough, and more radical changes are needed. How do we know when to innovate radically, and when to aim for depth and true artistry? A good supervisor or coach helps us to constantly reflect and improve, and a strong school accreditation process ensures that every few years, every aspect of a school is evaluated. Together, supervision and accreditation can help us find a dynamic balance between steady small-scale innovation and occasional radical change.

One of the most frequently asked questions we hear from heads of school is, How can I find and retain top talent in my school? In order to support our schools in ensuring they are great places to work and to create conditions to attract top talent to the field, Prizmah partnered with Leading Edge, the Alliance for Excellence in Jewish Leadership, to offer their Employee Experience Survey to day schools. This initiative was offered at no cost to schools through the support of generous federations and foundations.

In May, 22 schools administered this survey, and more than 1,400 staff and faculty participated. The survey focuses on employee engagement: the level of connection, pride, motivation and commitment a person feels for their work and how likely they are to stay or leave their place of employment. At Prizmah, we want to ensure our schools are incredible places to work. At the heart of our work is the people, and this tool supports schools in their efforts to identify ways to ensure the people who have chosen to devote themselves to the enterprise of day schools feel wholly engaged and supported in their work.

Among the key survey findings:

Jewish day schools excel at ensuring employees feel strongly connected to the mission of the school. Employees express a good understanding of the school’s mission, they deeply understand how their work contributes to the organization’s mission, strategy and goals, and they state that the mission of their organization makes them feel like they are making a difference in their work.

Employees feel comfortable asking for help from one another when needed, and they seek opportunities to collaborate with peers. The highest rates of favorable scores reside within teams where people feel most connected to the work and to their colleagues.

Faculty and staff value flexibility and autonomy within the school and appreciate the opportunity afforded by their positions to do challenging and interesting work.

Direct managers have great leverage in creating conditions within their teams where employees feel supported, well-cared for, and clear about priorities and responsibilities.

The data reveals areas where improvements would advance employee engagement:

Strengthening internal communications. Employees give higher scores for communications with direct managers and within departments than within the organization overall.

Managing performance through appropriate and ongoing feedback. Fewer than half of respondents said they receive regular feedback on how they are performing.

Ensuring a more even distribution of work across portfolios. While employees felt they have the information and resources to do their job well, fewer feel there are enough people to do the work.

Setting and communicating an organizational compensation philosophy. Few employees understood how salary decisions and raises happened at their organization and how salary scales compared to similar positions in other schools.

All of the organizations that participated in the Leading Edge survey were offered a one-on-one consultation with a Prizmah consultant to identify an approach to address the opportunities and challenges they face in their school and develop plans for next steps. Prizmah offers support to schools in facilitating leadership-team retreats, workshops on school culture, and coaching for senior leadership and boards.

Often, so much in a school feels both urgent and important. This tool is an effective way to identify what levers to pull on to maximize impact, create a safe space for employees to reflect on their experience within their organization, and give shared language to schools as they chart a path forward. We look forward to measuring progress over time and to supporting our schools in developing strategies and prioritizing work to ensure we create conditions where leaders can thrive.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business

By Patrick Lencioni

If you could do one thing this year that would dramatically improve your school, what would it be? Lencioni asserts that focusing on organizational health is the key. Lencioni, well known for his clear and simple style of writing, untangles the complexities of leadership and offers concrete ideas and practical steps to shift the way we work as he tackles our fundamental assumptions about what matters most.

Perhaps most challenging is Lencioni’s belief that the tools and resources needed to shift to becoming a healthy organization lie within the staff of the organization itself. What might we shift in our practice if we believed it were within our reach to make changes that could fundamentally shift our schools? What if our avoidance of uncomfortable conversations, our desire to solely immerse ourselves in data and strategic planning, prevents us from dealing with what matters most? While culture can be challenging to measure, the absence of a healthy culture can make all the difference in why some companies succeed and others fail.

This is essential reading for any school lay or professional leader and for our Jewish communities as a whole.

Ilisa Cappell

Storytelling with Data

By Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

Bad, incoherent, hard-to-read graphs are everywhere. Most people aren’t trained statisticians or skilled at telling stories with the data they have. Anyone who creates graphs to report on data could learn something from this book. Nussbaumer Knaflic provides step-by-step insight into great data visualization practices that will enhance your visualization, enliven the story of the data and improve the message you are trying to convey.

The book gives clear advice on how to create effective visuals by showing examples of typical graphs that we encounter and then unpacking how they could improve. Here are the three major takeaways: think about what you want your audience to know and do with the data before designing the graph; minimize clutter—less is more with graphs; focus your audience’s attention by using color intentionally.

Odelia Epstein

The Jewish Cookbook

By Leah Koenig

I savor the community we build in the kitchen and around the table. My cookbook shelf, and my cooking repertoire, is filled with Jewish food. Gil Marks, Joan Nathan and Yotam Ottolenghi grace my shelf and have been my rebbes in the kitchen; do I really need another Jewish cookbook? With this book, the answer is a resounding yes.

Koenig reminds us that Jewish cuisine is more than just matzah balls and potato kugel. I’m particularly excited to try the dozens of recipes that will push my culinary boundaries beyond my own Ashkenazi heritage, and those that show that Jewish food has been shaped by the cultures and flavors of our millennia of Diaspora: Persian jeweled rice, sweet potato-pecan kugel inspired by the flavors of the American South, and especially gulab jamun—rosewater fritters from India’s Bene Israel community.

Koenig’s extensively researched and meticulously tested recipes will ensure your success, whether you’re trying something new or looking to recreate a classic. And the beautiful photography and thoughtful design invite in both the experienced cook and the kitchen dabbler. I’m looking forward to a table graced by these wonderful recipes for years to come.

Daniel Infeld

Somebody Else’s Children: The Courts, the Kids, and the Struggle to Save America’s Troubled Families

By Jill Wolfson and John Hubner

This nonfiction thriller written by two journalists, one a former probation officer, walks you through the lives of children, teens, young adults, new parents and families impacted by the child welfare system, from court hearings to custody placement. The book expounds upon individuals’ experiences, while also highlighting the negativity, confusion and fascination that is typical of American family courts. Some of the people have lived a lifetime in the system, experiencing a gamut of shelters, courts and foster homes and a roller coaster of frustration, sadness, betrayal and sometimes reunification. However, for others, the system has served as a stepping stone for opportunity and change.

The world described in this book may seem far from the experiences of most people in our schools and communities, although it is a common feature for many in our society. Too often, we take for granted the resources provided to ensure perpetuation of education, love and support. While this book can be heavy at times, its description of the many people working to support these children reinforced my sense of commitment to our community and country.

Sara Loffman

Visionary programs of inclusion can be found in all kinds of Jewish schools. HaYidion asked the developer of one such program at the Beth Jacob Institute of Jerusalem, among the “Ivy League” schools of the chareidi world, to contribute this description of their pioneering work in the field.

The striving for integration of mentally, emotionally and physically challenged individuals into society is one of the noblest innovations of the modern world. Many programs have been developed in an ongoing search for the most appropriate and effective ways to do this successfully. Most of the work involves integration in the classroom and the workplace; significantly less research and experimentation has been done on the inclusion of people with disabilities into society as a whole. An exception to this is the work of the Beth Jacob Institute of Jerusalem (Machon Beit Yaakov Yerushalayim), a girls’ high school and advanced education school, with more than 3,000 students. Of these, 280 compose a special education department, serving a very broad range of special-needs students, aged 14 to 20 and older.

Thirty years of experience with a variety of methods at the Beth Jacob Institute have honed the sense that current methods—which generally define the aim as “acceptance of the other,” “removing the stigma,” and “helping the disadvantaged”—are qualitatively insufficient. They perpetuate in the special-needs individual an inferior status, which can and should be eliminated. Beth Jacob has developed a groundbreaking program which has as its goal the equal-status, genuine inclusion of people with special needs into society, to the benefit of both.

The Beth Jacob Institute of Jerusalem constitutes a microcosm of religious society in Israel. Because of its educational emphasis on acts of kindness and good deeds, it provides an excellent environment for testing ideas about social integration of the specially challenged. The Special Education Department was renamed as the Telem Center of the Beth Jacob Institute of Jerusalem, using a Hebrew acronym for “Individually Adapted Programs.” Many transformations accompanied the name change. In the past, integration programs at the Institute included part-time, individually suited inclusion of special-needs students in the formal academic classes of the mainstream school, technical training classes, informal school activities, pairing of students in tutorial relationships, etc. These programs were in line with the most advanced studies in the literature, but there was still considerable frustration, resulting from the obvious gaps between the abilities and skills of the general and special student populations. Invariably, there lingered a sense that mainstream students were being asked to assist the special needs students as an act of kindness. To the degree that the interaction between able and disabled students was achieved, it was strictly limited to the times of the integration activities and did not carry over to relationships beyond the prescribed frameworks. Barriers were penetrated but not removed.

Driven by the conviction that further progress could be made toward genuine inclusion into normative society, the Telem Center concluded that what was required was a new and more sophisticated methodology. To make the leap to a strategy that could take participants beyond the impediments and limitations of previous interactions, three prerequisites were emphasized:

• Factoring in the needs of both mainstream and special needs students
• Expanding the interaction to areas well beyond academics
• Addressing authentic needs of all participating students

Abraham Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of human needs was used as a starting basis for constructing a program for participating students. But Maslow based his analysis of human development on studies of the most able and accomplished human beings. The hypothesis on which the Beth Jacob Institute’s new work was based was that, when applied to the points of excellence which are present also in disabled individuals, the same ladder of needs can be climbed by all, leading to satisfaction, recognition and equal-status interaction.

The Yad leYad Theoretical Model

Extrapolating from Maslow’s hierarchy, a theoretical model, called Yad leYad (Hand to Hand), was developed by the Telem Center to direct an equal-status inclusion program, named Yedidut (Friendship). The Yad leYad model is composed of ascending, interacting levels.

Level 1 – Hierarchy base: Formal and informal studies, language development, capability-building and empowerment, including “mainstreaming” experience at the school, as a basis for future inclusion in the community.

Level 2 – Physiological needs: Organized and well-structured basic conditions. A network of workshops planned and directed by a professional team that directs all the activities at the school.

Level 3 – Safety: Mutual goals with normative students, creating a safe space for participants with special needs to join in normal activity. The organized network of workshops with professional guidance supplies the security needed for functioning properly.

Level 4 – Belonging: A joint product in exhibitions and performances fostering group cohesiveness and communal belonging that transcend the boundaries of the proposed program, revealing the strengths of the student with disabilities, and enabling the mentors to understand their differences and see the whole person. This understanding sets the stage for a relationship to form, and fosters openness and communal involvement.

Level 5 – Esteem: Providing positive feedback to the participants as to their areas of strength, boosting their efforts to keep up the relationship and enhancing their ability to give, love, demonstrate patience and empathy, and more.

Level 6 – Self-actualization: Through the sense of capability born of the relationship and the connection to the program’s community, fostering an inner emotional gratification, a connection to one’s own personal abilities and personal empowerment, and fortifying the participants’ desire and ability to develop more social relationships.

The Yedidut Program

The Yedidut program is a real-life embodiment of the Yad leYad model, enabling participants to build genuine mutual friendships that are meaningful and lasting. It has effectively broken down barriers between the two student populations at the Beth Jacob Institute.

The program begins by pairing mainstream students and students with special needs for activities outside the classroom in which they have a common interest. To this end, Yedidut offers a large number of weekly workshops in activities such as acting, dancing, painting, choir singing, clothing design, acrobatics, fruit arrangement, cooking and drama. Each pair of friends-to-be chooses the workshop of their liking together. Thus, from the outset, Yedidut identifies and brings into focus points of excellence in all participants, points that can be cultivated and that jump-start meaningful relationships.

At a later stage, group events are held to bring the participants together. These activities are accompanied, guided and carefully calibrated by skilled, experienced and motivated staff. From these beginnings, friendships expand exponentially to voluntary, self-motivated, all-week-long interaction, both in and out of school, and to wider and wider circles of friendships, thus effectively infusing the future lives of the participants, their families and communities, with the compelling energies generated by their inclusion experiences during their school years.

Here is the sequence of stages that the Yedidut program follows:

Stage I: Common interest. A “mentor” and a “mentee” register jointly for a workshop of their choice in an area of common strength and interest.

Stage II: Common goals. Developed in the course of the workshops, a common goal creates reciprocity and interdependence for the achievement of the goal, under the guidance of the professional team.

Stage III: Joint action. The students bond over activities in the various workshops—not based on language or academic studies. Dance, drama and cooking help the girls learn socialization techniques and discover solidarity and close social contact.

Stage IV: A product. Throughout the duration of the workshop, students work in unison to produce a performance, an exhibition, etc. Joint products allow the students to experience success and help expand the communication circles on both sides.

Stage V: Communication circles (in the chosen field of interest). The students’ joint activity in areas of mutual strength and interest, the pleasure derived from the workshop, and the social empowerment fostered at each stage of the program all merge to form a relationship that expresses itself also outside the actual framework of the workshop.

Stage VI: Broad natural-communication circles. In this stage, some of the partnerships expand to develop communication circles outside the specific area of interest represented by the workshop. These communication circles may include activities such as mutual home visits and shopping together, with the goal of deriving another positive experience from the friendly relationship. This is the deepest and most significant stage of the integration. Moreover, this friendship brings with it a network of friendships and acquaintances that encompasses the students and further integrates them into normative society.

The effects of the Yedidut program have been extraordinary. A new world of joy, achievement and personal growth opened up to all participants. The mother of one student with special needs noted that inclusion programs had not worked for her daughter because “putting them in a regular classroom means putting them in a place where their differences are very pronounced. Instead of highlighting similarities, this highlights differences.” The Yedidut program altered this dynamic completely.

Mainstream students and students with special needs alike have been energized and newly empowered. They discovered that everyone has something to contribute, that their friendships are truly friendships and mutually enriching and that everyone is, indeed, an equal-status member of a many-faceted society. One participant observed, “I was taken by the fact that when the girls focused on their strong points, their weaker points seemed to fade into the background. And this helped me to relate to my own weak points. I discovered my own weak points, and I learned to deal with them and see them.” Another commented, “This is actually what happened to the girls in the regular classes. They said, ‘Just a minute. It’s true that she talks slowly, it’s true that she thinks slowly, it’s true that she looks different. But as soon as she picks up that knife and starts cutting the cakes and creating those petit fours, she’s amazing at what she does. So she’s not just disabled.’ They began to relate to the bigger picture, to see the whole person. They realized that these girls can be much better than them at other things.”

Parents have been happy to find that formerly introverted, insecure and non-communicative daughters, including those on the autism spectrum, suddenly developed greater self-confidence. One student explained, “My communication with people simply changed. It has become so much smoother. The moment I realized that people enjoy being with me, as I am—the way the girls accepted me as I am—it gave me something that extended beyond. It impacted my more extended environment as well.”

Perhaps the most significant success of the program was the diminution of differentiation outside of the classroom. One mother described, “It created a brand-new possibility for her: ‘Yes, I can! I can be together with them.’ Because it’s not in a framework of studies. It’s in a fun, enjoyable framework. And even in the workshops where she actually does something, they do it with her. It’s the pinnacle of social interaction.” A participant elaborated, “In the past, I never saw these girls going out to the yard during recess. Never. Since this started, they go out—ecstatic! When they’re there they feel like they’re really part of things. They’re really together with everyone else. And for our part, as well—you know, everyone asks me, ‘Wow, you have other friends?’ I feel like they are my friends just like any other regular friend.”

In the three years since its inception, the reverberations of the Yedidut project have touched and significantly improved many lives. As one mother explained, “I have a cousin here, somewhere in this massive school, in a regular class. Every time I meet her, I say, ‘You have no idea how great it is for Racheli that you’re here.’ She tells me, ‘Racheli doesn’t even need me. Racheli has tons of friends here, everyone, all the girls in the hallways.’ But in her former school, Racheli was the kind of girl who was always on the sidelines. She wouldn’t talk. We didn’t hear from her. No self-confidence. Before she came here, she was like a little invisible dot in the corner of the room. Now she’s a flower.” Another mother added, “She says, ‘When I go into a room, they notice me. I walk down the hallway and someone says hello to me.’ This sense of belonging, we know what a basic and fundamental need it is.”

The innovative Yad leYad theory of equal status inclusion deserves to be widely adopted in the Jewish educational world and beyond. The trailblazing Yedidut project can serve as a model for others to emulate.

Melbourne, Australia, is a long way from anywhere. Our nearest Western neighbor, New Zealand aside, is a 14-hour flight away. Consequently, a determined internationalist outlook, an investment in development, and a focus on excellence through teaching and learning are musts in order to provide a gold standard of education that persuades our community to buy into the Jewish schooling model.

Jewish schools are leaders in values education. They have clear mission statements that articulate an ethos to parents, be it denominational or pluralistic. They have the staff and the structures to embed these values in both curricular and co-curricular experiences.

But how many schools are able to be as clear in their articulation of their learning ethos? In good schools, teachers know what to expect, and what is expected, from a Jewish perspective. Most schools have structures in place—reporting, assessment, technology platforms—to support lesson planning and delivery. But how is the student experience different in different math classes? How different are the experiences in different elementary teachers’ classrooms within that same school?

Just as teachers should not be automatons, so should schools. Individual flair and nuance are parts of what makes learning interesting and differentiated. We expect teachers to be individuals, and supporting the development of a teacher’s unique craft is essential for their effectiveness as pedagogues. Likewise, a school’s unique and individual pedagogy should not only be supported, but should be as transparent and known as its Jewish values.

In 2005, Melbourne’s Bialik College, together with Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, began the Cultures of Thinking project, funded by Bialik parents Abe and Vera Dorevitch. Bialik became a research site, and the resultant book, Making Thinking Visible (co-authored by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church and Karin Morrison), helped to popularize routines to nurture deep thinking throughout the global educational landscape.

Bialik’s determination is to make pedagogy as clearly articulated for student, teacher and parents as its Jewish philosophy. On the walls, documentation plots the learning journey of individual children. Rarely is “finished work” on display: The process of learning is what is showcased. Do we care about the finished product? Partially. But we are a school and not a museum. The struggles that we face in our learning are much more powerful and impactful than the glossy ending.

The articulation of a clear learning philosophy was evident throughout the early years of the school. As Australia’s first Reggio Emilia-inspired building, the Early Learning Centre for children aged 3 months to 6 years breathes pedagogy; the school even sent the architect to Reggio Emilia in Italy before designing the first building more than 20 years ago. When the primary (elementary) school was refurbished, for example, children made the cases for the mezuzot. By each mezuzah is a panel where the child explains their learning journey in the creation of this art.

The Culture of Thinking in the whole school is a natural partner to the Reggio Emilia-inspired approach in early learning. Cultural forces are a cornerstone of the approach. They are the tools and levers that educators use to shape classroom and learning. An awareness of the cultural forces in both curriculum planning and lesson planning ensures that there are clear expectations (a cultural force) for learning, that the environment (another cultural force) is used throughout the learning process, and that the language needs for the wide variety of students is incorporated into both planning and lesson delivery.

Thinking routines, of which there are dozens, provide opportunities to constantly delve deeper, assess and analyse critically, and expand upon learning. Rather than simply reflecting on a piece of work, we may use a CSI (Color Symbol Image) routine. Analyzing changes in thinking and perceptions may be channeled through a I Used To Think, Now I Think routine, while summarising key points may be achieved through a Headlines routine.

Deep thinking is embedded in the child through the school’s pedagogy.

Every new teacher at Bialik receives the Making Thinking Visible book before they commence employment. Through ongoing professional development, twilight seminars (after-school learning for educators from Bialik and other schools, delivered by our own expert educators and our consultants), day seminars, a biennial conference for 400 educators from around the world and research groups, teachers hone their craft in line with the pedagogy of the school.

Bialik has contracted with different researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in order to develop and extend our Culture of Thinking within our classrooms. This is a significant financial investment on the part of our school community, especially given our geographical distance to Boston, USA. Our current researcher is Edward Clapp, who is working with teachers in grades 5 to 9 to develop a distinctive middle school pedagogy under the umbrella of Cultures of Thinking focusing on “participatory creativity” (the title of one of his books). To build our conceptual framework, Clapp has motivated the team to inquire deeply into their practice through his consultancy over the past two years. He travels to Bialik from Harvard twice per year, visiting classes, conducting interviews with teachers and documenting learning. In addition, he has conducted Skype discussions each month based on professional reading of his textbook and mentoring each teacher in the next stage of their pedagogical journeys.

Through this collaboration, teachers develop their own research projects to further their practice in collaboration with the school’s pedagogy. From this experience, teachers have developed an iterative exhibition to showcase a snapshot of their research. Here are some examples.

In grades 3 and 5, an investigation into Aboriginal art installation both at Bialik College and in our city’s national gallery has unearthed misconceptions and prompted discussions about appropriation of Aboriginal culture by the white majority. Our children have been questioning how we invite others into the creative process and who actually owns the creative process: Is Aboroginal art, for example, a purely Aboriginal process and experience? What is the role of the white commissioner, purchaser or viewer of the art?

A math teacher has linked the research into a wider project we are involved in concerning anxiety in the mathematics classroom. Math students have become documentary makers, and the films are being used for collective reflection on the learning process.

Another project is addressing students’ perceptions of failure. The class is investigating the importance of failure as a learning tool. A set of supportive questions have been designed to help students capture the heart of their response to moments of failure.

Grade 9 Jewish studies students are using primary source materials and texts to refocus attention on ideas, rather than grades. Grade 10 Israel and media students have been focusing on the biography of an idea. In analyzing ideas such as statehood, patrilineality, independence, what are the Jewish and secular sources behind these concepts? Who are the early thinkers, and how have those thoughts evolved over time? Have they been manipulated or misappropriated, and are such evolutions appropriate?

Pedagogical development and ideology are not established by chance. The board’s devotion to professional learning is backed by financial resources. This enables us to employ a dedicated senior leader overseeing pedagogy; to bring top educators from overseas to Bialik, and to send six Bialik staff overseas every year, to Harvard, to Reggio Emilia and to Israel, with an explicit commitment for these staff to lead professional development for colleagues on their return. Bialik’s clear pedagogical direction, with a focus on consistently spectacular academic outcomes for an academically diverse cohort, coupled with its clear Jewish mission, reaps rewards.

Can a Jewish day school partner with a world-class research university to accelerate student learning and drive innovation? What does it look like when university faculty teach elementary school faculty on a day school campus? How might a Jewish day school develop a unique and cutting-edge approach to teaching Judaic studies?

The Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School (CESJDS) and the George Washington (GW) University Graduate School of Education and Human Development explored these questions when we created and implemented an integrated STEM and Judaic studies Lower School (JK-5) curriculum, using the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Crosscutting Concepts as an organizing principle. The crosscutting concepts are a way that NGSS link different domains of science; they describe patterns such as cause and effect, scale, proportion and quantity, systems and system models, energy and matter, structure and function, and stability and change. In our project, teachers and students used the crosscutting concepts to organize learning across general studies (math, science, English language arts, social studies), specials (art, music), and Judaic studies (Hebrew, Israel, and Jewish texts and customs).

Our project started four years ago with CESJDS’s strategic plan goals to develop partnerships with local and national organizations, and to enhance STEM, science, and math instruction. The school had been progressing in STEM education and wanted to make a qualitative leap to be a best-in-class STEM learning institution. With a philosophical emphasis on integrated curriculum at the school, we saw an opportunity to advance not only STEM but to innovate in Judaic studies.

After an RFP process, CESJDS entered into a partnership agreement with GW. GW brought expertise in STEM and teacher training to the collaboration, and CESJDS brought knowledge of Judaic studies, an innovative mindset and experience in integrating Jewish and general studies. The product of our collaboration was a three-year professional development program and a fully articulated integrated curriculum. Each unit in the curriculum used a crosscutting concept as the central theme, which served as the basis for integration of different subjects.

PARTNERSHIP STRUCTURE

The project was led by the STEM coordinator at the CESJDS Lower School and a GW faculty member. To start, CESJDS administrators invited teachers from different grade levels and content areas to take a leadership role in the curriculum development project. These teachers met weekly for one to two hours with the GW team. Teachers were relieved from some responsibilities in order to participate in these weekly meetings. The GW team included math and science education faculty and a doctoral student with prior elementary teaching experience. After three years of coursework and participation in the project cohort, CESJDS teachers received Graduate STEM Educator Certificates, allowing the school to build teacher expertise and capacity. The project counted toward GW faculty’s research and teaching responsibilities, and provided the doctoral student valuable first-hand experience in teacher education and education research. Together, the CESJDS and GW team organized our efforts on three types of activities: curriculum development, teacher professional development, and research and evaluation.

CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

One of the primary objectives of the partnership was to develop a set of integrated curriculum units (called “Kaleidoscope Projects” or KPs) for grades 1-5. The integration effort was informed by prior research into what supports and what hinders teacher collaboration in pluralistic Jewish day schools. Early on in the project, CESJDS teachers and the GW team studied Robin Fogarty’s article “Ten Ways to Integrate Curriculum” together.

The Kaleidoscope Projects were designed by the classroom teachers and documented by the university research team. KPs were created, piloted and then refined, with the integrated nature of the units deepening each year. Each grade level set a target of developing two to three KPs per year. We created a standard KP format for consistency across grades. All KPs included a STEM subject, and most contained a Judaic studies and/or a Hebrew component and a languages arts subject. Through this type of integration, the school was able to teach Judaic content in a relevant way for students and to make real-world connections between Judaic studies and other subjects.

TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The curriculum writing was based on a core belief that to truly innovate in STEM and Judaic studies, we needed to invest in building teacher capacity. The curriculum-making project required a core team of teachers who would take leadership for their grade-level teams and/or content areas. Teachers in the core team—approximately one per grade level, together with subject specialists—completed a 12-credit graduate certificate through GW.

In meetings, teachers learned about the crosscutting concepts and brainstormed KP ideas. For example, at one meeting, we looked at the existing second grade curriculum to find natural connections to the concept structure and function that could be the beginnings of a KP. The general studies teachers pointed out that all second graders learn to write various types of poetry and study the relationship between a poem’s structure and its function. Judaics teachers made a connection to character education (middot tovot of the CESJDS curriculum) and how the structure of a space can facilitate citizenship and participation. Teacher meetings were an opportunity for sharing lesson plans and materials and studying student work created in the KPs. While the teachers had assigned reading on STEM, integration and the crosscutting concepts, most of the “homework” for the program was the writing and piloting of the integrated units.

RESEARCH AND EVALUATION

The original project plan called for both evaluation of the units and research activities. Our evaluation focused on assessing the effectiveness of the curriculum and the project in meeting its goals and providing data that would guide the work beyond the initial three-year period. The research was aimed at extending the knowledge base on how to support elementary students’ science, math, Judaic studies and language arts learning in an integrated curriculum.

The core teacher group was called the Curriculum Integration Leadership Team (CILT). They made significant advances in understanding crosscutting concepts, curricular integration and assessment, as documented in the professional development meeting minutes and teachers’ planning materials. In terms of documenting student learning, the research and evaluation components of the project underwent significant redesign each year due to low parent permission rates. We encountered challenges obtaining consent; recent national and international events that have heightened societal awareness of security and privacy were contributing factors.

PROJECT OUTCOMES AND IMPACTS

The first year of the project focused primarily on professional development and curriculum development. We established the CILT, ran the first teacher courses taught by GW graduate school faculty, and created the first two Kaleidoscope Projects: Robot Shabbat and Rube Goldberg™ Machines.

During year two, the CILT studied the crosscutting concepts and different models of curriculum integration. We also examined opportunities for stronger arts integration in the KPs. GW and the third grade teachers worked together on projects called Ecological Communities and Where Does All the Water Go? Other grade levels created multiple crosscutting lesson plans for expansion into full projects. The CILT presented some of their lesson planning work at regional practitioner conferences.

Finally, in the third year, curriculum development ramped up to meet the goal of developing 10 to15 total KPs. The professional development concluded with teachers completing the final STEM Master Teacher certificate course focused on engineering integration. The project team gave multiple presentations of their work at local conferences. The GW team submitted a manuscript to a leading peer-reviewed science education journal. Last, the CILT met multiple times in the spring and summer to determine what elements of the project should continue moving forward, and what supports would be needed to sustain those elements within the school.

Professional development was a central component of the project. Rather than design curriculum and train teachers how to use it, this project focused on teachers as curriculum makers. The professional development was designed to help teachers take their ideas for units and turn those into high-quality curriculum. The professional development served another important function: It established the teachers as leaders who could support the rest of the faculty in future curriculum development efforts. Overall, GW provided 120 hours of professional development time. Though the credit-bearing option was limited to a small group of teachers (10 initially), the weekly meetings were open to all teachers throughout the school. The CILT’s potential as a source of expertise and support for schoolwide curriculum integration is a lasting impact of this project.

During the third year, we conducted a survey of all grade-level teams to gauge teachers’ knowledge of, comfort with and commitment to using crosscutting concepts as the central organizing principle for integration. The entire faculty was aware of the project and involved in different ways throughout the three years. The survey indicated that teachers were very comfortable with the crosscutting concept assigned to their own grade team, but needed more support to understand the crosscutting concepts in other grades. Teachers felt that students developed a better understanding of crosscutting concepts but wanted more evidence that the integrated nature of the project supported student learning in the various content areas. Since the GW-CESJDS STEM Integration Project is one of the first documented efforts to utilize crosscutting concepts in a systematic way across elementary grades in the United States, it has served as a pilot school for this national initiative.

We also surveyed the CILT teachers about their experience in the project. We learned that CILT teachers’ understanding of integration, crosscutting concepts, and assessment deepened dramatically over the three years of the project. For example, in the early years of the project, teachers’ assessments of student learning focused on vocabulary use and/or tagging phenomena with a crosscutting concept (“What’s an example of structure and function?” “Where do you see cause and effect?”). By the third year, teachers were trying to assess what students can actually do with crosscutting concepts, and how their knowledge of the concepts impacted their learning of new content in the various subject areas (“How can the crosscutting concept stability and change help third graders understand choices that characters must make in Parashat Lekh-Lekha?” “How does the patterns crosscutting concept help first graders remember and understand the different aspects of Shabbat?”). We suggest that many of the positive outcomes can be traced to the integrated nature of the curriculum and the teachers-as-curriculum-makers design of the project.

Overall, the opportunity for a research university and a JK-12 pluralistic Jewish day school to partner together on curriculum development and professional development had a major impact on both institutions and on the day school students. We have developed a cadre of highly skilled master STEM educators in a Jewish environment, developed a unique, integrated curriculum based around crosscutting concepts, transformed how teachers think about integrated instruction, and modeled how graduate faculty can teach and learn at the elementary level. We are working to disseminate the curriculum and research findings to the larger field so other schools can consider adapting this model.

Before surveying educators about whether or not they view themselves as creative, I challenge them to define the word “creativity.” Most define the term as meaning being artistic, musical or gifted in some other act of making something. While these are without question forms of creative expression, they do not define or even represent the essence of what creativity is and by extension could be. This narrow scope associated with creativity pushes many young people away from trying to figure out what creativity is for them and how they can impact the world around them.

So what is creativity? I define it as a mindset. This mindset uses various methods to observe the world, identify problems or challenges, and ideate a solution that, if successful, will bring value to others. Picasso did this through art and Mozart through music, but it also can be accomplished through organizing an event or developing a plan to support learners at varying levels of mastery. Creative capacity can be built without lifting a paintbrush or playing a note. From this realization, we can begin to develop our creativity and help instill the confidence needed for our students to do the same.

Creativity is often associated with thinking “outside the box,” striving to help students engage in nontraditional methods of learning while maintaining the same academic standards as “in the box.” One of my favorite students was just not an in-the-box kid: He built six boxes in the box and made sure his box was safe and secure from any attempts at the unscripted and unknown. He was one of the inspirations that pushed me to publish a book on cultivating creative capacity titled Educated by Design.

I needed to document the principles I hold to when standing up to a challenge and taking it head-on. The principles are organic and stand on their own, and while there are other equally important critical components to building creative capacity, these 10 build on one another and provide everyone the opportunity to reveal their innate creative potential.

1. Creativity is a mindset, not a talent. Remember it starts with a mindset, but the purpose of creativity is to move beyond ideas and turn them into something actionable.

2. Failure is a stop on the journey, not a destination. No one likes failure; those who say otherwise either aren’t trying anything significant, or are so scared of failure that the only way they cope with it is to pretend to love it. Nevertheless, by creating experiences for students where they can fail, grow and build resilience, we give our students, and by extension ourselves, the best chance at bolstering creative problem-solving abilities. Learning should be designed not as a one-time, summative experience but rather as a scaffold of multiple iterations that allow students to reflect and refine their work.

3. Empathy inspires creativity. True creativity is about bringing value to others. How is that value developed? How well does the artist or musician know their audience? How well does their product address the whole person? Teaching empathy is a critical skill for students to be effective problem solvers, communicators and leaders. When you ask someone to define empathy, many times they start defining sympathy instead. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand the unique needs, challenges and realities for someone so you can best support and engage with them on their terms.

4. Collaboration is a prerequisite for innovation. In school, students need to engage in cooperative experiences where they are all accountable for the same scope of work and need to work together to make sure the project is complete. Collaboration isn’t about just working together; it’s about leveraging each group member’s strengths, skills and knowledge to arrive at a more significant outcome. Students need to learn to establish project roles that provide equal value to the project not just in quantity but quality. A great example is having students create video content. There is directing, scriptwriting, filming, editing and post-production. Each phase is vital to the success, but the director rarely sits down and starts editing the footage. When building a technological prototype, you have roles in planning, design, construction, programming and troubleshooting. Once again, each role is critical, and the defined roles result in a richer learning experience and outcome.

5. Ideas should lead to action. Ideas inspire us but they aren’t usable. A big challenge in the world is how to take an idea and develop it into a solution that can be used by others to improve their lives. Schools should empower students to take content knowledge, come up with an idea to solve a problem and then act on it. By challenging students to tackle real-world problems, they can leverage the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom as they brainstorm solutions to problems around them.

6. Technology is just a tool. Technology is part of nearly every facet of our lives. In education, it is critical for us to help our students understand the role of technology as a tool to solve problems and improve experiences. Technology literacy should be a foundation that prepares students to be designers, computational thinkers and problem solvers. To achieve this, students need to learn the electronic tools, methods and apps that help them communicate, collaborate and create powerful content and ideas that bring value to others. Whether it is media creation, app development or programming a sensor, each student needs to develop both a broad and deep understanding of how to leverage technology to solve problems.

7. Don’t wait for permission. Permission can be an enormous roadblock that prevents us from trying new things, taking risks and interfacing with inevitable failure. Permission is the smoke and mirrors that tell us we can’t try until this magical moment of mastery. In school today, students often don’t have a chance to experiment in the unknown, unscripted and undefined.

8. Creativity is a hands-on experience. I cannot emphasize this enough: Students must learn with their hands. They must build things, design things and create things. If students finish your class at the end of the year with only essays, worksheets and exams, then you are missing out on truly making your classroom learning memorable for your students.

9. Put your soul into it. Passion, drive, commitment, determination. However you describe the effort you put into things, there is a certain soul quality that emerges when you truly care about something. If you ask your students tomorrow what they put their soul into, you might be surprised by the answer. You might also be surprised (or not) that the things they put their soul into are not part of school. How we blend those experiences into the classroom, and even more how we create learning experiences that bring the soul to the forefront, will be memorable moments for them. What could learning look like if students put their soul into their work?

10. Stay humble. I once heard an insight that what made Moses humble was not that he thought less of himself, but that he thought more of others. Humility is about looking at ways to engage in the world that put others first.

What does teaching humility look like in our classrooms? How can we shift from learning about others to students engaging in developing their humility through work that directly impacts others? Whether it is students facilitating learning for their peers, helping a friend in need, or creating a social entrepreneurial venture, we owe it to our students to let them build this character trait early on so they can be a positive contributor to society.

Whether we start small (highly recommended) or go all in, the process of building creative capacity is within the reach of everyone, teachers, students and administration alike. What’s important is that we are open to experimenting and exploring what other opportunities can be part of classroom teaching and learning. These 10 principles stand alone and can be built up alone, but together they synthesize the capacity to solve problems and engage in experiences that cannot just positively impact your students but empower them to positively impact the world around them.

Tell us your personal journey that led you to create your school.

I was educated in a very traditional, Orthodox setting from kindergarten until I graduated high school. (Despite what my friends and kids assert, at no point in my schooling did I attend cheder.) I was exposed to traditional texts, values and thought, as well as traditional teaching practices. I did well in school, but as the years went by, I grew increasingly ill at ease. I eventually managed to articulate what it was that bothered me in a question. (How very talmudic!) If Jewish tradition was as rich and profound as my rabbis claimed it was, why was my experience of it so flat, trite and superficial?

I wouldn’t say I went on to become a Jewish educator out of spite, but, if we’re being honest, I probably did. Ever since I began teaching and learning in Jewish settings, it has been my mission and goal to create opportunities for Jews to experience their history, texts, values and ideas in a more open, direct and transparent way. You cannot hide behind blanket statements like “Judaism says…” or “The Talmud says…”. You have to bring receipts.

I taught in supplementary schools in synagogue basements. I ran classes at Ramah when kids were thinking about anything but Hebrew as a language. I taught preteens and teens in day schools, and led them on summer trips across Europe and Israel. I learned alongside adults as they explored questions of history and memory. I lectured online in university seminars. Somewhere in there, I honed my own thinking about our tradition, professionalized and earned degrees. I also spent a lot time in Jewish kitchens trying to answer the question: What can Jewish educators learn about teaching from cooks and chefs? I wrote books. I started a podcast.

In 2011, Frank Samuels and Sholom Eisenstat invited me to join a conversation about how Jewish education could be better. It was not a formal symposium, just three educators talking over coffee and pistachios. We marveled at what technology could do today that it couldn’t do five years earlier, and why Jewish classrooms were falling behind. We soon realized that talk is good, but like Rabbi Tarfon and the elders stated, it is a necessary precursor to action (Kiddushin 40b).

And, so, after much thinking and talking, we launched ADRABA in September 2018.

Describe the new school.

ADRABA is a blended-learning high school, designed from the ground up to leverage technology to enhance learning in every subject—especially Jewish learning. Blended learning, defined simply, involves teachers using technology to personalize the student’s learning experience.

With blended learning, learning can happen anytime, anyplace and anywhere. Thus, we can structure the day differently. No more bells. No more cemetery seating. No more paper-and-pencil assessments.

ADRABA is Jewish high school, reimagined.

Talk about the school’s innovative features.

Almost every aspect of ADRABA is innovative! When we started the process of designing the school, we took nothing as a given when it came to the learner and meeting her needs. We wanted the learning experience at ADRABA to mirror how a person learns in the world. We gleaned lessons from our own experience as teachers. We talked to teens about how they learn best and how they use technology. All this anecdotal and research data influenced how we designed curriculum, learning goals and how we structure our face-to-face interactions. And as we, too, are human, we take pride in the fact that we, as a school, are learning, too. We will be assessing our practices, policies and processes along with the members of our kehillah. We will try new things. We will surely fail. And, most importantly, we will learn from our mistakes.

What model(s) inspired the design of your school?

Whereas my inspiration comes from theory, Sholom was inspired by experience in the classroom, specifically his years as a teacher in the CyberArts program (cyberarts.ca). One project in particular stands out, even decades later. Some of his students attended the Youth Summit during the 1998 meeting of the G8. While everyone helped to prepare the position papers, the kids who remained in Toronto formed research teams to support their peers in London. He remembers going to student’s house in the middle of the night to watch the sessions.

A question came up on the floor, and a request for information was passed from the kids in the room to the kids in Toronto. The Toronto research team quickly pulled together the research and sent it back to London. Everyone then watched as the note from the Toronto team was passed to the members at the conference table in real time. The kids were interviewed by the CBC, and one was asked about what she learned. She replied, “I learned that there are no limits.” Sholom recounts that his lesson was the same. There are no limits to what competent and well-supported teachers can do with motivated and engaged high school kids and the right tools.

How did you determine that there was a need for your school within your community?

Toronto has a historically robust Jewish ecosystem. Day schools affiliated with all major denominations as well as specific sectors of the Jewish community crisscross the landscape. More than 50 synagogues in the city and its environs provide afternoon and weekend Jewish programming for affiliated children. And yet, when it comes to Jewish high schooling, unaffiliated, Conservative and Reform Jews have only one option. Yet, for many families, that option is either geographically, financially or ideologically “too far.”

Our local Federation tells us that 2 in 3 Jewish Grade 8 students do not continue with Jewish learning in Grade 9. Couple that with the usual drop in synagogue affiliation post-bat and bar mitzvah, and you have what is arguably a crisis in Jewish communal viability.

One would think that, under these circumstances, the last thing Toronto needs is another school… but many parents have told us that if there had been another option when they were high-school age, they might have chosen differently. ADRABA, by its very design, is the alternative. And we are committed to galvanizing cohorts of literate Jews into action.

Imagine where we would be as a society if a vast majority of our citizens stopped learning math, science or civics at age 14. Who would make the next breakthrough in medicine or robotics? Who would design the next, better processor? Who would represent us capably and properly in city council or parliament? If not us, then who?

How then can we expect our community to continue in the 22nd century if there are no literate, engaged Jews to assume the mantle of leadership and involvement? Can we do it with only a 14-year-old’s understanding of our centuries’ old tradition?

We can do better.

Whom are you looking to bring on as teachers? Have you been successful so far?

Because of our unconventional and flexible schedule, as well as being located in Canada’s biggest Jewish community, we have access to a bullpen of educators that are both erudite and engaging. We are regularly approached in line at the coffee shop and via email by teachers from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds curious about ADRABA. We have secured staff for 2019, and will surely expand the roster in 2020.

How do you recruit for a school that exists only on paper?

We are a school built on an idea: “Blended Jewish.” Our challenge has been finding learners (and their parents) who are as captivated by the idea as we are.

Speaking with hundreds of parents and peers over coffee, we acknowledged our newness, our untestedness, but also our cutting-edgeness and over 80 years of experience in the Jewish classroom, multiple degrees and awards, etc. I also was reminded of one of the more pressing lessons I learned from my research: As much as people love to try new things, they are as terrified (if not more) by newness.

ADRABA is new. But, as Rabbi Nachman of Breslav reminded us, the essence is not to be afraid.

Explain how you’ve gone about finding board members for your new venture.

ADRABA was designed not only to be a 21st century school, but a school that looks and thinks like its kehillah. As such, the founders made a concerted effort to recruit a board that reflects the diversity of Toronto’s Jewish community. When the founders and the board gather to discuss ADRABA matters, we have an equal number of men and women around the table. We have practitioners of Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Judaism, men who wear kippot and men who do not. We have Ashkenazim, Mizrahim and Jews of color. We have Israeli expats and rooted Canadians. We speak from a variety of perspectives, but we all share the same goal: creating opportunities for Jewish teens to become literate and engaged in the kehillah.

What has most surprised you during this adventure of building a new school?

I was surprised by how, from a bureaucratic perspective, it takes so little to open a school in the province of Ontario.

I used to think of schools as edifices built by great men in stovetop hats that would withstand the passage of centuries—or, alternatively, as massive warehouses that churn out workers for the factories.

Schools, I realized, are neither. They are a site of learning built by people, where kids and teachers come together to ask questions and explore answers. Or at least, that’s what they should be.

What advice would you offer to someone else contemplating starting a school?

As much as I’ve gone on at length in response to earlier questions, I will be brief here because I hate to give advice. So, if I must, I will repurpose a shoe company slogan, and say: Just do it.

We need as many literate Jews as possible, and as good as Sefaria, My Jewish Learning and Wikipedia are, googling Jewish stuff does not a literate Jew make. And, sadly, legacy institutions are either too expensive or too slow to change. We need more Jewish learning places, not less. We need more passionate, literate Jewish educators to help make more literate Jews. We cannot cut corners or rest on laurels or hope inertia keeps moving us forward. If we’re to survive and thrive into the 22nd century, we need schools with bold visions to help us along. And everyone needs to pitch in.

A quest for new models that address the evolving needs and priorities among Jews, especially millennials, is a challenge for established institutions like day schools. The Lippman School, a K-8 Jewish day school in Akron, Ohio, offers a compelling approach that addresses education and recruitment. Called Kvod Habriyot, respect for all people as God’s creation, the model has enabled the school to admit students from a variety of religious, ethnic, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.

The Lippman School has succeeded in increasing its enrollment, allowing the school to thrive financially, socially and educationally for the students and their families. This multicultural approach has led a school embedded within a declining Jewish population to a 70% growth in enrollment, from fewer than 70 students to 110, and a 100% increase in annual tuition income over a nine-year period.

The Lippman Kanfer Family Foundation selected us as consultants to conduct an extensive evaluation of Jewish educational outcomes, the school’s overall effectiveness and stakeholder satisfaction. Based on our work with the school, the Jewish and Hebrew content has taken on a better defined, more comprehensively Jewish content-rich approach. We have also supported the school in integrating Jewish content into all areas of the academic program.

Students choose a modern language, either Hebrew or Spanish. All third- through eighth-grade students participate in a class called Core Values, which presents universal values through a Jewish framework, incorporating Jewish texts. For kindergarten through second grade, the values are integrated into the class curriculum, sometimes with a lesson led by the Jewish wisdom educator, a new hire for the 2019/20 school year. Core Values is where students formally study the holidays. The week concludes with TGIS, Thank God It’s Shabbat, a celebration of Shabbat and other holidays. In addition, all grades or subjects identify key opportunities for integrating Jewish content alongside of general studies subjects, with support from the Jewish wisdom educator.

For sure, the school is still addressing challenges that its model raises, especially in Jewish life and learning. Currently, the school does not teach tefillah, which is relegated to the congregational schools that most Jewish students attend, nor does it hold prayer services. Other challenges include the need for professional development, as both Jewish and non-Jewish faculty have limited background to be able to teach about Judaism and Jewish culture.

We wish to share what we have learned, as it has broad practical and philosophical implications and the potential to transform the field of Jewish day school education. We will present our methodology, describe the foundational principles of the school’s educational approach, present results of our evaluation work, and share some implications for the field of Jewish day school education.

Methodology

Our assessment followed a three-step process. First, in consulation with multiple stakeholders, we identified desired goals and outcomes, composing an assessment tool for measuring the current curriculum and school environment, identifying gaps, and making recommendations to strengthen Jewish content in the future. Second, we collected data about the school and curriculum, using a variety of methods: classroom observation, document review, interviews and focus groups, and surveys of parents, students, teachers and alumni. Third, we presented recommendations to the two boards, teachers and staff. The core of the recommendations were a set of “Indicators” (see Appendix A), benchmarks for identifying student achievement according to the educational goals.

Principles of Practice

At the heart of the The Lippman School is a multicultural philosophy of education with a deeply Jewish focus. The examination and experience of multiculturalism is personal, relational, traditional and universal.

Personal

“Different learning strategies than other schools. They do stuff like Friday we have TGIS—the whole school gets together to celebrate Shabbat with our buddies. They really care about their students. If someone is not doing well, they help them improve their grade.” Student

The multicultural approach supports students gaining a greater sense of self, identity and the other. Multiculturalism is not merely a subject or course; the subject is the person, and the exploration of the person, of humanity, is through a multicultural or global lens. Students get to explore their own background and that of other students as well as cultures completely different from own. The school’s multicultural approach supports the students’ viewing Judaism’s intrinsic integrity and deepening their understanding of Judaism through a comparison to other cultures.

Race, religion, culture, gender, heritage and values are all explored, shared and spoken about on a personal as well as academic level. For the Jewish students as well as all the other students, this means there are opportunities to examine their tradition and heritage in relation to other lived cultures. For those students being raised in other religious or cultural traditions, they develop an understanding of Judaism and an appreciation of Jews and the Jewish people overall. Students regularly have opportunities to make explicit their feelings, views and ideas about Judaism, and relate them to their personal background, whatever it may be. Each student’s cultural and religious heritage is explored, along with other cultures, and the school culture gives voice to each individual.

Relational and Traditional

“I have almost never had a bad experience with other kids here, and how most everyone is kind and accepting.” Student

“[Students] learn about other people, about themselves as they compare themselves to other people. They learn vocabulary to talk about themselves to other people. Given the chance when Cheyenne and Chinese [come], they have lots of opportunities to share about who they are…. They have a way to talk about being Jewish. They know how to talk about other people and with other people.” Faculty member

At the core of the exploration of multiculturalism at The Lippman School is the reality of students simultaneously learning to live in a traditional culture and a modern society. Students come to understand and appreciate one another for who they are and what is important to them. At The Lippman School, the experience of the other is characterized by an I-Thou relationship, a turning toward a person, listening to their views, hearing their story, probing their background and heritage, and understanding and appreciating what is important to them.

Students experience the Cheyenne Nation on their annual visit to the school, or when the Chinese teachers come to share their culture, and many of the students go to visit these places. The experience of the Cheyenne building a tepee on the school grounds is compared to and contrasted with the building of a sukkah.

These authentic cultural experiences of different peoples from traditional cultures allow for engaging in dialogue of customs, symbols, rituals, values and worldview. The exchange is two-way. The student must both be able to probe and question as well as share and explain their own culture. Teachers build empathy for the stories of others as the students gain a respect for one another. The way students talk with one another and act towards one another is indicative of the relationships they build. Students speak about how there is no bullying in the school. The head of school is proud that birthday celebrations and playdates occur across the socioeconomic and racial spectrum of students. The school culture is such that students feel included, and include each other, without regard to individual backgrounds.

The outcome of this approach is the bursting of the “day school bubble.” At The Lippman School, as at other Jewish day schools, the Jewish students are given the opportunity to understand their heritage. What is different about Lippman is that the Jewish students also see how others appreciate and embrace their heritages. This builds Jewish pride and a confidence that Judaism should be respected by those from the larger population. Alumni, Jewish and non-Jewish, expressed a comfort with and enthusiasm for explaining Judaism to the larger population they confront in high school, university and at work.

Universal

“Lippman really likes to express the value everyone is different, but we are also the same. People who look or speak differently are the same as you, and you can be friends with them.” Student

“It’s a school that fosters community regardless of race or religion, instills values and both students and parents feel well known.” Parent

Values are a key component of the curriculum, not just in the Core Values class but throughout the school. Like all other aspects of the school, values are explored through a Jewish lens and through the lenses of other cultures. Yet a name, nuance or understanding can lead students to a different appreciation, interpretation, framework or worldview—for example, the difference between charity as “benevolence to the poor” and tzedakah, righteous act combined with justice.

The larger understanding is that values are universal, no one religion/culture holds exclusive claims over kindness, caring for the earth, awe and wonder, and so forth. This approach makes families of diverse backgrounds feel included and their lives enriched, while for those who are Jewish, it deepens their knowledge and identity.

At The Lippman School, the diversity of the student population is a common attractor for parents raising Jewish children and those from other backgrounds. For families raising Jewish children, it allows parents to be both “tribal” and “global.” For those from other backgrounds, exposure to Judaism is a multicultural experience for their children and themselves. This diversity is especially appealing to millennials, who now predominate the parent body of school-age children. Millennials are often referred to as “global citizens” who value diversity.

Learnings

This is a compelling model that can be adapted in other pluralistic Jewish day schools, regardless of size, demography and location. Many parents find it attractive, and it has potential to significantly strengthen Jewish educational outcomes. Clearly, appealing to a larger audience has enrollment and financial implications for struggling schools. More importantly, we believe this model offers an approach to learning that offers a deeper, more relevant way of presenting and integrating Jewish content into the life and learning of day schools. Rather than the Jewish day school serving as a self-contained Jewish “bubble,” the Lippman School model is a microcosm of the real world, where diversity is explored in an intentional fashion, where students talk openly with others about their backgrounds.

This multicultural approach empowers learners to express what Judaism means to them and to explain it to others. It leads to strengthening of Jewish identity and the understanding that others appreciate Judaism. Students come away with the ability to inquire into the cultural background of others from a point of appreciation and acceptance. This prepares them well for entry into high school, the workforce and life.

We strongly believe that this multicultural approach will help to rejuvenate day schools, meet the needs of Jewish families, and help redefine the future of Judaism in North America.

A Multicultural Approach to Jewish Education

Goals

Giving students the tools to thrive and have productive, meaningful and fulfilling lives

Providing students with the skills and values to understand, embrace, and further an authentic multi-cultural, diverse and inclusive community at school, locally and globally

Developing a personal connection to and broad understanding of Judaism and the Jewish people

Supporting students and families in their own personal, cultural and spiritual journeys

Indicators

1.1 Students draw on Jewish sensibilities, ideas, sources and Hebrew terms, integrated throughout the curriculum

1.2 Students reflect on learning, relating content and experiences to what they know, do and feel

1.3 Students use a variety of modern technological tools in all subject areas to explore content, ideas, issues and problems

2.1 Students explore universal values from Jewish and other cultural perspectives throughout the program

2.2 Students understand and speak a second language, including Hebrew, taught in an immersive fashion, as a gateway to understanding their own and other cultures

2.3 Students model in daily encounters the core values of a multi-cultural community, including respect, dialogue and affirmation of others

3.1 Students are active participants in opportunities to experience and celebrate Shabbat, Jewish holidays and Jewish life cycle events, in a variety of school settings

3.2 Students connect key events, figures and communities in Jewish history and today to society and their lives

3.3 Students create personal connections to Israel through encounters with Israeli peers and adults, Israeli culture and Israeli efforts to better the world throughout the year locally, through online platforms and in Israel

4.1 Students apply Jewish wisdom, stories and texts in confronting issues affecting them personally and impacting the community locally and globally

4.2 Students and parents share customs, symbols and family history from their own culture and other cultures

4.3 Students engage in activities designed to help them explore their personal spirituality and the spiritual traditions of others

(Developed and accepted by the board of The Lippman School and the board of Lippman Kanfer Family Foundation, February 2019.)

I followed the principal as she showed me around the school where I, just out of grad school, was doing the day’s professional development session. As we walked through the Teacher Resources section of the school library, a set of bookshelves caught my eye. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that…,” the principal replied sheepishly.

It turns out that “that” was what I’ve come to call the Aisle of Abandoned Innovations, each dusty curriculum guide (some still shrink-wrapped) representing a dashed hope of creating lasting change, or at least of meaningfully addressing a pressing concern, in the school. While many of these ancient artifacts were about subject matter (a new approach to teaching languages or social studies), others (gasp!) had to do with the sort of thing I’d come to talk about, initiatives in the social and emotional realm (such as bullying prevention, mental health promotion, positive psychology, mindfulness, diversity and inclusion, values, community building, etc.).

A note about terminology: I’m using the term innovation broadly. If an initiative that requires a shift in practice or focus that is new to your school, it is an innovation regardless of whether it is hot off the presses and uses on all the current jargon, or whether it was rescued from someone else’s Aisle of Abandoned Innovations.

I’ve since discovered a similarly dusty, sad-looking space in many schools I’ve visited. To some extent, this is the result of a natural process. There are many reasons to innovate. Things change. Curricula go out of date, social changes occur, staffs turn over. New practices develop to address emerging challenges, and we want to “stay current.” We and our staff want to learn and grow. And if we do a bunch of PD sessions or introduce some new initiatives and a few new ideas stick, dayenu, right?

This reasoning can lead to taking the Aisle of Abandoned Innovations for granted, as an inevitability. Of course we need a place to keep putting new materials from the last innovation; there will always be a next innovation, on a completely different topic, with more materials. However, it is often the case that Jewish day schools are challenged not by too few innovative new initiatives, but by too many. Rapidly Cycling Innovation Syndrome (RCIS) is at epidemic levels. Each back-to-school season and PD day brings some new exciting idea and practice. Every student assembly or series of discussions introduces some new theme. Each workshop, retreat, “special issue” of a publication and conference has its own topic.

There are downsides of RCIS that are seldom acknowledged, though we have all seen the signs. These challenges relate to two sets of learners: students and staff. Both groups receive mixed messages about the importance of each new innovation. Last year’s priority focus is mothballed when this year’s is rolled out. Perhaps you’ve seen staff members appear skeptical about a PD session—and express that skepticism with rolling eyes and inattention? This is understandable if their expectation is that this is just one among many initiatives that sound great, but are destined for banishment to the Aisle of Abandoned Innovations. Perhaps students “don’t take seriously” the time they are asked to spend with the new initiative, or they take it seriously but soon forget it even happened? They’ve gotten the message too: This is not part of what really matters in the school.

Further, RCIS favors activities that are limited in their scope and are therefore likely to be limited in their impact. Wellness Week. A Day of Diversity. A Moment of Middot. Mindfulness in first semester, sixth grade, Mondays from 9 to 9:15. Perhaps these are provided by outside experts who put on a high-quality program, with little to no followup. Or they involve activities delivered by teachers on a time-limited basis.

These sort of innovations are based on an inoculation approach to learning. Though often unstated, the assumption is that limited exposure to a new idea or practice will create ongoing impact that will see learners through indefinitely. This oversimplifies the complexity of what we ask of both our staff and students. For our staff, it ignores what Robert Evans calls the “human side” of change, the process of changing what might be long-standing patterns of behavior in the face of an immense set of already-existing responsibilities. For students, it assumes that their experience with a short-term intervention will provide them the wherewithal to enact new values and behaviors throughout the complexity of their lives. For all, it gives the false impression that we’ve “solved” a complex issue and can move on.

The treatment and prevention of RCIS

Innovations often take the form of good intentions to stay current and to address new issues that have arisen or taken on increased importance. It is possible to achieve these intentions while avoiding RCIS by providing linkages among ongoing and new initiatives and by accounting for the need for innovators to learn and grow.

Link new initiatives to existing priorities

As a first step to developing linkages among initiatives, it is worth conducting an inventory of existing initiatives. What’s in place in what grades for what duration? Where are the gaps? If solid efforts are already in place, it is worth supporting and augmenting these, not introducing an innovative “disruptor.”

Linkages can happen on two levels. First, a set of values or virtues can be helpful in organizing and linking efforts. Which values or virtues are best for this? This is a question that needs to be explored in each setting; there is no abstract answer. Jewish tradition provides middot and sensibilities; values also can be found in character education and positive psychology. Pick a handful of core values, not a laundry list. The goal is to provide a framework that will be in the forefront of the minds of everyone in your school community. Whatever you choose, the most important thing is that you and your community engage with them on an ongoing basis and use them to help shape the initiatives you take on. Where are our strengths in terms of our work with kavod? Where are we falling short? Where do we need to be better at treating people as created betzelem Elohim? New innovations should be taken on in support of ongoing, articulated value-priorities, not as ends onto themselves.

The second linkage concerns enactment of these values on the ground. There should be recurring efforts to prompt for and reinforce desired outcomes over time and to practice and apply them to new situations. Doing that requires integration of initiatives over time and across settings (Jewish and general studies, guidance, behavioral policies, etc.) in a school. Creating linkages might require adapting any new initiative to fit your site’s existing strengths and needs, to build on what students have experienced, to reinforce existing language.

What competencies should form this foundation? The five categories developed by the Collaborative for Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning (casel.org) are quite useful: self-awareness; social awareness; self-management; relationship skills; and responsible decision-making. These are empirically linked with many positive developmental outcomes, and they are conceptually linked with any and all of the values that might drive your efforts.

Consider the needs of staff for growing expertise

If you are engaging members of your school community in an innovation, you are likely asking them to change routines, juggle priorities and move out of whatever comfort zone of balance they have achieved within the creative, controlled chaos that sometimes characterizes a classroom or school. They need room and support to grow. Teachers can find the new expectations that accompany innovation to be exhilarating. They also can find them to be disempowering and cause for self-doubt, as they are called to implement practices that may seem foreign to them, and to do so while continuing the work they’ve been doing. At the very least, they should know that their efforts to learn to implement a new initiative won’t have a short shelf life; they should be able to trust that their investment will continue to be valued.

Your staff also need ongoing support to enact a new program or curriculum within the concrete context of their classroom and learners. They should have a say in how the program develops, and have opportunities to share ideas with one another and to troubleshoot with their peers. Support from outside is important as well. Networking with other schools can provide ideas and inspiration. Ongoing relationships with expert consultants and PD providers are often needed. While it is tempting to think that the job of these experts can be “taken on internally,” the responsibility for tasks such as continuing training, program adaptation and troubleshooting, integration with other initiatives and more are often handed to an already-busy staff member.

All of this takes time and resources and, because no one has unlimited supplies of both, decisions need to be made. If time and effort are to be expended on new initiative X, what is the impact on a teacher’s already-packed schedule? Does our push to innovate result from an assessment of a long-term commitment, or is it a symptom of Rapidly Cycling Innovation Syndrome?

Take a Learning Community Approach to Innovation

Innovation does not result from good ideas alone. A cutting-edge, well-researched, fun and catchy initiative, with all sorts of bells and whistles that speaks to the need of the moment, is completely worthless if it is not implemented, or implemented without giving a chance for ongoing learning on the part of both students and teachers. Students need to develop their competency in the area targeted by a new initiative. Teachers need to develop skills in implementing it. Both will need to be treated with patience, and both face paths that are nonlinear. Both groups need to know that the goals they are working toward and the efforts they are making to achieve these are valued, and will continue to be valued, by others in the community.

In this way, a school’s investment to stay current and address emerging issues takes place in the context of ongoing learning and growth. Rather than continuing to populate the Aisle of Abandoned Innovations, the school can develop an Archipelago of Integrated Efforts, with staff empowered to build bridges and students able to find ongoing support for their journeys over the course of time.

As Jewish day school leaders seeking to nurture and implement successful educational innovation, much can be learned from the implementation of educational innovation within public schools. From a historic perspective, the current drive to innovate that has dominated so much of the educational discourse among Jewish day school educators and their public school counterparts emerged 10 years ago when President Obama established i3, the Investing to Innovate Fund. The highly publicized competition for this federal grant was intentionally designed to drive educational innovation.

One of the significant distinctions of i3 from the educational reform efforts that preceded it was the way it empowered innovation at a school level. Earlier efforts at educational innovation were often imposed upon public schools by the state, and new educational initiatives were introduced into the classroom in a top-down manner by administrators. Instead, i3 drew upon the educational research that emphasizes a whole school approach to innovation. In order for schools to successfully implement educational innovation, schools needed to focus not just upon the learning of the students but also the entire faculty and administration. In this approach, educational innovation is understood as a socially driven process in which the faculty and administrators together develop creative solutions to address the school’s most pressing educational issues.

According to the educational research, educational innovations are not new programs, projects or initiatives but rather are new practices and knowledge within an organization. Furthermore, educational innovation does not come about through the efforts of one individual; it is a collective endeavor. It revolves around collaboration that occurs between two or more people sharing what they know. Instead of taking place only in the administration’s office, it consists of teachers asking one another for advice in the hallways and giving counsel during meetings. It involves lots of talking and at times a bit of social pressure. Eventually, people begin to integrate the ideas and information they have learned from their colleagues and start doing things differently. Their behaviors, actions and ultimately classroom and administrative practices gradually change into something new.

Longitudinal data collected by Carrie Leana, a scholar of organizational science and learning, reveal that teachers interacting with their co-workers and principals in this manner is the most important element when implementing school innovations, moreso even than a focus on the development of targeted skills. While no one is discounting the role of credentialed and capable teachers, principals and consultants, both Leana and Michael Fullan remind us that collaborative learning is often more important for educational innovation and the improvement of educational quality. This point is particularly important for Jewish day schools, since many struggle to recruit and retain high-quality teachers and administrators. Strategies aimed at addressing these school personnel challenges often divert energy and resources away from harnessing the existing capacity of Jewish day schools to effectively innovate and thus enhance the overall quality of Jewish education. Instead, this research reminds us that we might do better shifting more of our attention to the ways in which we can reorganize our schools and transform them into places where socially driven processes can thrive.

Using the research on educational innovation from public schools, along with my own experiences having supported innovations across several day schools while directing professional development and educational technology for the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland, I will identify four practices that support socially driven innovation. I chose these four because I believe they are the most accessible for Jewish day schools and leaders irrespective of the size of the school and overall resources.

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)

In a school that has successfully created a culture of socially driven innovation, administrators know that their success lies in providing their faculty opportunities to regularly meet and communicate with one another during the workday. This change requires a transition away from a model of periodic faculty workshops on relevant but varied topics and instead initiating PLCs, weekly meetings where educators come together to share their expertise and collaboratively develop ways in which to enhance student learning outcomes.

For Jewish day schools with a dual curriculum, releasing educators from their responsibilities in order to participate in PLCs is not easy. Schools must shift some of the organizing structures of the school to accommodate this approach, which will involve creatively revisiting assumptions about scheduling and teaching contracts. Some schools might alter their schedules by increasing the length of the school day, establishing fixed blocks of time for specialized teachers like art, instituting enrichment programs that can be supervised by non-teachers like mini elective courses in dance or makerspaces, and establishing block scheduling.

For strategies that are not as disruptive to the schedule, some schools may choose to eliminate the weekly all-staff meeting and instead dedicate that time to PLC learning. Others might contractually obligate their teachers to arrive an hour early or stay an hour later one day a week, which is particularly effective when schools have clear divisions between Judaic and general studies instruction and teachers are not full-time employees. Another option might be to remove teachers from traditional duties like lunch, recess and buses, and assign these tasks to non-classroom teachers.

External Networks

Enabling teachers and administrators to participate in professional networks that extend beyond their school is critical for the spread of ideas. According to Fullan, a well-regarded expert on educational change processes, the prevailing assumption that a successful pilot in one school can be expanded to many others is often not feasible. Pilots are often site-specific, preventing their easy transfer elsewhere. The original school often has a level of motivation not found in other schools, and funding for expanding pilots is rarely available long term.

Instead, Fullan suggests engaging many different schools together in a process of collaborative learning through networks that encourage the transmission of new knowledge and ideas. Research shows that those with whom we have weaker connections often provide us with the necessary new information that catalyzes the innovation process. Networks present successful innovations, and then schools can identify which elements of the innovation are most relevant to their needs.

Fortunately, there are many ways in which Jewish educators can participate in external networks. On a national level, Jewish day school educators can participate in the Reshet Prizmah networks. Day school leaders from several schools within a single community also can be an important network. For example, the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland convenes a network of Jewish day school leaders multiple times a year. Graduate and postgraduate training programs in Jewish education possess vast alumni networks that, when appropriately leveraged, provide a wealth of expertise. Lastly, Jewish day school leaders should not limit their networks to the field of Jewish education. We have much to learn from those in the public schools. There are several state and county educational service organizations that provide opportunities for networking, as do many of the independent school associations that credential Jewish day schools.

Shared Decision-Making and Trust Between Faculty and Administrators

A school with an innovative climate engages both teachers and administrators together in shared decision-making. By regularly seeking advice from one another, the educational leadership recognizes that consensus from all stakeholders is a prerequisite for educational innovation. When administrators involve teachers in such decisions, they are helping to reinforce the belief that teachers are part of a larger collective endeavor.

Within the faculty body, this cultivates sentiments such as responsibility, ownership, accountability, and most importantly, a desire to work towards the successful adoption of innovations. Shared decision-making also generates trust between teachers and administrators, which enhances the quality of the working environment. This in turn strengthens these relationships and enables the successful exchange of knowledge and resources that serve as the foundation for educational innovation.

Supporting shared decision-making within Jewish day schools committed to innovation implies that principals should be involved with PLCs and/or create other opportunities for regular collaboration. Jewish day school administrators are often extremely busy and are required to fulfill many tasks throughout the day. In order to prioritize these educational conversations with their faculty, they should devise strategies to delegate responsibilities accordingly.

Educational Leadership

All the preceding recommendations are not possible without strong educational leadership. Leana and Fullan note that administrators should be active learners with their faculty and lead them in ways that will encourage socially driven innovation. This may be a departure from the kinds of tasks they are accustomed to, as most principals typically address educational issues by managing the school’s curriculum, conducting teacher evaluations, and providing oversight of lesson plans. Instead, administrators may require training in group-facilitation processes. They will most likely also benefit from mentorship, as they look to implement structures within their schools to support socially driven innovation.

While the drive for educational innovation keeps us oriented towards an exciting future, it also challenges us to come up with solutions to problems that we encounter on a regular basis in our professional practices. As tiring as it may be at times, the act of innovating reminds us that no matter how messy education can get, it is a relational business. Through the process of innovation, we can gain strength from the wisdom and rich resources of those engaged in similar work in public and private schools as well as peers in Jewish day schools. Together, we are all part of the same educational story, and innovating together ultimately strengthens our students, schools and broader communities.

Articles for further reading

Michael Fullan, “Amplify Change with Professional Capital”

Carrie Leana, “The Missing Link in School Reform”

Naomi Thiers, “Making Progress Possible: A Conversation with Michael Fullan”

Innovation has become the 614th commandment for Jewish day schools, a central part of their promotional lexicon and a key component in their educational planning. Schools are adopting innovative initiatives and approaches for two reasons. First, and most importantly, innovation enhances the educational experience, allowing schools to better prepare students for their futures while fulfilling organizational mission and vision.

At the same time, it would be disingenuous to deny that a second reason is to improve enrollment results. Current parents want to know that their children are receiving an education that is on par with what other similar schools are offering. Prospective parents are making choices based on the perceived quality of the academic program, and innovative initiatives make a school more appealing. The potential impact on enrollment is even greater in Jewish day schools, because parents don’t want to feel they are compromising the quality of their children’s overall education in favor of the Jewish aspects of the program.

Beyond its impact on academics and enrollment, innovation can have other important influences. Innovation initiatives can be a boon to fundraising efforts by both positioning schools more positively and providing them with additional giving opportunities. Schools adopting innovative approaches are generally more attractive to prospective teachers and allow schools to hire more selectively. At the same time, the implementation of those approaches can be very demanding and stressful for existing faculty.

For all of these reasons, how schools communicate about innovation is as important as the initiatives themselves. A school’s success in forging new paths will, to a large degree, be determined by how they tell their innovation stories.

With that in mind, here are five imperatives for telling your school’s innovation story along with some notable examples from Jewish day schools.

Educate stakeholders

Your innovation story needs to convey foundational information that will build both awareness and support. You want there to be broad consensus that this initiative is a good idea. To do that, you will need to explain why this area of innovation, as opposed to others, was chosen and describe the decision-making process. It may be effective to reference articles by experts in the field or other sources. The idea is to make the reasoning so compelling that people feel this was an obvious choice. The finesse is to do it in a way that avoids technical “edu-speak” and is easy to understand.

Noteworthy

Harkham-GAON Academy is a high school in Los Angeles that is built on a blended learning model as a means of reducing tuition and encouraging more students to continue their Jewish education. The description of their academic model clearly lays out what makes their innovative approach a good idea.

Harkham-GAON’s model is unprecedented, designed with an innovative approach to offering Judaic and general studies in a blended learning model. 

• Students work with a highly personalized program. 
• Students work at their own pace.
• Students access their general studies curriculum through StrongMind, an online college prep program that provides excellent, WASC-accredited curriculum. 
• Our innovative approach allows for affordable tuition.
• Our students are entitled to a “Concurrent Enrollment Agreement” with all community colleges, giving our students dual high school and college credit.​
• We offer a variety of co-curricular/extracurricular classes such as sports, Model UN and music.

At the same time, it’s important to be forthcoming about the cost of implementing innovative programs. Funding may be required for construction, equipment and materials, while staff training costs also have to be taken into consideration. Detailing exactly how the program will be funded, whether that’s through grants from foundations, donations from individuals or operating budgets will build credibility and consensus.

Create Relevance

Clearly you would like as may stakeholders as possible to embrace the initiative. To do that, there are many elements to the story that must be put in place. First, it should be clear that the innovation has an identifiable purpose and that the school is not pursuing innovative programs just to be identified as “innovative.” In hand with that, there must be real substance to the initiatives so there can be no accusation of paying lip service to innovation.

Noteworthy

Westchester Torah Academy is a K-8 school in White Plains, New York, that has adopted a blended learning model. This is how they soundly define the purpose being served by the innovation:

This model enables our students to learn at their own pace and experience instructional approaches customized to their unique learning styles, strengths, weaknesses and academic needs. 

For the school community to see the innovation as its own, you will need to explain how this initiative enhances the educational experience at the school. Provide detail on who will benefit from the program and in what ways. How will students be better prepared for their futures?

The innovation should also be portrayed as meeting the interest of parents, both current and prospective. For example, how do the initiatives represent a response to opinions expressed in a parent survey or in other forums? You need to consider how the innovation enhances the value proposition for parents considering your school. Then communicate the ways in which it speaks to the needs and interests expressed by prospective parents. Your innovation story could be an important way to establish a competitive advantage over other schools.

Find the one-of-a-kind

Beyond describing the innovation, it’s really important to describe how the program has been designed to fit in with what is unique about your school. Simply put, the story should align innovation with brand. You need to talk about how initiatives further the school’s mission or its strategic direction. For example, how is the STEM learning lab at your school different than the one at the school down the street? You need to demonstrate that you didn’t just copy what other schools are doing but rather have developed approaches that could only be implemented in your school.

Noteworthy

The Toronto Heschel School is a PK-8 arts-based, egalitarian school in Toronto that has adopted a number of innovative educational approaches. Their very original video (https://torontoheschel.org/experience) features an eighth grade student and presents her innovation story in a way that is completely brand-based.

Make it shareable

You want as many people as possible talking about and retelling your innovation story. To make that happen, it’s important to create emotional connections. As opposed to focusing on technical aspects, you can describe the impact the innovation is having on people’s lives. Tell the stories within your innovation story. That could be a student talking about how an initiative has created a spark in her learning. Alternatively, it could a teacher describing how he is excited by the way his students are reacting to this innovation and how it is enhancing the classroom experience. Short videos are a great way to tell the innovation story in a personal and compelling way.

Content with a strong emotional quotient is more likely to be shared by parents, teachers, board members and others, which makes it even more authentic—and shareable. Social media is a great platform for experimentation. Create stories and measure the engagement generated: comments, shares, forwards. If you’re not getting the best possible results, you can always tweak the content and try again. You can also try out stories on small groups of people and use their responses as a guide to further iterations.

Noteworthy

Lamplighters Yeshiva is a self-described lab school embracing the Chabad spirit and incorporating the Montessori approach. It serves students from preschool to eighth grade in Brooklyn.

This Facebook post was accompanied by supporting photos and told a simple, revealing, compelling and very shareable story about a student at the school:

This young man came to my office today and said, “Guess what? I am an author!”

He had made parts of the apple book with such care. And then he took it “on the road” to share with his favorite readers.

Inspire

Above all your innovation story should be inspirational. It should passionately speak to a vision of the ideal in education at your school. It should be a rallying call, uniting students, faculty, board members and donors in the pursuit of a higher purpose. It should be a powerful source of both pride and optimism.

Noteworthy

The Idea School is a high school in Bergen County, New Jersey, built on the model of High Tech High in San Diego. It is almost completely focused on project based and experiential learning. The “Why The Idea School” section of their website includes this paragraph which establishes a larger than life raison d’être for the school:

What if we created such a high school for Jewish education? One where learning stemmed from students’ passions? Where each learning experience began by getting students to ask questions, so we knew what they wanted to explore in a discipline, a time period, a book or a Jewish text? And what if students didn’t just memorize information, but took newfound knowledge and skills and used them to make something beautiful or solve a problem in the real world? With such an educational model, students would construct meaning out of their studies, get to know their talents and strengths, and understand how they might live a fulfilling Torah life, while bettering the world.

Some might regard the innovation story as superficial and see it as little more than the sizzle to the steak. It would be wise for schools to heed this wisdom in a 2018 article from Forbes that declared, “At its heart, innovation is a profoundly social phenomenon. More often than not, it is the story that makes the innovation, rather than the other way around.”

At the inauguration of its 60th anniversary, Hillel Day School of Metropolitan Detroit conducted a comprehensive curriculum audit of its Judaic studies program. At Hillel, the audit marked the necessary bridge between the school’s existing curricular challenges and our next chapter of innovation. It fueled the flames of innovation, linking that which exists with the aspirations of what could be.

This audit began as an outgrowth of a conversation among our former head of school, Steve Freedman; the Jewish educational leadership team; and an outside consultant. Hillel’s goals derive from two documents: our mission statement and a visionary portrait of a Hillel graduate, recently revised. These two texts in combination are the inner compass of our school.

As we sat together with the freshly approved portrait of a graduate in our hands, we understood that there was a renewed need for self-assessment. We needed to ask ourselves if we were fully actualizing our goals. Did our eighth graders walk out the doors of Hillel as the young leaders and thinkers that our portrait envisioned? We knew that the only way to answer these questions would be to hold up a mirror to our school and honestly assess our performance. A comprehensive audit was the necessary starting point on our journey to innovation.

My goals as the auditor were seemingly simple: I intended to collect and document all of the written Judaic studies curriculum at Hillel and evaluate the documented curriculum through the lens of our portrait of a graduate and our seven core Jewish values. I wanted to systematically identify our areas of strength, as well as pinpoint areas for improvement. After several months of work and several hundred pages of study, the audit was complete. Hillel’s audit was organized into four chapters (Tanakh, Rabbinics, Chaggim and Tefillah), with each chapter containing subsections, such as data documentation and data analysis. Most importantly, the audit included recommendations and specific goals for each particular area of study.

The findings of the audit were numerous and touched on nearly every aspect of a student’s Judaic studies experience. Below I will focus on our three principal findings.

Tefillah: Programmatic Weaknesses

Upon entering Hillel Day School, a visitor is greeted with the school’s mission. It reads: At Hillel, we inspire a passion for learning, responsibility to self and community, and devotion to Jewish living in a warm, innovative, and engaging environment.

At Hillel, to inspire a passion for learning means offering students a deep and integrated curriculum through which they can explore the world. In a building where bells rarely chime and walls are movable, the physical environment supports the school’s philosophy that no subject stands on an island. Keeping this in mind, I began collecting data about tefillah. Early in the process, I became curious to see how often we engaged our students’ higher-level thinking skills, and I decided to evaluate every Judaic studies benchmark (“I Can” statement) alongside Bloom’s Taxonomy.

This process led to my first two-part epiphany as auditor: The majority of our tefillah benchmarks fell into the lower end of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Moreover, while tefillah filled the most weekly minutes of a student’s Judaic schedule, it had the least integration of any subject matter across Judaic studies and other subjects. Our approach to tefillah felt out of sync with Hillel’s educational vision and, as Jewish educators, we were missing a critical opportunity to engage our students’ souls.

In response to this challenge, Rabbi David Fain, our rav beit sefer and dean of Judaic studies, and I created a new middle school tefillah curriculum in which fifth and sixth graders rotated through eight mini-courses. We collaborated with teachers to create relevant and integrated topics that offer a balanced exploration of keva and kavanah, the fixed words of the prayers and meaning-making in tefillah. In a mini-course titled “Growing in Tefillah,” for example, students toil in our greenhouse exploring the ways plants help us appreciate God in our everyday lives. Students study tefillot like Yotzer Or and Or Chadash while learning about photosynthesis with our science teacher. In another mini-course, the Attitude of Gratitude, students learn about the ways that gratitude can improve our tefillah experiences as well as our lives. Students engage with mindfulness strategies to better understand the theme of gratitude in the prayers Modeh Ani and Modim. In the coming years, we hope to expand this type of integrated and interesting tefillah programming to all grade levels.

Tanakh: Alignment Challenges

The beauty of the Tanakh text is timeless, and walking through the hallways of Hillel it is evident that the Torah is passionately transmitted to our students by means of engaging learning, ranging from plays about the Creation story to impactful Project Based Learning initiatives focusing on the biblical census. As both a teacher and a former student of Hillel’s Tanakh Program, I sifted through the data fully anticipating near-perfect scope and sequence. And yet, when examining our Tanakh program alongside our portrait of a graduate, I observed that our Tanach benchmarks did not adequately support our aspiration that graduates “[a]ttain a level of Hebrew fluency and Jewish literacy to participate actively in Jewish life.”

At school, I began pulling students from each of our homogenous Tanakh sections, asking them to read aloud and navigate me through a pasuk. After numerous conversations, I understood that our Tanakh program was suffering from a lack of vertical alignment. The confidence I felt at the onset of the Tanakh audit eventually turned into uncertainty.

After many long conversations within Judaic studies, our great moment of innovation came when we partnered with our general studies leaders, Melissa Michaelson, principal, and Barbara Applebaum, assistant principal. Both shared the cognitive and social-emotional successes they attained with Lucy Calkins’ Readers’ Workshop. Taking a deep breath, we decided that in order to overcome our Tanakh challenges and realign our curriculum both internally and with our portrait of a graduate, Hillel would create and pilot a new Tanakh curriculum called the Tanakh Sadna (workshop) in the 2019-2020 academic year. The Tanakh Sadna is a differentiated Torah curriculum that aims to teach literary-based biblical Hebrew skills even as it promotes a deep love of Torah. Last year, when I visited the classrooms of Hillel’s veteran Readers’ Workshop teachers, my eyes were opened to the fact that our Tanakh methodology was out of alignment with the way students approach the process of reading in other disciplines. When students curl up on our bean bags to read a book for Language Arts, they may use a pen to annotate, but they seldom pause their reading to answer textbook-like questions. This observation helped us realize that our former Tanakh approaches were actually creating roadblocks for students’ reading fluency and comprehension. Thinking back to Hillel’s mission, the audit helped us realize that if we want students to become passionate Jews, we need to equip them with the tools to be excited Jewish learners.

Core Jewish Values: Oversight

Toward the end of my work on the audit, I decided to look for large-scale trends across the four Judaic chapters. Were there any topics that we consistently overlooked as a community? I discovered that scant time and attention were paid to understanding the religious and philosophical underpinnings of one of our core Jewish values: tikkun olam. Despite the many chesed drives throughout the year (coat drives, food drives and acts of service), tikkun olam was barely present in our classroom and tefillah curriculum. It seemed so counterintuitive because at Hillel, community is everything, and we aim to teach students about our responsibility for others. After further exploration, I understood the root of the problem: Many of our tikkun olam initiatives were based outside a student’s in-school daily experience and outside our written Judaics curriculum. While values should be represented and modeled in the school’s larger community, as Jewish educators, our values must be an explicit and learned outgrowth from our units of study.

Once again, in collaboration with Rabbi David Fain and our Jewish educational leadership team, we decided to rekindle our community’s dedication to tikkun olam through the lens of our chaggim program. As the heart of Jewish life, chaggim represent the natural home for tikkun olam, with each holiday containing mitzvot that focus on caring for the other. Our goal is to help students see that to be Jewish is to be present and ready for those in need.

As a final outgrowth of the audit, Hillel’s Jewish educational leadership team created a Judaic studies strategic plan. This document has helped us prioritize our audit takeaways, clarify our goals and hold ourselves accountable as we continue executing these newly developed curricular ideas. In short, at Hillel we believe an audit is a necessary tool for any school hoping to make philosophically aligned, long-term innovative changes.

Reading and editing progress reports were the most painful parts of my first year as principal of the Columbus Jewish Day School. At best, the progress reports relayed a snapshot of a student’s growth over the last grading period. With some oddly specific standards thrown in, perhaps parents were able to understand what skills their child was mastering and where their child needed more support. At worst, the progress reports contained generalized statements of “___ is such a pleasure to have in class,” with almost no specific content information and little insight for parents as to where their child stood with regard to grade level norms. Given the rich, integrated and robust academic program offered at our school, our progress reports were not doing justice to the many ways that a student was learning and growing.

The critical missing components in our progress reporting system were as follows:

a) The progress reports lacked specific content information and could not illustrate specific strengths or weaknesses of students.

b) The progress reports did not give parents a clear picture of their child’s standing with regard to academic standards.

c) The progress reports were disconnected from parent-teacher conferences in both timing and content.

The first solvable issue was timing: The following school year, progress reports were released the week before conferences took place, so that teachers and parents could speak directly about the reports, clarify what they were seeing and making plans for moving forward.

Still, the reporting itself was missing key components. A colleague and I began to research models being used at other schools, and we loved the idea of portfolios. I found myself reluctant to transition to this model because I knew I would be asking a lot more of my faculty, and from a human resource frame, I did not want this to cause ill will. I soon realized, however, that the faculty also felt frustrated with our progress reports. In addition, most teachers were already in the habit of collecting artifacts of student learning throughout the year and of using these to illustrate their comments during conferences.

I began to research online platforms for portfolios. If we were going to embrace portfolios, they had to be digital. Simultaneously, I began to create guidelines that could help manage the workload of the teachers as they created the portfolios: only 1-3 artifacts per subject area, focusing comments on the specific work of the child, and no more than 3-4 sentences. The change started to feel doable, and so at our spring in-service, I let teachers know that this was coming in the fall.

My first, and biggest, mistake was in choosing the digital platform for the portfolios. I screened several different LMS (Learning Management System) platforms to find one that both supported a portfolio format and was within our price range. In addition, we were looking for a system that would be relatively user-friendly, as not all of our faculty were tech-savvy. The system that we chose seemed to meet all of those criteria.

One faculty member acted as our beta tester. We developed the format for the portfolios and worked out user-friendly instructions for the faculty. Unfortunately, despite our careful planning, the portfolio segment of the LMS system we had chosen was underdeveloped, clunky and prohibitively time-consuming. Each artifact took about 10 clicks to get to the right spot, and then the uploading of a photo or video took an incredibly long time. From a parent perspective, the portfolio setup was not intuitive and required that the parent click around to each subject area bucket. While some parents clicked through everything, many did not.

By the end of the second round, I could see that my human resources worries had come to fruition. This process was taking up so much time and energy that the faculty could barely function in the weeks before the portfolios were released.

That said, the portfolios were amazing. Several parents expressed their pleasure and excitement at this incredible new window into their child’s work. We could literally see, hear and watch student progress through actual artifacts, sound bites and videos of their work. This was definitely the right move for us, just not the right platform. So I formed a faculty task force.

I began the task force meeting by putting on the table that all ideas were welcome, except doing away with portfolios altogether. In no time at all, we had our solution. One of the task force members suggested that we create a slide-show presentation where there would be one slide per subject area. A small screenshot of the artifact would be embedded and linked to the page, with comments adjacent to the artifacts. The single screen created the space limit I had been hoping for, which automatically limited the amount a teacher could write. The link format meant that teachers did not have to upload every video, photo and soundbite for each individual child.

Problems a and c were solved; we created an avenue for specific content information that illustrated student growth through their work, and we connected the feedback of conferences and reporting by changing the timing of conferences. In every conference, teachers had their laptops open to the child’s portfolio, and parents and teachers could discuss student growth together with the same text in front of them.

However, we still had the problem that parents did not have a clear picture of their child’s standing with regard to academic standards. While the portfolios demonstrated students’ own growth trajectory, parents also needed to know and understand where their child’s growth measured against grade-level standards. Imposing an A-F grading system seemed counter to what we were trying to create, so again, we looked at the models in other schools.

We created a template for a “grade card.” The name was intentionally not a “report” card as we did not want parents to confuse this grade card with the overall mechanism we were using to report progress. We landed on a 1-3 reporting system. 1 means below grade level standards. 2 meets grade level standards. 3 exceeds grade level standards. And included on the grade card was the following line: “*Expectations are measured in accordance with Ohio State Standards,” with a link to the Department of Education website outlining the standards. In addition, there was a link to the portfolio in the upper third of the grade card with the line, “This student’s work and comments are available in their e-Portfolio at the following link.” This way, if a forwarding school or a parent skipped to the grade card, they would understand that this is only part of the picture.

In the third marking period, we were able to roll out the new portfolio format in Google slides, and we had our grade card to clearly communicate both growth and academic level. The teachers were much happier because they could communicate clearly about student progress without an intense amount of work. The parents were thrilled because they still loved the portfolios, and the new format made it really easy to scroll through their child’s entire body of work. And in the office, we were excited because this new format was already in our Google suite and didn’t require any extra filing to keep both the grade cards and portfolios on record.

Reporting student progress is one of the hardest parts of our work as educators. For a school committed to partnership with parents and keeping student growth at the center of its work, effective reporting is critical. The most transformative aspect of the portfolio process is that it allows parents and teachers to look together at a piece of student work. Often teachers tell a parent about something their child has done; the portfolios allowed the teacher to show the parent. The conversations that emerge from analyzing student work in real time, illustrating the teacher’s feedback and allowing parents to clarify and understand, are incredibly powerful. Through this process, we have been able to strengthen the connection between teachers and parents and provide better resources, better results and therefore a better education for our students.

How often do we hear that an artist, whether a painter, sculptor, musician or writer, is gifted? Indeed they are, and certainly we all have predispositions and abilities, yet inherent in that assessment is: They are gifted therefore they can create masterfully; someone else is not. The haves, so to speak, and the have-nots. Do we leave it at that, and not strive to nurture what could be possible beyond the obvious?

As I drive my three-year-old granddaughter to SAR Academy each morning, we pass a doghouse, yellow on the bottom, blue on top, with an arched opening. It’s just the right size for a little dog, one she imagines is soft and can curl up in her lap.

Approaching the home with the doghouse, my car fills with anticipation. Maybe one time we will even spot the dog who lives there. Then one morning, the doghouse is gone. Oh no. What should I say to my granddaughter? Before I could figure that out, she emphatically announced, “There’s the doghouse.”

“What? You saw the doghouse?” I ask.

“Yes. It’s yellow on the bottom and blue on top,” she answers.

The same reaction the next day, and the one after that. That doghouse means so much to her that she still sees it. Magical thinking? Her imagination rearranged memory so the past is also present and perhaps even future, all at once, converting linear time into what eternity might look like, a resurrection of sorts. What a wonderful world.

Children are dreamers, and great educators are the keepers of those dreams. Pedagogues are also cheerleaders, guiding lights and visionaries, reminding students what is possible to express on their evolving canvas.

SAR Academy’s arts departments practice nurturing excellent student work and embed gifted education pedagogy into our study. Our adherence to a broadened conception of giftedness and human potential debunks the myth of art-making as an elite conception, that real art is produced only by a gifted few and appreciated by an audience only slightly larger.

When we paint a painting, create a musical composition or write verse, we have adopted what European art educators instill. Central in their approach is making greatness in the arts visible through explicating qualities of excellence in each particular discipline, rather than thinking this reconnaissance stifles creativity. This conversation is foundational in building a framework to utilize tenets of gifted education pedagogy.

We pointedly ask, “What makes this portrait, this landscape, this symphony, this fable, these lyrics, excellent?” Suddenly, it is no longer just a stunning painting, or just a beautiful song or poem, though most of us would agree that van Gogh’s iconic “Starry Night” or Franz Marc’s “Dog Lying in the Snow,” Claude Debussy’s “La Que Plus Lente” and John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” are indeed masterworks. Mysterious as they all may appear in their mastery and often magical in their ability to move observers/listeners emotionally, intellectually or spiritually, or all three at once, with clinical assessment they are also decipherable compositions comprised of tangible elements and quantifiable skills. Gifted is now qualifiable.

The arts indeed can raise a person’s sensitivity to seeing, to hearing, to understanding, yet we don’t leave our experience of the arts to only art appreciation. Rather, we converse about greatness and try to understand it. Ron Berger, founder of Expeditionary Learning, writes, “When young athletes work hard at their sport, they watch older students, Olympians, and professionals and imprint that vision in their hearts and minds. Unfortunately, when young students are engaged in academic work in school—creating a scientific report, persuasive essay, geometric proof, or architectural design—they typically have no idea of what would constitute excellence, no provocation, and no vision. We give students written assessment rubrics, but absent models of excellence, those rubrics are just a bunch of words. Picture the difference between reading a rubric of proficient play in soccer, and watching a World Cup soccer game. But models alone are not enough. We need to analyze models together and discuss and debate the criteria for excellence.” George Couros, author of The Innovator’s Mindset, says, “If you want to be great at something, learn from someone great.”

In faculty discussions about qualities of excellence in music, art and literature, we make transparent to ourselves what greatness looks like. In the process, we become further equipped in leading those conversations with our students, in music and art and library class in the early elementary grades and in our Voice & Choice program in the upper elementary and early middle school grades.

Generated from those discussions, our arts team built an anchor document for our protocol, “Qualities of Excellence,” that continuously evolves, listing qualities of excellence in art, music and literature. All this conversation about greatness, about what is excellence is significant in raising the bar for students in how they consider the arts and is employed to help deliver gifted education pedagogy, the overarching framework for our work in the arts. Our discussions about what is excellent include consideration of components of gifted education as spelled out by the National Association For Gifted Children and in the research of Joseph Renzulli at the University of Connecticut. We utilize gifted education elements in our work through disseminating advanced content, integrating historical perspective, having concern for advanced methodology, escalating student performance, familiarizing advanced vocabulary and providing organic experiences to use that vocabulary, encouraging application of skill, pursuing high-quality product development and creating opportunities for students to present to an authentic audience.

Children begin to hone the capacity for considering what comprises a masterwork and what applicability there might be to their own endeavors. When children were asked, “Why look at masterworks?” they responded:

• to discover what makes an artist’s or musician’s work great
• to be inspired and then do your own unique work
• to use as a model
• to copy some parts to learn
• to observe technique

And when shown van Gogh drawings, our fourth grade students made these observations:

• Space is used to give perspective.
• A variety of lines are used and a lot of lines.
• There is so much detail from just lines.
• Van Gogh creates mystery and surprise by having houses without windows or a door.
• Even without color there is use of value by having lighter drawing and darker drawing.
• The artist shows light by leaving space between lines.
• There aren’t specific leaves drawn but there’s the look of leaves from lines loosely representing them.
• He uses representational drawing instead of drawing completely realistically.

We do the same with musical composition and literature, and in addition to considering masterworks, we guide students by structuring their study with a mastery objective, learning targets, criteria for success and rubrics. As their work in the arts progress, we introduce descriptive peer feedback and critique, drafts and redrafts, all toward nurturing exceptional student work.

Steve Seidel of Harvard Graduate School of Education and Project Zero writes, “Quality is best viewed not as an end-state, but as a discussion. A stellar symphony orchestra or sports team can only keep quality high by constantly analyzing and critiquing—discussing quality during rehearsals and practices and after performances. If the analysis and discussion stops, quality will deteriorate.” We discuss, we analyze, and students work rigorously, with engagement and joy. Through these efforts, excellence becomes achievable.

Having said all this, I would be remiss to conclude that Qualities of Excellence refer only to academic or aesthetic components of arts education for students. It refers also to us, qualities of excellence as human beings, as educators. Our delivery and approach, our structure, how we communicate and encourage and engage students and conduct ourselves is itself a work in progress, as we too, are works in progress.

Our sages knew something of this, I suspect, when those versed in Mussar tradition suggested we live, “as-if.” As-if we already are all we can be, all we hope to be, all of the transcendence that is possible.

We are right here right now, but if we visualize greatness well, as we are instructed to do, we can bring the future into the present. Everything that limits us we have to put aside. The trick, they say, is to begin by seeing ourselves as having already arrived, in a place where we, our work, our characters are excellent. Time travel for transformation.

So much is in seeing, and when we perceive possibility, “as-if” is angled inward like a mezuzah’s blessing on an arched doorway opening to where, as Louis Armstrong sings, “I see skies of blue and clouds of white, the bright blessed (yellow) day, the dark sacred night.”

Greatness. Now we see it... Abracadabra: Now children see it. Giftedness, made transparent, discussed and deconstructed into its decipherable skills and abilities, enables magic to happen. “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

Qualities of Excellence

Literature

• Uses questions
• Uses dialogue
• Puts readers in the minds of characters
• Celebrates language
• Takes readers on a journey that touches the heart
• Is well-crafted, using accurate interesting words, spinning sound, alliteration, rhythm, simile, metaphor, no superfluous words
• Presents powerful images and new perspectives
• Is well-organized and shows clarity of thought
• Tells a story with a distinct style and voice
• Builds concrete and vivid images, and makes things happen in the mind of the reader
• Evokes a response and connection to the work; is impactful
• Has staying power, making the reader feel compelled to return to the work again and again
• Can convey values

Art

• May include symmetry and show perspective
• Uses materials well and/or in unique ways; masters the medium
• Strokes are well-planned
• Evokes emotion and invites the viewer in unexpected ways
• Tells a story, often pointing to something not to be missed; revelatory
• Offers a satisfying composition, cohesion and rigorous beauty
• Provides intellectual content; uses metaphor
• The color palette is pleasing and evocative
• The viewer’s eye moves through the piece
• Evokes a response and connection to the work; is impactful
• Leaves a memory and has staying power. The viewer feels compelled to return to the work again and again

Music

• Gives the audience a sense of familiarity (form has some predictability) combined with an element of surprise
• Harmony, melody and rhythm work cohesively
• Evokes a response; triggers a memory
• Audience can hear musicians listening and responding to each other
• Has texture/timbre
• Is technically well-executed; there is consistency of tempo, melodic, rhythmic
• Communicates musical ideas
• Appeals intellectually, emotionally and spiritually
• There is an inherent sequence and development of ideas
• Has appeal after repeated listening
• Listener feels stimulated and enriched after having heard a piece
• There is a satisfying conclusion
• The works is impactful, evoking a response and connection to the work
• Has staying power. Listeners feel compelled to return to the work again and again

One of the primary functions of a Jewish day school is to help create healthy, functioning members of both society-at-large and the Jewish community. With this goal in mind, we at the Mandel Jewish Day School in Beachwood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, have adopted an approach to education called Integrated Project-Based learning (IPBL). We have been amazed at how this approach to education has impacted our students at all grade levels, involving them more directly in the educational process, thereby creating excitement, nurturing a thirst for learning and aiding in leadership development.

IPBL is a dynamic academic approach in which students gain domain knowledge and skills by working collaboratively for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex essential question. Essential questions are rich and open-ended ones that can be viewed in-depth and at many different levels, and they can be revisited over time. Examples are: What is freedom? What responsibility do humans have toward the environment?

Why Add Integration to PBL?

Traditionally, a teacher will decide to use PBL in his or her classroom to deepen the students’ understanding of a topic, with an eye toward authentic learning. While this approach is still effective for particular classrooms, often it hinders students’ ability to make critical connections that can enable them to deepen their understanding. Integration allows students to understand the world around them as a place of connectivity. Students learn that the world is not compartmentalized, and neither is their learning. Whatever their future profession, it is likely to require proficiency in multiple areas that are interconnected. Students are asked to respond to complex problems using research and critical thinking, and to do so through the lens of different subject areas and skill sets.

Adding Integration to PBL allows concepts and events to be observed and examined through multiple lenses and subjects. Integration elevates the students’ connection with the subject matter. IPBL has students identify, investigate and respond to an essential question using knowledge gained through different subject areas and by making cross-curricular connections.

This approach to PBL includes learning fundamental life skills related to communication, creativity, public speaking, teamwork and leadership. Integration involves learning not just multiple subject areas but also multiple life skills. An additional life skill is emphasized in each grade level.

IPBL helps students become more resilient in the face of adversity. As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Making mistakes, trying a new path, and reflecting on where one is in the creative process are all critical parts of the IPBL process.

Design Process

Our approach to IPBL, which continues to evolve, has been based upon design thinking, which is a creative process founded on the “building up” of ideas. It uses techniques like observing, interviewing, empathy mapping, storyboarding, relative thinking and creating low-tech prototypes. We have added a focus on community, so that each project connects students to the broader community and incorporates tikkun olam, one of our core values.

Our IPBL process involves substantial teacher planning, including:

Brainstorming project ideas with students to find a project that interests them. In our lower school, the focus is on projects for which students have passion. In the middle school, the focus is on projects reflecting empathy.

Meeting with faculty colleagues to determine commonalities across subject areas. Faculty review common core standards and preexisting subject units. We usually begin with science, math and social studies, and then weave in language arts, Hebrew, art, music and technology.

Developing the essential question that the project must answer. Buy-in is cultivated through a kickoff event or an interesting activity.

Identifying potential community partners and community experts who can be invited to participate.

Making effective student teams based on student interests, academic abilities and social-emotional characteristics.

Developing ideas for exhibiting the final project. Issues considered in collaboration with the students are: what space will be used, how the space will be transformed and project budget.

Creating a timeline complete with meetings, project milestones and the schedule for what is being taught and by whom.

The IPBL design process used is as follows:

Project Kickoff. The kickoff is all about creating excitement and intrigue from the students’ perspectives. The kickoff might include field trips, simulations, video trailers and possibly guest appearances. Brainstorming takes place with the students to discover what they know about the topic and to determine the ways in which the project may contribute to the school, Jewish community and/or local community.

Learn. Assignments are tailored to elicit responses to the essential question. Assignments are differentiated to meet the needs of all learners, and students are provided research tools. Mini-workshops are held to enable students to successfully develop prototypes.

Project Development. As the project unfolds, it is essential that students have a voice and that they have choices to make. Opportunities are provided for students to problem solve and for them to decide how best to improve prototypes and written documents.

Feedback. Constructive feedback is provided both by teachers and peers, and time is allowed for students to make revisions and to assemble different project components.

Public Presentation. Students and teachers brainstorm the logistics of the presentation (time, place, schedule and layout). We believe that the presentation is as important as the project, as it provides important experience in public speaking and presenting. We require it to be professional, so it requires multiple rehearsals. All stakeholders are invited to attend, including other students, parents, community members and field experts.

Community Connection. Whenever possible, we try to connect the project to the larger community. Sometimes project products or money are donated to community organizations. This helps the students to develop empathy for others.

Reflection and Assessment. At the end of the project, students are debriefed and led in reflecting on everything they have learned. Both students and faculty complete an individual evaluation, which is shared with the class. Faculty also administer an academic assessment to measure the development of skills.

Sample Project: Model City

The third grade undertook a project with the essential question, “How can we change Cleveland to reflect the use of its natural resources?”

For the kickoff, the students watched a drone video of downtown Cleveland, and listened to the song “Cleveland Rocks.” Later, students heard from an engineer and a Cleveland artist, and they participated in a field trip to Cleveland. Guided investigation included reading articles about Cleveland and related topics, and reviewing building blueprints.

Multiple subjects were incorporated:

Writing—essays on creating your own city, and summarizing and sequencing an assigned novel.

Math—learning metric measurements, measuring circumference, learning about 2D and 3D shapes, and creating prisms, cubes, pyramids and cylinders.

Social Studies—integrating map skills, comparing and contrasting Cleveland to other cities with bodies of water, and learning about how other cities use their waterfronts.

Hebrew—introducing Hebrew vocabulary for shapes and writing Hebrew narratives about what students like about Cleveland.

Art—creating prototypes of proposed changes to Cleveland.

Technology—creating a storyboard, designing a brochure about proposed changes to the Cleveland waterfront and using Google Draw to devise prototypes.

Students created a 3D scale model of Cleveland, including mini-models of buildings and elevation sketches. After building the model, the third graders noticed that Cleveland does not utilize its waterfront very much. They compared Cleveland to other waterfront cities, and developed plans to make better use of the waterfront. Street signs were made, as well as plaques for major landmarks. The final public presentation showed the different landmarks, provided an explanation of the model buildings and highlighted the differences between Cleveland and other cities.

Community involvement was secured through:

Displaying the proposed city model at the local library.

Donating funds to a local organization that is helping to develop the Cleveland waterfront.

Adding more layers to the project; this year, for example, they plan to meet with the Cleveland mayor to pitch their ideas for a new waterfront.

After six months of work on the project, students were assessed on their final product and presentation skills. At the end, teachers and students reflected on the process and the final product through written reflection and discussion.

Considerations in Implementing IPBL

Successfully implementing IPBL is a journey that takes years and is ever evolving. We’ve made a number of mistakes over the years, and we continue to make changes every year. Some of the keys to success are:

Having strong backing from the board, head of school, and the senior leadership team.

Recognizing that a change in culture is required, involving much more collaboration among the faculty and with the students.

Taking the time to develop buy-in from the faculty.

Actively involving students throughout the process at every grade level. Seek the input even of preschool students.

Educating parents about IPBL, so that they can be supportive and helpful to their children.

IPBL can be an effective program that helps prepare students for success in life and the 21st century work environment. Students become very engaged in their education, and they develop skills that will serve to provide a solid foundation for further growth and development.

Like most English teachers, I entered the profession in the hope I could inspire others to love words on paper as much as I do. Once I entered the classroom, however, I discovered that there were other significantly more achievable goals. You could get students to care about learning how to write—they knew this skill was valuable. You could teach students how to analyze texts and parse language. You could even make them appreciate the beauty of certain Shakespearean plays. But you could not make them love books. Books did not sell themselves, and no matter how hard one pitched them, Sparks Notes and Snapchat were there to enable students to avoid actually cracking the spine of a text.

Most students felt about English the way I felt about Judaic studies when I was in high school. Give me a book, and I’d crawl into bed and read all night. Give me a Jewish book, and I’d stare at it like it was some sort of strange creature that was theoretically interesting but not realistically approachable. The lines upon lines of Hebrew alphabet arranged in maze-like blocks of texts seemed impenetrable.

It was only once I went to Israel for a gap year that I began to love Tanakh as much as Tolstoy. The two truly began to click after many Jewish literature courses in college. Upon graduating, I wondered why someone could attend 12 years of yeshiva day school without interacting with the authors, artists and scholars who make up the modern Jewish literary canon. These college courses asked questions about being Jewish that were energizing and enthralling. Only now it seemed so obvious to consider struggles with faith against the backdrop of Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep. As a descendent of Holocaust survivors, I find Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl to be the perfect text to help one consider their identity and relationship to Jewish trauma. Surely, these were lost opportunities.

Part of the impetus for wanting to teach in a Jewish school was having an opportunity to test the theory that integrating Jewish and general studies in an English classroom could create a space in which the analysis of texts provided a springboard for discussions about Jewish identity. It was only after a few years of teaching and encountering how difficult it had become to get students to read a book in a regular English class that I went back to the idea of a yearlong Jewish literature course, with the goal both of inspiring students to read and connecting them to their Judaism. I was hoping that if the texts we read connected to some of the challenges they faced in their everyday Jewish life, they would be more motivated to read them.

As opposed to the college lecture hall, high school classrooms offer students the opportunity to analyze literature in relation to themselves, as a means of reshaping their Jewish identities. Our class was built around Rabbi Aryeh Ben David’s Ayekah model of soulful education, in which students receive questions that force them to interrogate themselves simultaneous with the texts being studied. Each unit comes with a writing exercise that pushes students to reflect on how they will personally answer the questions relating to Judaism that arise in the texts. There are 10 larger essential questions about Judaism that surround the course (see sidebar), and the goal is for each student to be able to use the reading and writing exercises throughout the year to be able to answer each of these questions for themselves by the end of the course.

Having taught Jewish Literature and Identity over the past three years, the curriculum has surpassed my expectations. The goal was to engage in an in-depth study of Jewish literature and art, while considering how it might shape or influence one’s own sense of American Jewish identity and affiliation, but I had no idea how much students would actually identify with the literature. One of my students became obsessed with Yiddish literature; others told me it was their “favorite class in all of high school.” In the survey at the end of the year, one student wrote, “It was such a meaningful way to explore Judaism and understand how culture and religion ties into writing and affects it.” Another said, “I think a big reason why I enjoyed this class so much was because it connected to me and allowed me to reflect on my own Judaism.”

There are many unique and innovative elements of the course that became part of its recipe for success.

Keep texts short. The class has very few large overwhelming pieces. Rather, it weaves together short stories, articles and poetry to help synthesize students’ ideas about a Jewish theme and teach them how to build connections between a variety of disparate texts that could have been written centuries apart.

Shape the course around identity building. Students have opportunities to write about their struggles with their “personal Judaism,” explore times when their Jewish identities conflicted with that of their parents, and understand the ways in which the Jewish institutions they are part of fulfill their aspirations and/or disappoint them. These reflections do not just stay on paper but form the basis for our classroom discussions.

Inspire students to become Jewish authors. We don’t only study the literature, but the students use many of the texts as mentor texts. We try and imitate some of the classic Jewish authors to help put ourselves in their shoes and teach the students to become Jewish writers themselves. For example, after reading samples from the early 20th century Yiddish advice column A Bintl Brief, the students write their own contemporary versions of these questions, considering the socio-religious dimensions of our Los Angeles Jewish community. They then develop answers to these questions and discuss the larger issues facing our community. These types of exercises push students to think practically about how they can change their day-to-day behavior to enrich Jewish life and become the Jews and citizens of the world they would like to be.

When we also read excerpts from different Jewish memoirs, students wrote three pages of their own memoir, focusing on an important religious moment in their lives. The project is called a “Religious Retrospective,” after which the students also complete a different assignment called “Your Jewish Future.” These exercises help them reflect on the foundations of their Jewish identity, but also encourage them to think about how they want to build their Jewish future.

Get out of the classroom. Look around your city to find a Jewish performance, author or even restaurant to which you could take students. One year we went to hear Michael Chabon speak; another we saw a performance of The Chosen. These experiences show kids that what we study is vibrant, current and being created and recreated all the time.

Bring the community into the classroom. Most cities and Jewish communities have locals who are in fact experts on a subject or theme within Jewish literature. Bringing in a Klezmer group, a Jewish film buff or any expert from your community also illustrates that a larger world of adults that care deeply about what we are studying exists. Having the students subscribe to Tablet Magazine also enhanced our class conversation and achieved this goal, giving students insight into a larger world of Jewish culture that they can be part of.

Keep it current. Constantly reshape the class around the current news cycle or conversations you hear students having in the hallways. For example, when gender became a hot topic this year, I created a project around tracing gender in Jewish literature. We looked at different gender models in the texts we studied and asked what Jewish literature has to say about the topic. We then tried answering the next question of how Judaism perceives gender roles today and thought as a class about whether these roles are helpful or harmful.

Help students find their own Jewish questions and answers. Have a large independent research project that runs throughout the year in which students pick a larger research question they have about Judaism and then find the answers that Jewish texts have given to their larger question. They then have to write a thesis-based research paper describing the answer they have found.

Create a cohesive learning experience. One of the most difficult parts of teaching so many different short Jewish texts is that certain pieces can get lost in the shuffle. Build a broad list of essential questions around which all the texts circulate; keep coming back to those questions and recall previous answers given as you read different texts throughout the year. Some important questions that have been useful are:

How can we be both loyal to our Jewish identity and American identity? What happens when the needs of these two identities conflict with one another and we have to decide where our allegiances lie?

Usually when we talk about “assimilation” the word has negative connotations. Is assimilation a bad thing?

As 21st century Jews, how can we deal with the realities of our history of Jewish trauma and oppression (Holocaust, pogroms, exile, anti-Semitism, etc.) without letting the past or present trauma define our Jewish future?

Is there something universal about the Jewish experience, the experience of the “other”? Is the Jewish experience different than other minority experiences?

Through close reading and writing, offer your students the opportunity to bridge our two worlds, the Jewish and the American, with the goal of gaining a better understanding of the life we live as Jews in America today. Maybe you’ll even be lucky, and they will fall in love with reading in the process.

Ten Essential Questions

What does the category of Jewish literature mean? What makes something “Jewish”?

How do individuals build identity? Do we have control over who we become, or does our environment decide who we become for us?

How can we be both loyal to our Jewish identity and American identity? What happens when the needs of these two identities conflict with one another and we have to decide where our allegiances lie?

Usually when we talk about “assimilation,” the word has negative connotations. Is assimilation a bad thing?

As 21st century Jews, how can we deal with the realities of our history of Jewish trauma and oppression (Holocaust, pogroms, exile, anti-Semitism, etc.) without letting the past or present trauma define our Jewish future?

Is there such thing as a Jewish language? What makes a language Jewish? Does Judaism actually need its own language and if we invented one, what would it look like? Would it be/is it a language that could be translated or read by those who do not affiliate as Jewish?

How do secular American Jewish men and women define and relate to their Jewishness? How is it different from the way a religious Jew relates to their Jewishness?

Is it a contradiction to be religious and struggle with your belief in God? To be truly religious do you have to struggle with your belief in God?

Is there something universal about the Jewish experience, the experience of the “other”? Is the Jewish experience different than other minority experiences?

How has the viewpoint of Judaism or Jewish literature changed when comparing Yiddish, American/English and Israeli literature?

Given the limited classroom time available for teaching Tanakh, school administrators and teachers must make a choice about how to divide their time. Should we focus on breadth of knowledge, having students cover a large amount of material? Or perhaps classroom time should be devoted to depth of knowledge, focusing on deepening the understanding of a limited number of chapters and stories?

In recent years, more and more emphasis has been put on ensuring that students have the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of their studies. This is certainly true in Israel, where the national Bible curriculum for religious schools has slowly been phasing out their beki’ut (proficiency, or literacy) requirements, in tandem with an increase in the chapters of Bible that are to be studied be’iyun (with in-depth analysis).

While in-depth study is certainly welcome, it comes at a price. Without broad knowledge of the stories of the Bible, our students will remain functionally illiterate in the foundational texts of Judaism, and, indeed, of Western society.

Biblical Literacy

Are your students conversant with stories like:

Joshua and the collapsing walls of Jericho. Samson bringing the house down on the Philistines. Saul searching for his donkeys… and discovering that he is king. David and Goliath in battle. David playing madman to escape the wrath of Saul. Saul turning to the witch of Endor for a bit of necromancy. King David defending his throne against his rebellious children. Solomon building the first Temple. The division of Israel into a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. Elijah riding a chariot to heaven. Elisha splitting the Jordan River. The exile of the 10 tribes. Destruction of the Temple. The murder of Gedaliah. King Cyrus’ decree inviting the Jews to return to their land and build their Temple. The challenge of intermarriage in the early Second Temple period.

Can they answer the following trivia question:

Four characters in Nevi’im Rishonim commit suicide, each one to a different one of the four capital punishments of the Bible. Can you name these four characters and their means of suicide? (See end of article for answers.)

A Jewish Great Books curriculum would certainly include every one of the books of the Bible, but all too often the idea of making our students knowledgeable about the stories in Navi remains a challenge in an age when reading is no longer fun-damental. If only there were a way to engage them in learning these stories in a framework where they feel comfortable and involved.

Hayyinu KeHolmim: A Digital Game-Based Learning App

This is where Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) comes in. DGBL is an instructional approach that emphasizes engagement with educational content using techniques commonly found in successful commercial digital games. What if studying a perek of Navi was transformed from reading and decoding text to having the option to have it read aloud on a phone app, to answer questions and receive reward points and to connect it with contemporary, modern-day applications? What if my participation was a virtual color-war competition with other day schools in my community or around the country?

These questions began as theoretical ones, but when challenged by Israel’s Ministry of Education to create a program to teach middle school students 170 Bible chapters over the course of seven months, Herzog College responded by developing an app that has been launched in Israel in 142 schools, encompassing 6,000 students.

The smartphone app that was developed, Hayyinu KeHolmim (“We were as Dreamers” play.hatanakh.com), contains a single unit on each chapter, divided into micro-units that include:

• The biblical text of the chapter, with audio
• A summary of the chapter, integrated with relevant pictures or icons
• “Did you know?”: important facts/characters/places in the chapter
• “My story”: meaningful ideas from the text that are applicable to contemporary life
• Idea: an in-depth analysis of one particular section of the chapter
• A quiz measuring how well the student understood the lesson

The idea was to familiarize students with a broad overview of biblical narrative by means of engagement with the text, summary and quizzes, while helping them personalize it and make it meaningful to their lives through stories and ideas.

Each unit takes about 5-10 minutes for a student to complete. Answering questions and completing the unit accrues points for the student and his or her school. These points can lead to prizes for students and placement among schools in a national competition.

Digital Game-Based Learning

Several different elements of DGBL were built into this pilot project in order to make it attractive to school-age students:

Engagement

Games that are fun to play significantly improve learning performance. When students have fun, the learning pressure dissipates, allowing them to freely define and modify their strategies.

Competition

The competitive elements of a game are generally not found in traditional learning methods like a classroom lecture or discussion. Competition provides motivation to students/players to engage and finish an activity. It doesn’t need to be against another participant. It could also be attempting to bag the highest score possible or outdoing one’s self every time.

Small-scale bits of information

The bite-sized learning approach takes into account contemporary lifestyle demands that hinder longer periods of concentrated study. It also utilizes short, focused activities with the explicit aim of increasing learners’ knowledge and skills.

Immediate rewards

Rewards aid in the learning process by keeping the participant invested and coming back for more. This fosters a continuous learning process for the student/player, as each learning objective is tied to a series of challenges. Goals and their corresponding rewards can be built in stages and set according to difficulty.

Immediate feedback and reinforcement

Research on learning and behavior shows that students learn faster when there’s a shorter interval between behavior and reinforcer. It would be less discouraging for students to learn their mistakes right away than seeing a red mark on paper assessments a few days later. Feedback in a game context is instantaneous, and scoring can be standardized to allow comparisons.

Action Research

While developing the Hayyinu keHolmim app, in the course of its launch and at the end of the pilot period, the development team at Herzog College was involved with three related research initiatives:

1. A focus group of students played a role throughout the development of the app, offering real-time feedback and direction.

2. A follow-up survey questionnaire was prepared and sent to both participating students and their teachers.

3. A qualitative research initiative was carried out, involving a series of personal interviews with students who had participated in the program.

The various studies concluded that introducing the app—a combination of a mobile platform with bite-size units, interdisciplinary content and gamification—led to an increase in student performance. 

Among the study’s findings:

More than a third of the students reported opening the app and studying the chapter every day. More than half reported doing so at least two or three times a week.

Almost two-thirds reported that the reason they kept returning to the app was because it was a pleasurable educational experience.

More than half or the students reported that their favorite parts were the various online quizzes.

Worldwide Impact

As a point of interest, the program’s success in Israel has made it into something of a worldwide phenomenon. When school leaders from Latin America were exposed to the Hayyinu keHolmim app during their visits to Israel, they asked for sample units to pilot with their own students. Today, with funding from Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the project has been translated into Spanish and adapted for use in Latin America, where it has been launched in several schools in a number of different countries. (There has been no funding so far for an English translation.)

One of the great challenges for Jewish studies programs in North American day schools is that for reasons of scale, curricular support materials for Jewish text study cannot compare to those that are available for parallel general studies subjects. DGBL apps like Hayyinu keHolmim are tools that have the potential to fill at least a small part of that lacuna.

What if school was a place for students to collaborate to solve real-world problems? What would the school day look like if student work consisted of meeting with stakeholders, learning from experts and creating projects that address the needs of clients who require solutions to real problems?

These are the questions teachers grapple with as they design and implement Learning Adventures, at JCDS, Boston’s Jewish Community Day School, a schoolwide initiative now in its third year that is striving to transform how students, teachers and parents understand both the purpose and structure of the school learning experience.

Spread out over the course of the school year, every grade participates in a Learning Adventure, a one-week interdisciplinary unit developed around a specific challenge selected by that grade’s teaching team. During their Learning Adventure, students take a break from all typically scheduled classes to deeply immerse themselves in an applied learning experience. Teachers plan the week around a framework of either Design Thinking, Project Based Learning, Computer Science or what we call “Jewish Engineering”—using the Engineering Design Process to address important Jewish issues The range of issues covered across the grades is vast. In the pilot year, challenges included reducing the environmental impact of the school; building musical instruments to enrich tefillah; programming computer-aided models to measure playground temperature; and preparing for a class pet. The following year, students developed interactive local history exhibits they shared at the public library, created a documentary exploring connections to God, reevaluated our school’s hot lunch systems and more.

From kindergarten students working with an artist-in-residence to create a playground Buddy Bench to eighth graders recreating Jewish culture destroyed in the Shoah, each Learning Adventure is connected by a pedagogical vision of allowing students to grapple with tangible and relevant hands-on problems and creating a solution for an authentic client. At a developmentally appropriate level, all students go through a process of identifying a problem, collecting data through research or interviews, prototyping possible solutions, improving based on feedback and then sharing their solutions with an audience. Students explore broad framing questions, such as “How can kids make friends at recess?” and “How can we better understand pre-War II life in Poland by reconnecting with the music and culture of those lost Jewish communities?” The students’ clients have included other students, residents of a Jewish senior residence, local public library patrons and civic leaders.

Third grade students, tasked with improving the overall student experience of indoor recess during the long Boston winter, started by speaking to the various stakeholders: students in all grades and teachers on recess duty. They then analyzed their data and developed problem statements that defined their task, such as: 

Some students need a way to play physical games with their friends during recess, because it helps them reboot their minds and bodies. 

Some students need help figuring out what to do during recess, because it can be overwhelming and unstructured. 

Some students need a way to do quiet activities, but indoor recess is very loud. 

Teachers on duty need a way to make sure all the students are safe and having fun. 

The students took seriously their task of matching solutions with the stakeholders’ needs. The same process was evident in the first grade, where the students researched the needs of bearded dragons and then developed plans to demonstrate that they were prepared to become responsible classroom pet caretakers.

By connecting learning to real-world issues, students engage in a variety of tasks and assume multiple roles. Fourth grade students, by designing, building and testing playground models, became computer programmers, engineers, graphic designers, artists and problem solvers. Second graders cut copper pipes, sawed cardboard and used lots of duct tape to make musical instruments to enrich classroom tefillot. Similarly, seventh grade students worked as ritual committee members, water engineers, architects, fundraisers and marketers when they developed plans for a new community mikveh. Each Learning Adventure was designed to allow them to contribute to their community in meaningful ways. The powerful impact of Learning Adventures on both the students and teachers is a result of the relevancy of the problems; students are highly motivated to engage deeply when challenged to solve real-world problems.

The educators’ reflections on these experiences demonstrate the significant impact of this type of program and also suggest areas for future growth. Here are a number of lessons derived from those reflections that are significant both for educators specifically planning these types of integrated units, as well for thinking more broadly about education and schooling.

Many students thrived when given the opportunity to work for a sustained period of time on an engaging, complex and meaningful task. Students are allowed to make many choices when working on Learning Adventures, both on the specific content they are focusing on as well as what medium to use to share their learning with an audience. In an eighth grade local history Learning Adventure, one group of students interviewed the Watertown police officer who apprehended the Boston Marathon bomber and made a documentary movie on that event, while another student learned about the neighborhood’s local Armenian cultural history and then hand-sewed representative clothing. However, some students panicked, finding it stressful to no longer have both the restrictions and scaffolding of rigid, time-bound assignments that they are used to. These students benefit from clarity of purpose and more explicit instruction about the assignment expectations. A rubric often helps get these students started and keeps them on track.

Understanding that classroom resources extend beyond the walls of the school building takes some getting used to, for both teachers and students, but once everyone understands how we can alter the normal rules of school, wonderful opportunities for learning from experts and contributing to the community can be created. When sixth graders were working on reducing the school’s environmental impact, they made telephone calls to waste collection companies to determine both the cost and the requirements. It was quite a special moment for the students on the phone with the school’s recycling company when they discovered that our school could include glass and metal waste collection at no additional cost. Students preparing for a class pet got all their questions answered over FaceTime by connecting with first grade student experts in another state.

Partnering with other community organizations, both Jewish and otherwise, enriched the students’ experience by identifying authentic challenges to address, such as helping home-bound seniors find a way to welcome Shabbat, and also provided a ready-made audience interested in the students’ work. For example, a local history Learning Adventure was planned in partnership with the town historical society and the public library. The students created interactive museum artifacts that were assembled into a pop-up museum in our school where we welcomed many neighbors who had never stepped into our building. This led to an invitation for the students to share their work at the public library’s annual gala.

A lesson we learned about working with other organizations is the importance of finding areas of overlap between the goals of the Learning Adventure and the interests and mission of potential partners. General appeals to the broader community did not receive much interest, but specific projects were of interest to particular organizations. For example, when seventh graders spent the week developing a plan for a new community mikveh, an existing local mikveh, called Mayyiim Hayyim, became very involved, even promoting our work on their blog.

As we enter our third year of Learning Adventures, we continue to reflect on what has worked so far in order to build on our successes and learn from our failures. Although the initial excitement of trying something for the first time has faded, the program benefits from the high expectations that students, teachers and parents now bring to the experience. While the Learning Adventures are scheduled for just one week of the year, the impact of the learning, for both students and teachers, is year-round and lasting.

Excerpts from Innovate Inside the Box: Empowering Learners Through UDL and the Innovator’s Mindset, Chapter 10, “Creators.”

GC: Here is a little confession: I have a gigantic #ManCrush on Ryan Gosling. I think he is amazingly talented and love his range in so many roles; La La Land is in my top 10 movies of all time! He is one of my favorite actors in the world and has been for a long time. And he is Canadian!

That is why I laughed hysterically when I saw a series on the Vine app (I miss you so much, Vine!) called “Ryan Gosling won’t eat his cereal.” In segments no longer than six seconds each, someone would find clips of Ryan Gosling in movies and try to feed him a spoonful of cereal by standing in front of a screen and slowly moving cereal to his mouth—that he would ultimately deny. It was amazing how many different ways Ryan Gosling would deny the cereal (he is so versatile), from making faces of disgust to actually making movements to swat the cereal away from his mouth. Every six-second video would bring me to tears as it was so random yet funny.

The mastermind behind the videos was Ryan McHenry, a Scottish film director. With each short creation, he brought joy to the world and smiles to a ton of people. Ryan Gosling even acknowledged in an April 2015 tweet that one thing people didn’t know about him was that he actually loved cereal, a little nod to the meme created by Ryan McHenry.

In 2013, Ryan McHenry was diagnosed with a form of cancer, osteosarcoma. Through his diagnosis, chemotherapy treatments and remission, he continued to make short videos that connected a community to his story. The cancer eventually returned, and McHenry passed away in May of 2015. I didn’t even know about McHenry’s passing until I saw a strange video of a bowl of cereal on Vine, with Ryan Gosling taking a spoonful of cereal, making a slight nod and eating cereal in front of the audience. Gosling actually created a Vine account just to take a moment to eat cereal and acknowledge McHenry.

Gosling then followed up with a tweet: “My heart goes out to all of Ryan McHenry’s family and friends. Feel very lucky to have been a part of his life in some small way.” Seriously, Ryan Gosling? You have to be gorgeous, talented and sweet?

I share this story of Ryan McHenry and Ryan Gosling often as something that seems so ridiculous and minute, but actually has a very powerful underlying message. Little creations that may seem insignificant can have a big impact on the world. In education, we talk about developing the next person to create Facebook, but the little cereal videos McHenry created bring smiles to so many people in a time when it seems we need more light in the world.

When my daughter was born, I played a song titled “Growing Up” by Ryan Macklemore on repeat. My favorite lines from the song are:

Don’t try to change the world, find something that

you love

And do it every day

Do that for the rest of your life

And eventually, the world will change

What McHenry shared in his short 27 years embodied this lyric to a tee. What we create doesn’t have to be “big” to have an impact. Small gifts continuously shared over time can make an incredible difference in the world.

Why the Word “Create” Is So Crucial to Education in Our World Today

A quote from Thomas Friedman has shaped a lot of my thinking:

The world only cares about—and pays off on—what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it).

In other words, it isn’t what we know that matters; it is what we do with what we know—what we create—that matters. I believe that to be true, and yet I remember reading a Wikipedia article on “Internet Culture” that said only 1 percent of people online create content, and 99 percent consume. I have no idea the validity of that statistic, but let’s think of it in terms of school. How often do high school students in school consume information from Wikipedia versus contribute to a Wikipedia article, in a serious manner? Even in classrooms, we confuse regurgitation of information with creation.

Chris Lehman, the CEO of the Science Leadership Academy Schools in Philadelphia, makes this point brilliantly:

If you assign a project and get back 30 of the exact same thing, that’s not a project—that’s a recipe.

Are our students clamoring to “create” in schools? Maybe in kindergarten. But too often the need to create gets “schooled” out of them before they leave elementary school. I have worked with students in schools where their own mobile devices are not allowed in classrooms, and I ask them, “If you could bring your device, how would you use it in the classroom?” The typical answers I hear over and over again are “to Google stuff” and “as a calculator.”

It’s always disheartening, because I know there is so much students can create with technology! Information searches and calculations don’t even scratch the surface of what they could do with even a device as simple as their smartphone. But when they aren’t encouraged to create or to explore the possibilities for creation, “to Google stuff” and “as a calculator” are the best they can come up with—at school. The story might be completely different at home.

KN: Embracing Student-Centric Creations

In Universal Design for Learning (UDL), we want all students to be creators and makers. I asked my second grade daughter what she wants to learn to make in school. Her answer: “I want to learn how to make robot puppies.” Now, how many classes are providing her with the skills to make those robot puppies?! In all seriousness, our kids have passions and interests, and when we align our goals and standards with personalized assessments, magic happens. Assessments need to move beyond worksheets, essays and presentations to more authentic applications that include student-centric creations.

We are much more likely to persevere when we know our goal and are empowered to choose what we create to reach it. One of the UDL guidelines reminds educators to “optimize choice and autonomy.”

Provide choices. Options and choices are often used interchangeably, but they are not always synonymous. Too often, teachers give students options, but they do not give them choices. Students know what their options are. They know they can write blogs, produce videos, create projects or work alone or with peers, but often they don’t have a choice in what they create. After you have your why, consider taking the time to tell students, “This is what you’ll be learning about in the next week. That is non-negotiable, but you get to decide what you want to create to show me that you met your goal. Let’s list four possible options together, so you can make a choice about how to best meet your goals.” (Innovate inside the box!) In a sixth grade science class taught by the brilliant Caitlyn Morris, students had the following choices to express their understanding of the similarities and differences between solar and lunar eclipses:

Create a poster (use any art medium you wish or graphically design on your Chromebook)

Create a sketchnote (by hand or on Google Draw)

Create a slideshow

Create a Flipgrid video demonstration, and the link will be posted on Google Classroom (this could also be in homage to the Ryan Gosling cereal videos!)

Innovators need to be creators, not just consumers. With that in mind, teachers need to provide numerous opportunities for students to create by providing options and choices for students to collaborate, examine exemplars of creativity, find solutions to problems, use non-traditional formats to consume new information and content, and have the flexibility to put the ideas together to create and express new and better ideas.

We Jews are a people committed to listening, as evidenced by our public declaration at Mount Sinai of Na’aseh Venishma, We will do and we will listen, our shared commitment to God. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks further illuminates: “[The word shema] is fundamentally untranslatable into English since it means so many things: to hear, to listen, to pay attention, to understand, to internalise, to respond, to obey… Judaism is a religion of listening. This is one of its most original contributions to civilisation.”

In our efforts to realize the benefits of listening in innovative ways, the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC) seized an opportunity to hear from many diverse voices in the Jewish day school field by partnering with Prizmah to host “Listening Booths” at its biannual conference this past March. We wondered what JDS stakeholders would say are their dreams, visions and wishes for Jewish education, and we wondered how those responses might help day schools achieve the optimal results of students internalizing Jewish values that can help them develop enduring Jewish identities and connections to Jewish belief and practice. We invited conference attendees to participate in 20-minute taped interviews in which they shared their opinions and ideas confidentially. Confident in the impact these interviews could have on the field, we engaged a group of trained interviewers and an evaluation team. This provided consistency in the Listening Booth interview process and in the coding and analysis to ensure valid and reliable results.

Fifty-two participants shared their insights, and we listened intently. Some of the results validated what many in the field already believe to be true. Other findings were somewhat surprising, and some of the ideas shared were truly out-of-the-box. Below is a snapshot of data from the interviews, followed by highlights from the data gathered.

The Listening Booths participants represented diverse voices with some compelling similarities.

Of the 52 conference attendees who participated:

About two-thirds of the interviewees were staff members (including educators) in Jewish day schools.

Approximately one-third represented Jewish educational nonprofits, higher-education institutions and content providers, enabling us to engage stakeholders—including influencers and funders—aside from JDS professionals.

Of those affiliated with a JDS, two-thirds were from community or Solomon Schechter day schools, including one inclusion school, and one-third were from Orthodox or Modern Orthodox schools. This ratio closely mirrors attendance at the Prizmah conference.

About 40 percent held head of school or director-level roles, 34 percent were school principals or played key roles (e.g., admissions directors), and 26 percent were department chairs, teachers, consultants and board members. The diversity in roles allowed us to listen to a broad range of perspectives among JDS professionals.

Participants brought an average of 20 years of experience in Jewish education to the table and an average of six years’ tenure in their current role. The longevity of interviewees in JDS education and at their current institution was a surprising statistic given the trends we often hear about in the field. Perhaps this is evidence that people particularly invested in day schools’ long-term success also envision themselves in this career for the long term.

Additionally, 72 percent had been day school students themselves, and 86 percent were either current or former day school parents. Perhaps this indicates that those who are connected to day schools recognize their value and therefore want to see the field strengthen and grow.

Eight major themes emerged.

We were heartened to hear consistent points among participants as this underscored themes many feel have been circulating anecdotally in the field. Aside from these eight themes, several of the Listening Booths participants commented in some way about “making education relevant,” and numerous people shared the importance of relating Jewish content to the lives of current and future generations of children.

Building on Prizmah’s 2019 Conference theme, Dare to Dream, Listening Booth participants imagined Jewish day schools that:

Emphasize Child-Centered Approaches
Imagine the Jewish future if day schools focused on middot and mensches; social-emotional development; students thriving; good values over competitive academics; safe, comfortable and happy spaces; empathy and tikkun olam (transforming the world); gemilut chasadim (acts of kindness); consistent, long-term community service programs; students’ positive sense of self and of Judaism; holistic learning including cognitive, physical, spiritual and social-emotional; collaboration among faculty; student-centered pedagogy; and accessibility for all students.

Instill Passion and Joy for Jewish Learning
Imagine the Jewish future if day schools emphasized bringing fun and energy back to education; creating extraordinary and inspired Jewish education; making their school the epicenter of joyful learning; generating excitement; and growing lifelong learners.

Increase Diversity in Learners, Families, Teachers and Content
Imagine the Jewish future if day schools aspired to become a place with more students and families; a community spanning race, religious observance, socioeconomic background, language and culture; a community-oriented place; an educational institution with a wide range of learners and a variety of pedagogies; and a school where teachers are intentionally trained to accommodate diverse needs of students and families.

Individualize Teaching and Include All Learners
Imagine the Jewish future if day schools considered student interests when making curricular decisions; differentiated instruction; ways to maximize students’ individual strengths; the many paths people follow to find meaning in Judaism; and how to help students develop personal meaning from Jewish tradition and sources.

Increase the Jewish Educator Pipeline
Imagine the Jewish future if JDSs committed to identifying ideal candidates for leadership positions; finding and supporting aspiring Jewish educators; raising standards for Jewish day school professionals; and developing strong professional and lay leadership.

Professionalize the Field for Jewish Educators
Imagine the Jewish future if day schools made a dedicated effort to encourage specializations in Judaic subtopics such as tefillah and Israel education; provide guidance to teachers on how to “kick it up a notch”; redirect resources to provide better professional development; recognize professional development as the norm; grow strong Jewish educational leaders; and professionalize the image of the entire school staff.

Implement Best Practices to Increase the Quality of Education
Imagine the Jewish future if day schools would utilize best educational approaches such as inquiry-based learning; implement cutting-edge, student-developed lesson plans; incorporate intensive units focused on a single initiative; expand self-reflection and content knowledge among students; position day school as a popular option for general education; want other schools to emulate them; embrace accreditation processes reflecting schools of excellence; collaborate across movements; invest in both professional and lay leadership training; adopt innovation as common practice; arrange for educators to visit exemplary schools; and hold broader conversations around best practices.

Manage Affordability and Sustainability
Imagine the Jewish future if day schools dedicated efforts to broaden funders’ mindsets; positively disrupt enrollment and financial models; solidify the financial stability and sustainability of schools; and help families see “Jewish” as an added value rather than as a detractor.

Participants offered some ideas that have not been commonly circulated in the field to date.

Jewish day school stakeholders abound with creative, original and ingenious ideas. Our Listening Booth interviewees presented bold conceptions. They envision a field where Jewish day schools branch out by:

Using existing resources and buildings to expand the reach of day schools. This could be achieved by expanding pre-K to 12 education to include adult learning institutes that could bring more people into the building and cultivate new relationships to increase buy-in, revenue and support for the day schools themselves in the community. Another avenue for broadening day schools’ communal role would be to create additional “school-within-a-school” models across North America, whether for the inclusion of students with special needs or for the availability of specialty learning tracks such as the arts or STEM.

Educating about diversity while reducing costs through partnerships between day schools and Catholic private schools for travel and study for educators who have not yet had the opportunity to visit Israel.

Disrupting the financial barriers to enrollment by examining the financial models at Catholic and other Christian schools where they lower tuition for all by supplementing revenue with donations from large philanthropists; having day school leaders learn from other independent school models to better engage with available resources to make this type of Jewish education more affordable and accessible to all who wish to attend.

Reimagining middle schools by completely revamping the middle school experience. Instead of classes and a typical schedule, middle schools would implement a junior version of the dissertation process. Students would learn about real-world problems, challenge themselves, and work through interdisciplinary hands-on experiments to create actual, pragmatic solutions.

Creating local JDS systems, where feasible, to facilitate cost-sharing for logistics such as student transportation.

So many more ideas arose, and you can access the entire report here.

Out of this research emanates good news and an opportunity to be fearless. The good news is that there are a great number of impassioned, creative JDS stakeholders who are committed to improving Jewish education and creating the strongest and most enduring future for the Jewish people. These stakeholders have the ideas, and they are ready to execute them. The opportunity to be fearless means stakeholders in the field need to be ready to jump into action, collaborating, taking risks, innovating and inviting others (including funders) to be a part of the solutions.

Will it be difficult? Yes. Is it impossible? A fervent no. Are we committed to making progress, even one step at a time? Absolutely. As Manette Mayberg, trustee of the Mayberg Foundation and a strong supporter of transforming Jewish education, says, “It might be a dream, but it is not a fantasy.” Please join JEIC on our journey to radically improve Jewish day schools. Our shared success comes from partnering with JDS stakeholders like you. Let’s continue to imagine, experiment with and bring to fruition the vision of a bright Jewish future.

Are you ready to realize our shared dreams? Visit Prizmah’s Knowledge Center over the next few months to explore a series of articles that elaborate on some of the Listening Booths’ ideas and approaches to improving JDS education. May we all draw strength in our efforts to catalyze radical change in JDS education from the same directive Joshua the prophet received from God: Chazak Ve’ematz, be strong and resolute!

For many adolescents, who deeply yearn for authentic spiritual experiences, the confined structure of tefillah remains an enormous obstacle to overcome. The square peg of autonomy, personal freedom, and free choice does not always align with the circular hole of Jewish core values such as chiyyuv, responsibility and obligation. Tefillah can become a frustrating experience of untapped spiritual potential, a wasted opportunity for spiritual development, and often misses the mark in serving as an authentic, meaningful and personalized relationship experience with the Creator of the Universe.

Our tefillah programing at the Stark High School of the Fuchs Mizrachi School was constructed with these unique challenges in mind, to achieve the following three goals:

• Autonomy
• Personal meaning
• Individualization

We are striving to create experiences that allow for students to choose from a number of different options. We seek to create experiences that are personally meaningful to our students, that address areas of need and concerns that they want to explore in more depth. And lastly, we work to make our programs more individualized, targeting each of our student’s ba’asher hu sham, identifying where they are in relation to their sensitivity and appreciation of tefillah, and collaborating with them in taking steps to enhance that connection. For example, our daily “immersive tefillah experiences” offer a selection of options for students to connect to tefillah in a deeper, more personal way, outside the beit midrash, with the goal of channeling that inspiration back into their regular tefillah routine.

These programs have a number of features in common. Most importantly, they are completely optional. Students can choose to attend a session one week and not another. Faculty members do not pressure students to attend any program. Autonomy is critical, enabling the group leaders to create an atmosphere where the students that are at the workshop on a particular day are “bought in,” ready to fully engage in the experience.

Immersive Experiences

1. Menorah Park

Once a week, students have the opportunity to drive to Menorah Park, a local senior citizens home, to join or lead the service. Students sit and engage with the residents at both Shacharit and breakfast, and bring a ruach that has made the Menorah Park trip a beautiful community-building and leadership program for our students. It is fascinating to see students who sometimes struggle with their daily tefillah at school take on leadership roles at Menorah Park and make such a positive difference both for the residents and themselves.

2. Reflective Tefillah

Every Wednesday morning, students create an atmosphere of silent tefillah reflection. In a large double classroom, with ample room to walk around, students daven at their own pace in Hebrew or English, look at the commentary in their siddur or simply reflect, creating an atmosphere of silent, focused prayer and allowing students to feel, as one student described, “being alone together.” This “silent tefillah” is enjoyed for the first 15 to 20 minutes of the session. Each student is able to sit and experience their own thoughts and feelings, while being connected to a larger group engaged in the same process. The group comes together as a minyan for Kaddish, Barchu and the Shmoneh Esrei, and follow that with a tefillah discussion with the group’s teacher facilitator.

These discussions also follow a set structure. The students examine a particular tefillah in both Hebrew and English. The students then have an opportunity to share their reflections on the tefillah and discuss comments and questions that the tefillah evokes. The group facilitator concludes each session with an idea on that tefillah that was prepared in advance.

3. Arts-based Spiritual Expression

Students are given an opportunity to express their feelings, attitudes and perspectives both broadly towards tefillah as a whole and more directly regarding specific tefillot through the medium of art. These art-based initiatives give a voice to many students who have struggled to foster a connection to tefillah, allowing them to open up a different access point in their relationship with God. Last year the students focused on the different brachot of the Shmoneh Esrei, with each student focusing on a different brachah and representing it artistically. These selections are in the process of being published, and we look forward to sharing this incredible student-generated work with the rest of our student body.

4. Mindfulness Tefillah

Every Monday morning, students have the opportunity to join with one of our faculty members for a mindfulness meditation tefillah. Led by a trained practitioner, the “circle” is organized behind the stage curtain in our auditorium, where students are able to collect themselves in a silent reflective atmosphere and be “present” while using the words of tefillah as a conduit to better understand themselves and their relationship to God.

These are four examples of the seven individualized tefillah workshops that we have continued to develop and refine over the last three years. We believe strongly that students genuinely want to connect to something larger than themselves, that they innately yearn for spirituality and want to experience tefillah as an access point to develop their ongoing relationship with Hashem. By opening up different avenues for our adolescent students to exercise their autonomy within the structures of tefillah, by appreciating and respecting the individual tefillah needs of our students, and by striving to make tefillah more understandable and personal, we are hopeful that our school community will continue to deepen its appreciation for and connection to our daily tefillah experience.

While interlacing her fingers, my mentor, Susan Wall, teaches that “goals and assessment go hand in hand.” I believe it’s important to translate this notion into curricular decisions made in tefillah. In the high school where I teach, my colleagues and I have developed four main goals for our tefillah program:

• Havanah: understanding key prayers in the siddur and choreography of the service
• Keva: committing to tefillah as a daily practice and following its traditional structure
• Kavanah: meaning or intentionality in prayer, which encourages personal reflection and occasionally non-traditional modes of prayer
• Kehillah: community-building

Following the educational philosophy of Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins in Understanding by Design, we use these four goals to guide our practice and shape the ways in which we assess student learning and growth in tefillah. Our school acknowledges teachers’ and students’ discomfort assigning a grade to spiritual growth. Yet as educators, we know that we need to assess student learning. Students need feedback to be able to see themselves and trace their growth. Here is one effective method that we use at RZJHS of incorporating assessments into tefillah.

Over the years, we’ve integrated our sophomore Talmud curriculum with our tefillah program. We ask students to demonstrate their learning in this academic course by drawing both on their study of talmudic texts from Masechet Brachot as well as their own lived experiences of tefillah at school and beyond. These assessments also support the curricular goals of the course: to become careful readers of rabbinic texts, to explore key concepts and practices regarding tefillah in the Talmud, and to find personal meaning in the course. The academic goals of this Talmud class echo the goals of our tefillah program, especially kavanah and havanah.

For example, one of the texts that sophomores investigate is the opening mishnah of the fifth chapter of Brachot:

One should not stand up to pray [the Amidah] except with a focused mindset. The first pious ones would wait an hour before praying in order that they might direct their thoughts to God. Even if a king greets someone [while praying] s/he should not respond; even if a snake is wound round one’s heel s/he should not stop.

Studying this mishnah, students learn about the requirement to recite the Amidah with koved rosh (literally, “heaviness of the head,” understood to mean intention or focus) and explore the practice of the hasidim rishonim (“the first pious ones”) who would shohim sha’ah achat (“wait/sit for one hour”) before reciting the Amidah. In class, students grapple with these concepts, hypothesizing what exactly the hasidim did before prayer and how it would have helped them to reach koved rosh.

Students then enact the practice of the hasidim and try out different interpretations of shohim sha’ah achat in tefillah later that week, creating their own exercises to foster greater focus or concentration before the Amidah. For example, some experiment with sitting away from their peers or listening to a song that facilitates koved rosh. Others may look at photographs of important family and friends or read the morning headlines to focus their attention before beginning the Amidah.

While bringing the words of this talmudic text to life, students record the effectiveness of these exercises and how they might carry these talmudic concepts into their daily prayer. Students are assessed based on their ability to reflect deeply and openly on this process with their teacher and classmates both in writing and class discussion. As tefillah participants, students develop tools to bring greater kavanah to their prayer experience and a deeper havanah of the Amidah and its importance in the liturgy. Students strengthen their analytical and textual skills and find personal meaning in talmudic texts through these assessments.

As educators, we see the impact of these assessments not only in each particular assignment, but also in the form of increased participation and leadership in tefillah. In addition, students continually reference these talmudic concepts related to tefillah and bring them into other academic classes such as Bible and English. Creating these types of assessments give students opportunities to enrich their understanding of Jewish practices and concepts and bring these abstract, ancient texts to life in tefillah. Each assessment in tefillah serves as a mirror for students to witness their own intellectual and religious growth.

By its very nature, spirituality is abstract, hard for students to grasp; we must find ways to make children experience spirituality so that they will relate to it, love it and view everyday events in a spiritual manner. I define spirituality with respect to children as connecting to God and themselves in a deep way by singing and learning about the tefillot. The goal of spirituality is cultivating in our students a positive and enriching kavanah, or intention, that facilitates a connection to God through tefillah.

A daunting task? It may seem so, but here are some of my favorite resources that help me and enrich my teaching.

Choice

Children have very little control over their lives. When they can choose for themselves, they feel empowered. Several times a year, I run an optional Tefillah Club at lunch. We do activities that include the comparing and contrasting of liturgical music from Debbie Friedman to Yossele Rosselblatt, mindfulness activities, art activities tied to various tefillot like paper midrash, gratitude projects, prayer jars, and having guest speakers. Because students have the choice to be present, they engage in tefillah enthusiastically and willingly.

Faculty Collaboration Groups

A few years ago, my school required each faculty member to take part in a collaboration group at school. The tefillah group that I led restructured our Friday afternoon Kabbalat Shabbat services. Each Friday, we rotate among four different formats:

Traditional: We sing all of the Friday evening tefillot.

School Assembly: Depending on the time of year, we might have a holiday celebration, a guest lead tefillah or a class make a presentation.

Enhanced: We divide the time evenly between the singing of tefillot and a special guest from the school or synagogue staff who teaches or tells a story.

Creative: A time to teach the meaning of the tefillot in a creative way geared towards the multiple intelligences.

The beauty of the collaboration meetings, in this case, was that it resulted in an effective restructuring of our Kabbalat Shabbat program as the result of a group effort and therefore increased the “buy-in” from the teachers involved.

Multiple Intelligences

While designing activities, I very often draw on Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences in order to ensure that students use all of their senses and capabilities to learn, feel, experience and live the meanings of all of our tefillot. Since we all learn in different ways and become engaged in different ways, experiencing through different modalities can allow all students to access the tefillot.

Colleagues and Friends

I am fortunate to be part of a network of experienced and resourceful Jewish educators. A few years ago, I invited a group of educator friends who taught at different schools and from different Jewish movements to my home for a gathering. We had an amazing discussion, and everyone left not only with many practical ideas, but also with support from their colleagues.

Express Yourself

Another way of making spirituality concrete is to facilitate experiences that allow students to express themselves. Some ideas include writing in prayer journals, stopping between tefillot at a service and asking open-ended questions, having posters up and letting students write comments, asking tefillah questions and having students answer on index cards and then pair and share. I try to ask them questions throughout the year to keep them thinking. The questions can be about the tefillot, or about God and their lives in general. Some mornings I give students a silent moment to ask God for help with something, or to think about what they feel thankful for at that moment. This modeling teaches them how to do it on their own.

I’ll leave you with something a student wrote when I asked the class, “Why do we sing the tefillot?” The student wrote: “I sing the tefillot because it makes me feel good when I am sad and it makes me feel like God is listening to me.” Seeing that this child connected to God in a real way through tefillah made the late nights of planning more than well worth it.

Tefillah education is a vital part of Jewish education. Many schools work tirelessly on modeling proper tefillah for their students, hoping that they will pick up on good habits and develop a strong connection with Hashem. In YCQ, we are working on two major aspects of tefillah: the messages and knowledge one needs to have before engaging in tefillah, and the words and procedure of tefillah itself.

An important realization one should have when focusing on tefillah education is that before students can engage in proper tefillah, they first need to develop and internalize certain ideas/themes that are essential for a strong inner connection with Hashem. In the book Living in the Presence, Dr. Benjamin Epstein argues, “Our foremost and most basic obligation to ourselves and those around us is to reveal God’s presence in the world. … Our awareness of the divinity manifest within the present moment consecrates the present with the presence.” To address this, our team created a structured class where once a week our students in grades 1-5 learn topics that help them further their relationship and awareness of Hashem. Some of the themes include nifla’ot Haborei (wonders of the world that Hashem created), basic emunah (faith) concepts, Nature and Hashem, hashgachah pratit (Divine Providence), struggle and growth, and mindfulness.

The lessons themselves must be engaging enough to ignite a curiosity in our young daveners. The structure of the lesson includes a stated goal, a trigger activity that creates interest in the topic, a hands-on lesson that supports the goal and assessment (which can be an activity in school or out of school that checks for understanding). One lesson that we recently had our students focus on was the topic of the appreciation of nifla’ot Haboreh. We had the students bring in a peach pit and asked them to try to open it. We asked them to use any tools in their desk to open up the pit. After the students were not able to open it up, we taught them about how specific enzymes and bacteria found in the dirt caused the outer seed to open, thereby allowing the genetic material in the inside of the seed to come out. The students recognized that Hashem created an amazing world with tremendous Chochmah (wisdom). As a takeaway, the students had to find something else in nature/science that they find interesting, and the next day in class explain how there is so much chochmah in how Hashem created it.

After the students internalize the different ideas that they learned in the first half of the year, they will begin the second aspect of our tefillah curriculum, which focuses on the tefillah itself. The ideas that were taught this year will come out naturally in the words of the siddur and will help the students connect with the major themes and phrases found throughout the siddur. With a newfound understanding of Hashem’s role in our lives, we hope the tefillah will become naturally relevant to them. This process will be an important part of our students’ development in Judaism.

In the future, we will look to have our upper grades engage in a social-emotional curriculum of tefillah that requires the teachers to give thought to what is on their students minds, to question where their interests lie and connect them to tefillah. The idea is once the students have an individual sense of basic Jewish thought and emunah, the students will begin to open themselves up to understanding the significance of davening for themselves and eventually for Klal Yisrael (the entire nation) by connecting to areas that are relevant to them. Some areas that they can explore are self-esteem, failure, future goals, jealousy, stress and relationships. Connecting these relevant topics to the words of the siddur will allow our students to focus in and have a direct line to Hashem.

This program will hopefully carry our students in all areas of tefillah, academics and as a member of the Jewish community. As the year continues, we hope to see success in this pilot program, with our students engaging in tefillah in a meaningful way.