Our Greatest Value Lies in...

Ruach

Rabbi Eli Mandel

Vice Principal, TannenbaumCHAT, Toronto

I was hired as a rabbinics teacher at TanenbaumCHAT, and on my first day I was assigned a Grade 10 applied rabbinics class. My mentor warned me that this was likely the most difficult class in the school to teach. Grade 10 students are enabled but not mature enough to know how to behave. “Applied” meant that they had less experience with Jewish texts; “rabbinics” meant it was a not-for-credit course. I mentally prepared for the worst and, just like the books told me to do, I walked into my classroom, creative lesson in hand, with confidence, good posture and a smile on my face.

To my shock and great delight, I was greeted by the most pleasant, well-behaved, eager-to-learn group of students that I had ever taught. They had their books open, pens in hand, and were ready to soak in my every word. This lasted the entire year and was repeated for every class that I taught in the school.

What I learned on that first day, 19 years ago, is the magic that’s in the air at TanenbaumCHAT. Our school’s greatest value lies in this quality, which can be called the ruach or school culture. The culture at TanenbaumCHAT is that “it’s cool to do well academically.” Other parts of our wonderful school culture excite our students to get involved in school life and to do everything in their power to become a school leader. Whether they are applying to become a madrich or a school ambassador, or running for a position on Student Council, our students line up eager and enthusiastic to be selected. Equally important, there is a sense of derech eretz and respect that permeates throughout the entire school community.

In “The Culture Builder,” an article published in Educational Leadership, Roland Barth describes school culture as “a complex pattern of norms, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, values, ceremonies, traditions and myths that are deeply ingrained in the very core of the organization. It is the historically transmitted pattern of meaning that wields astonishing power in shaping what people think and how they act” (my emphasis).

Once entrenched, school cultures are extremely difficult to change. For schools with weak or toxic cultures, this is bad news. Changing a toxic culture requires years of consistent small actions that are strategic and deliberate. For schools like TanenbaumCHAT that are blessed with a culture that is alive and flourishing, we must be diligent and ensure that we aren’t slipping. 

Over the past two years, like everyone, we needed to implement many changes. We turned the timetable on its head, switching to quadmesters and lessons that ran for two hours. Our extracurricular programming had to be dramatically reduced, with much of it offered only virtually. More recently, teams of faculty members spent a great deal  of time thinking about how to recapture all of the full in-person TanenbaumCHAT spirit that we know and love.

We remain confident that with the continued outstanding efforts of our stellar team of educators, our school culture—one that has stood the test of time for more than 60 years—will continue to bring excitement to our hallways and ruach to our community for decades  to come.

Consistency and Coherence

Rabbi Azaryah Cohen

Head of School, Frankel Jewish Academy, West Bloomfield, Michigan

If there is anything young adults are good at, it is spotting inconsistency. As they learn to navigate a world that they are making sense of and finding their place in, anything that smacks of hypocrisy becomes fodder for critique and could ultimately undo the best of educational intentions. At Frankel Jewish Academy, we’ve taken aim at consistency and coherence by infusing our entire professional school culture with elements of pedagogy and learning (and of course our core values). In particular, learning and growth, assessment and evaluation, have become an integral part of our professional lives at FJA.

We emphasize that learning shouldn’t just be relegated to the classrooms. It should be a communal pursuit, with teachers and staff modeling the learning process and reflecting “learner characteristics” in all that they do. For nearly a decade and a half, we have focused on creating a culture of professional learning that emphasizes growth. Over 10 years ago, we established a new teacher induction and peer coaching program. The program’s aim, to ensure teacher success and growth at all levels of experience, led to the realization that unless we were engaged in our own learning and employing best practices in that endeavor, we are invoking a “Do as I say but not as I do” tack while working to inspire our students to be “lifelong learners” (the finale clause of our mission statement).

At the board level as well, we often speak of the importance of continued learning and growth. We acknowledge that trustees have much to learn about the school and about their role as trustees. Board education builds and enhances our board’s capacity and serves as an additional affirmation that we are a community that values and incorporates essential elements of learning and pedagogy into everything that we do.

We also gave serious thought to the role evaluation, assessment and data gathering plays in our professional pursuits. Just as assessment plays a critical role in students’ learning, we incorporate a variety of evaluation tools into our professional routine. Nearly a decade ago, we developed and named our system of evaluation “Supervision for Growth,” clearly articulating that professional growth is the intended outcome of evaluation. At this time, through a collaborative process, we are updating our evaluation system to reflect our newly developed “characteristics of professional excellence.” The updates will create coherence between elements we value as a professional community, and the system will continue to support skill and knowledge acquisition by emphasizing goal setting, reflecting on successes and developing strategies to overcome challenges.

Constituent surveys further highlight the importance of assessment as a learning tool. On a yearly basis, we survey staff, faculty, students and parents to understand if we are achieving our strategic and programmatic goals. Our board evaluation likewise informs trustees whether our board is knowledgeable about its role and whether it is operating with best practices in mind.

Most recently, we have established learning cohorts, where each member of our staff and faculty, regardless of role, engages in peer learning and capacity building around specific topics of interest related to our educational vision and our characteristics of professional excellence.

This year, I’ve joined a cohort related to our educational vision, tasked with “creating a learning environment where students develop a ‘failure tolerance’ and are willing to take risks in their learning.” While teachers can think about this through the lens of their classrooms—assessment, grading, classroom culture—I can think more broadly about how we develop consistency and coherence around “failure tolerance” (not a term I love) throughout our school.

How, as professionals, can we incorporate this into our practice and model the “failure-tolerant” approach for our students? In a school setting, what would it look like if our professionals saw “failure” as merely an opportunity to learn? If they saw taking a risk as an opportunity to innovate and succeed? How can our leadership team (lay and professional) model this for our staff, faculty and students, and how can we effectively communicate and partner with our parents? Will they see the stakes as too high, or will they understand that the stakes are too high not to try?

At FJA, our commitment to pursue coherence and consistency in education will, in the long term, teach our students that the path to success and growth is through employing best learning practices and demonstrating a willingness for vulnerability at every level of career or life.