The Story about the Baby Sharks

I told a story about the ritual of counting the omer at Shabbat Services for Temple Emanu-El. It is based on a famous one about starfish that I learned as a kid in CRaFTY (the NYC region of NFTY, the Reform Jewish youth movement).

(Full transcript after the jump)

What do we mean by "lifelong learning?"

A piece I wrote for Jewish Federation of North America's "Ideas in Jewish Education and Engagement" blog appeared on November 28. Entitled, "What do we mean by 'lifelong learning,' I describe two of our most successful (and explicable) programs here at Emanu-El and the big ideas about Jewish education that underscore them.

Here's the tl;dr take-aways:

1. Our classes form a microcosm of Jewish community, where diverse opinions can be expressed and, through thoughtful reflection and mutual respect, our students learn to accept one another for who they are and what they believe, and empower one another to grow as individuals.
2. We study ancient wisdom in the context of intergenerational relationships.
3. Our teen leaders are role models, sharing their expertise and modeling their commitment to Jewish life.
4. The teens are proud of their growth as leaders and of the connections they make with the younger kids. Many describe their work as “giving back” to the community 
5. We publicly acknowledge and celebrate students who go “above and beyond” school attendance. 
6. Children play a crucial role in shaping the lives of the rest of their families.
7. For parents, coming to school-based family activities normalizes the experience of participating in synagogue life, making it easier to prioritize it over other ways to spend their time and to consider coming to another activity even without their own children. 

Talking with our children about tragic events

This is what I shared with the Religious School community at Temple Emanu-El after the events at Tree of Life Synagogue:

Dear School Families,

During Religious School on Sunday and Monday, we did not explicitly raise the tragic events at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh with our students. We know that every child is different, and each family must choose to handle the situation in its own way. Yet, we also know that many of our children have questions and fears that we, as their parents, want to address – not to mention our own, adult concerns.

I want to share with you the guidance I gave our faculty, which holds for parents as well:

1. If the children bring up the topic, don’t shut it down. Listen attentively to what they have to say -- their concerns and their questions, their thoughts and feelings -- and let that drive the conversation.
2. Try to answer questions factually without adding unnecessary details. Don’t assume that your questions and concerns are theirs.
3. Reassure the children that Temple Emanu-El is a safe place; we are a sanctuary for all people seeking comfort and support. Here at Emanu-El, there are many adults who are looking out for them and who know exactly what to do to prevent emergencies of all types from happening. A good example is that when there is a fire drill, we all are trained to respond quickly and safely. There are other things that the kids don’t know about that we, the adults, are doing to keep them safe.
4. Let them know that an important part of what it means to be Jewish is that when we hear about tragedy, we want to respond. That is why Emanu-El is participating in city-wide vigils (both to express our emotions and to demonstrate our solidarity) and why our Philanthropic Committee and Student Council are already talking about what we can do to help the people of the Tree of Life Community.
5. Remind them that there are always many more people trying to be good than to do harm, of all religions, backgrounds, and nationalities. Unfortunately, it is so much easier to be destructive than to build, and bad news always gets the headlines – but remember, although there are some dangerous people in the world, nearly everyone you meet is a kind, generous, loving person like yourself.

The Golden Age of Religious School Education

I wrote this article for the March-April 2018 edition of the Temple Emanu-El Bulletin.

The challenges of Jewish education are largely the same as they were more than a century ago, when the first generations of American Jews began attending supplementary schools. Forced by these challenges to be inventive and resourceful, the best educators integrated innovative approaches and cutting-edge practices. And yet, because we are in an era of unprecedented collaboration, I believe we are now in a “Golden Age” for religious schools.

Where have all the Teachers Gone? A Collaborative Community Response

This article about the course I will be teaching this semester, authored by Dr. Evie Levy Rotstein, appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on September 14, 2017:

Each year the challenge seems to grow. Jewish educators are frantically searching for qualified teachers to fill open positions in their religious schools. Research for many years has indicated that there is a shortage of well-trained teachers in Jewish settings, exacerbated by the challenge of retaining strong teachers for these part-time positions. (Westheimer, 2007). This past summer, though, the problem was particularly striking: I received more requests than ever for graduate students to fill multiple empty positions in the New York metropolitan area. Is this problem intractable, or can something be done?

Last winter, a group of seasoned NYC educators that form a peer network group hosted by the Jewish Education Project in Manhattan began to explore this very issue. They discussed how they might collaborate to offer high level professional learning to encourage current religious school teachers to become teacher leaders. One of the educators, Saul Kaiserman, teaches our “Laboratory in Teaching in Learning” course to rabbinic, cantorial and Masters in Religious Education students at HUC-JIR New York School of Education. What would happen if these educators could offer their faculty members such a course for graduate credit at a highly subsidized tuition fee? What if the congregations themselves paid for the course and then offered the teachers a salary bonus upon the completion of the course? Might avocational teachers begin to consider a career in Jewish education? There was significant back and forth as the group hammered out what they would want in such a course, whether their teachers would realistically attend such a course, how many transferable credits it would be, and ultimately if the finances would be feasible.

And behold a strategy for change was born. HUC-JIR made the bold decision to offer students enrollment at an incredibly subsidized rate, similar in cost to the introductory course for the Executive Master’s Program. The professor offered to teach the course gratis, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York agreed to host the course, and all of the congregations were willing to provide the funding for the tuition. At the time of writing, teachers representing congregations across NYC have applied for a spot in this course

This is a story of community collaboration and the desire to address the challenges of the teacher shortage and retention. We as leaders in the field of Jewish education must continue to find ways to recognize and validate the fact that our teachers need to continue their own growth and learning to keep them from leaving the field. We know from the data, that teachers who do not participate in ongoing professional development are less effective in the classroom and less likely to meet the emerging needs of students, administrators, and the field of Jewish education. Our hope is that this course may be the catalyst for teachers to seek a graduate degree and ultimately a full time career in Jewish education. We also need to think about the future of Jewish education leadership. 

If you are interested in learning more about the course please follow this link or contact Dr. Evie Rotstein at erotstein@huc.edu.

Talking with our Students about the Election

I want to share with you the email that I sent to our school faculty at Temple Emanu-El:

Dear School Faculty,

Several of you have spoken this week with either Jackie or me about the outcome of our presidential election. You have expressed a particular challenge it poses to us as Jewish educators. The question I’m hearing is something along the lines of, “how can we teach our children what it means to be a good and morally righteous leader, if I think the president-elect is a terrible role model?”

Clearly, that is not how all of our congregants, or faculty, or even a great many of those who voted in this election feel. Yet, we do know that throughout his campaign, Donald Trump used hurtful language in an unprecedented fashion, with rhetoric that was explicitly racist, misogynistic, and just plan mean-spirited. How do we explain to our students that it is unacceptable for them to use such language, if our president does?

As Jews, we believe the Torah can be a guide for our behavior. When we study the stories of our ancestors, we see how their actions serve as examples for us today. And yet, even our greatest leaders were imperfect. Side by-side with their hospitality, compassion, and righteousness we find selfishness, arrogance, and even cruelty. In truth, from their stories we not only learn what to do, but also what NOT to do.

It is our responsibility to help our students (and their parents) decide for themselves which values lead to a loving, just and peaceful world and then together build a community in which they can act upon those values -- even when they are in opposition to those values espoused by our leaders. We need to be able to stand up to oppression wherever we encounter it. And most importantly, we need our school to be a place of sanctuary for all of our students and families, in which all feel safe to be wholly themselves.

While we always encourage those who have made mistakes to seek forgiveness and improve upon their past actions, we should not excuse or minimize bad behavior, no matter how prestigious the person engaging in it.

As always, both Jackie and I make it our top priority to help you think about your teaching and your individual students. Please don’t be shy about reaching out to us to think an issue through – on this topic, or for any other reason.

We are strong, getting stronger, getting strength from each other.

Saul

For more reading on this topic, I recommend the op-ed by Emily Bazelon in today's New York Times, Bullying in the Age of Trump. And here is a great set of resources from Border Crossers.

Aspiring to "Failure" (from the Jewish Futures Conference, 2015)

With the next Jewish Futures Conference just around the corner, I realized I had never posted this video of my presentation from the 2015 Conference. 

The theme was "radical empathy," and my presentation, "Failure," was on my experience as a teacher at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan. 

Here's the punch-line: "If I'm a better teacher now, it's because what I've learned is that being a great teacher...isn't about being a great teacher. It's about helping the kids to be great students."

Studying our history to build a Jewish future

In May of 2014, I posted a personal vision statement for Jewish education. Previously, I offered two examples of this vision how we have implemented these ideas in our work at Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York: In our curricula for tzedakah (which I will here translate loosely as "social justice") and tefilah ("prayer"). This week, I wish to share with you a little of how we have organized our history curriculum for grades 3-6. In so doing, I want to once again emphasize that collaboration is the cornerstone of our methodology, and I am reporting on the intersection between my philosophy and the work we do, not taking credit for our achievements. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts, your feedback, and your critique.

The most important thing you can do for your children, writes New York Times columnist Bruce Feiler, is to tell them true stories about your own family. The more children know about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem, and the greater their resilience in the face of stress. By sharing our childhood memories and the stories of our parents and grandparents, we teach our children that they are part of something larger than themselves, something intergenerational and ongoing. As our children discover that they, too, can be story-tellers, they learn how to make sense of the confusing and sometimes unpredictable world around them.

Stories of redemption -- family narratives that tell of overcoming setbacks and recovering from failures -- are the most beneficial, according to psychologist Dan McAdams. We help our children to be courageous in the face of adversity when we let them know that although we have had both good and bad times, we have always persevered. Telling stories about the times when we endured hardship without losing hope gives our children confidence in themselves and their capacity to succeed. Further, McAdams’ research shows that those who have both this sense of personal agency as well as intimate, caring relationships are most likely to demonstrate a concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations.

How to ask a question (?) (!) (?)

The following is a excerpt from the article "Active Learning in the Halakha class" by Mark Smilowitz, which first appeared in the Lookstein Center's journal Jewish Educational Leadership:

Classically, teachers and students alike tend to view questions as stemming from problems; if nothing bothers you, you don't ask. Even progressive methods devised to make students active learners through questioning seem to view questions as stemming from problems. For example, the "inquiry training" model relies on presenting students with puzzling events that will naturally arouse their curiosity and stimulate their questions. This approach "deliberately selects episodes that have sufficiently surprising outcomes to make it difficult for students to remain indifferent to the encounter.

Perhaps you've seen a science exhibition where they put a blown up balloon into liquid nitrogen, and it comes out shrunk. The kids are naturally stimulated to ask why it does that, because the outcome is surprising. This is precisely the kind of curiosity-generating activity that would kick off a unit in the inquiry training approach.

But let's consider another way to stimulate curiosity. Take a regular balloon, a normal object that doesn't automatically generate questions, and hold it up in front of a classroom as is, and tell students they have two minutes to write down as many questions as they can think of that will help them understand the balloon better. Tell them not to hold back, but to let their imaginations go.

When I do this experiment on myself, I find that I suddenly become interested in things I wasn't interested in before – science questions such as why balloons lose their air after a while, manufacturing questions like how balloons are made, or maybe economic questions like how do they decide how much balloons cost. When one is prompted in this manner, instead of curiosity generating questions, it is the discipline of questioning that generates the curiosity. We might refer to this latter kind of question as a research-oriented question, as opposed to a problem-based question, because asking this kind of question is often the key to researching a topic

My guess is that most students only know about problem-based questions and are never taught to ask research-oriented questions. Neil Postman expressed his “astonishment at the neglect shown in school toward” the art of formulating questions. “All our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that question asking is our most important intellectual tool. I would go so far as to say that the answers we carry about in our heads are largely meaningless unless we know the questions which produced them.”

My favorite quotes: Barnett R. Brickner

With all the talk about how the religious school is broken and in need of redemption, and how we need new models for, and approaches to, supplementary Jewish education, I appreciated discovering this quote from the CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly (#33):

“I do not think there is a rabbi in this Conference [the Central Conference of American Rabbis] who is satisfied with the Sunday school, who is not willing to subscribe his name to the fact that the Sunday school has been, as far as the purposes of Reform Judaism are concerned, a failure.” 

That's Rabbi Barnett R. Brickner writing in ... wait for it ... 1923!

Vision-Driven Institutions: Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan

In 2007, I wrote on this blog about the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in Israel. At the time, I expressed my skepticism about my ability to turn this into a regular feature, but here I am, just six short years later, with a description of another innovative institution, the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan. I wrote this piece as part of my coursework for the executive doctoral program at the Davidson School of Education. This is not a comprehensive discussion of the institution, but a description of just one element of the program, and the institutional leader who created it.

Dr. Steven Lorch is the founding headmaster of the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan, a K-8 Jewish Day School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that is currently in its 18th year. I taught at Schechter Manhattan for three years. I loved its team-teaching approach (every class is led by two teachers, both fluent in Hebrew, who share responsibility for all areas of the curriculum), its constructivist philosophy, and its focus on menschlichkeit [kindness and empathy] as a core component of the institution. Yet, no aspect of my work there has influenced me more thoroughly than the experience of leading daily worship and teaching its tefilah [prayer] curriculum. At both Central Synagogue and Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York, the two institutions I have served since leaving Schechter Manhattan, I have attempted to adapt the Schechter prayer curriculum to suit the needs of a Reform Jewish supplementary school setting. This sketch focuses solely on this aspect of Dr. Lorch’s work: His role as the creator of the Schechter Manhattan tefilah curriculum.

Jewish Education: An Intrinsically Optimistic Endeavor

I wrote the cover story for the April 2013 Temple Emanu-El Bulletin, Volume 85, No. 8. Here is the text of my article:

Jewish education is an intrinsically optimistic endeavor. Our work as Jewish educators is predicated on the faith that we can inspire our students to personal growth. Further, we believe that by studying the past we can successfully prepare our students for an unknown future. Therefore, we act as translators, of a sort: we strive to make the ancient wisdom of our people relevant to contemporary sensibilities.

I believe the most compelling questions of value and meaning have remained largely the same since the days of the Bible. We look to our people’s history for direction as we ask ourselves the same questions that confronted our ancestors, like “What kind of person do I want to become?” and “What kind of world do I hope for myself and for future generations to inhabit?” Our people have struggled with these questions over the centuries, providing us with a legacy of their responses under varying circumstances.

The role of the Reform Jewish educator is not to pass along definitive answers to these questions, but rather to engage our learners in striving together to make meaning of our Jewish inheritance in all of its complexity. Our religious school is a “laboratory” for the Jewish future, providing experiences and opportunities our students cannot find elsewhere in their lives. The classroom is a center for Jewish life, where our students encounter one another’s ways of being Jewish. In accepting one another for who they are and what they believe, our students empower one another to say “I can be myself here and I can figure out who I might want to be.”

Responding to Crisis on the Eighth Night of Chanukah

If, like I, you are finding yourself speechless after using words like “tragedy,” “devastation” and “disaster” so many times this fall, you may find some words to say by looking at the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland's “Responding to Crisis” website.

Some links you might find particularly useful:

How to respond to children and teens in a crisis generated by humans

How children respond to crisis

Many of the quotes in the section “texts from our tradition” speak to me, but I particularly note one that we have been teaching our Sunday 3^rd-5^th graders at Emanu-El: 

Who is mighty?

                            One who conquers his evil impulse. 

            As it is written,

            Those who are slow to anger are better than the mighty,

            And those who rule over their spirit than those who conquer a city. 

                                                                                                                 PirkeAvot 4:1

Finally, many useful links in the resources section, and I sadly note that this one is helpful to know about right now:

Helping your children manage distress in the aftermath of school shootings

This being the final evening of Chanukah, I thank all of you reading this for your dedication and rededication to keeping alive the flames of hope, courage, and faith. At times like these, I am so proud to belong to a tradition that for thousands of years has asserted that every human life is sacred and dared us to strive for a more righteous and more loving society. I know the metaphor of “passing along the torch” is a tired one, but when you are lighting the Shamash so your kid can light her menorah . . .

Thanks to Nachama Skolnik Moskowitz for posting a reminder about this resource to the NATE facebook group.

Emanu-El Religious School - 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage from England to New York City.  Coverage of Jewish interest is available on-line at the Forward (the original articles from 1912 were published in Yiddish, but don't worry - everything on the website is in English).

That year, our school newspaper (the 1912 Emanu-El Religious School Chronicle) featured poems written by our students in response to this tragedy, with titles like "Ode to the Heroes who Perished on the 'Titanic.'"   According to that venerable news source, Wikipedia:

"The immediate aftermath of the sinking saw an outpouring of poetry, though much of it was dismissed by The New York Times as 'worthless' and 'intolerably bad.'"

I am sharing with you two of the better poems, written by H. Reinheimer in Class II and by Vera K. in Class I.  If this event has been on the minds of the children in your household (or perhaps even if not), you may wish to read these together.  I think they do a fine job of telling the story and expressing its significance to our community.

How to help your daughter's teachers re-think gender

There's so much good stuff going on right now to help Jewish boys and girls grow up with a sense of self-confidence -- and one that isn't predicated on gender stereotypes. But what do you do when your child's teacher didn't grow up attending Moving Traditions programs, hasn't been to a training on the "evaded curriculum" and doesn't even realize that Jewish chicks rock?

Julie Sissman writes:

"I wanted to share with you the email below that I wrote to my daughter's school administrators. Not in response to any incident or specific concern I had about the school, but rather in response to my ongoing fear/concern about raising strong, healthy girls with high self-esteem and confidence - and my concern about raising boys who see their full range of humanity open to them, rather than a narrow view of what 'masculine' means.

"I encourage you to use this email as a template to edit and send on to your own kids' school administrators and community group leaders (or forward to friends/siblings with kids). If we each take up this important issue, and each school does professional development around it, we could, together, have a big impact. (Obviously, if your child doesn't go to a Jewish school, then you wouldn't include the Jewish-related items. Similarly, if your kid is well past pre-school, you would put in different examples.)

"To give extra motivation - I sent this to our school, not knowing what response I would get. They took it up very seriously and appreciatively, spending 3.5 hours today on a professional development workshop for faculty and administrative leaders on the topic.

"If you're in NYC - I actually designed and facilitated the workshop! And I'd be happy to bring it to your school, also.

"Here's to building a world where both girls and boys see a broader range of possibilities!"

Here's Julie's letter:

Hi xxx,

I never fail to notice how often someone limits my daughter's choices - at the doctor's office, when they say "Do you want princess stickers?" At the arts shop, when they say "Do you want pink paint?" I recently saw a couple of articles that made me think more about how gender is "taught" (formally/consciously and unconsciously) to children, which prompted me to write this email. 

Our children spend so much time in school and their teachers and administrators have such a powerful influence on their individual thinking, as well as their group dynamic. Therefore, it's incredibly important that teachers and administrators have a gender lens as they look at what goes on in the classroom and as they interact with children. Here are a few examples:

• Do the teachers react with as much excitement when girls build a tower with blocks ("Look at how tall/complex that tower is!!!!!!!!!") as when they dress up as Snow White ("You look so beautiful!!!!!!!!!")? 


• Do they offer all children, both boys and girls, varied options for exploring the world (such as puzzles and blocks or art/crafts) and equivalent suggestions for play-acting ("Would you like to dress up as a firefighter today?") 


• Similarly around holidays - Because there are so many more men in the stories and holidays, are teachers/administrators going out of their way to bring women's stories and women's voices in?  Is Esther viewed as a critical protagonist or as a confused and scared accomplice to Mordechai? Are figures like Deborah brought in to the curriculum?  Is Miriam highlighted as a critical player in the Pesach story as well as Moses? Are Ushpizot invited into the sukkah, in addition to the traditional group of Ushpizin? 


• Are girls encouraged towards math and science as much as boys are?  


• Are teachers aware - or do administrators who observe point out - any subtle differences in ways that teachers interact with boys and girls?  


• What ongoing professional development and ongoing feedback is included/provided for faculty - especially those who may have grown up in communities where girls and boys were not given the same opportunities?

I'm hoping that school can be a place where my daughter's options are kept as open as possible - which is only possible if her teachers have an awareness of these types of things and how limiting they can be. Especially since many other children will be perpetuating gender stereotypes with their words and actions, I'm hoping that the teachers will help keep open the windows to opportunity.

These windows of opportunity are, of course, also important for the boys. There's a world and palette that our society tries to limit boys to, also.

These articles that I read not only comment on what teachers say and what they encourage, they also comment on what is included in classrooms. For example, perhaps the preschool classrooms do not need to have high heeled shoes for the kids to dress up in. As I've watched the girls having to walk gingerly around the classroom, I've wondered, "Is 3 years old really the age at which we want to impede our girls' movement in this way? We don't have shoe-dress-up for police officers or firefighters or chefs. Maybe dressing up the body but not the feet is good enough for a princess, also."

In case you're interested, I'm including the links to the articles that prompted me to write now. I'd be happy to hear your reactions. And I'd love to hear more about how the school - both in the preschools and beyond - thinks about these issues. One of the things my husband and I love most about the school is how thoughtful you all are, so I'm sure you already have a point of view! :)

Thanks for listening,

Julie

And here are the articles Julie recommends, that led her to write this letter in the first place:

1. How to Talk to Little Girls, by Lisa Bloom (Huffington Post). "This piece resonated a lot with me because I've been struck how waiting in the morning for school to start, almost every parent says to each girl as she arrives, 'Hi! I love your dress/hair/shoes/coat/etc.' I've been bothered, but couldn't quite articulate it to myself. This does a great job."

2. Taking a Stand Against the Princess Culture, by Susan Tomchin (Jewish Woman Magazine). "An interview with Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter. This made me think about how girls are dressing up, how Talia's already asking me to wear nail polish (because she sees other girls wearing it), etc. and helped paint a broader context for all of that."

3. The film Miss Representation. "This film focuses on media and advertising - I think it's a really important film."

Do you have suggestions of other resources and must-reads? Post them in the comments.

Job Posting: Director, Jewish Journey Project

Well, here's a job description you've never seen before: To direct a new initiative that will attempt to replace individual synagogue schools (in Manhattan) with an elective-driven communal coalition:

"Applications are now being accepted for a Jewish educator with an ability to think outside the box to lead a cutting-edge complementary Jewish education program based in Manhattan for children in grades 3-7.

"The Jewish Journey Project (JJP) seeks to revolutionize supplementary Jewish education for children. JJP catalyzes collaborations between congregations and JCC’s to create customized learning journeys for every student based on their interests and passions. JJP’s educational design is experiential and oriented to address the whole child, applying the wisdom of the Jewish heritage to the social, emotional and intellectual growth of each and every student. Families are deeply involved in the JJP process as they help to customize their children’s learning journey in consultation with advisors who serve as the liaison between families and member institutions. Most importantly, in JJP the entire community becomes a living classroom and, as a result, a breeding ground for lifelong Jewish engagement.

"The Jewish Journey Project was launched in the winter of 2010 based a concept paper written by Rabbi Joy Levitt, the executive director of the JCC in Manhattan. Currently, six synagogues spanning the denominational spectrum and two JCCs are participating in a year-long planning process to develop this new model for elementary Jewish education. The program will launch as a consortium in the fall of 2012. The position is available commencing March 2012 with the immediate tasks being the hiring of a faculty, the marketing of a new program and working closely with our partner institutions to meet their respective needs.

"Candidates should have at least an MA in the field of Jewish education or the equivalent. They should have experience in both formal and informal Jewish educational settings. The position will require strong management skills (e.g., budgeting, putting new systems in place, communications strategy, hiring and supervising personnel, scheduling,) as well as leadership savvy (e.g. inspiring faculty, raising the bar of what is currently acceptable in the realm of Jewish education, working with funders, Jewish communal professionals, parents and their children). Previous experience in running a school would be most valued though we will consider candidates with a less conventional background.

"Interested candidates should send in a resume, a letter explaining their interest in and suitability for the position and their salary expectations to Rabbi Sid Schwarz, project director for the Jewish Journey Project at dokrent@jccmanhattan.org."

If this is the first time you're hearing of the Jewish Journey Project, you might want to read Joy Levitt's editorial or Julie Weiner's article in Jewish Week.

We at Emanu-El have been involved in the planning process for over a year, so feel free to be in touch with me directly if you are curious about this initiative or my thoughts on the position.

Should Religious School be Cancelled on Halloween?

This year October 31st, a/k/a Halloween, falls on a Monday.

This poses a unique challenge for religious schools. Unlike Thanksgiving or New Year's Day, Halloween is not a national holiday, and secular schools do not close. Yet, practically speaking, for many children in the United States, the afternoon of the 31st is meant for trick-or-treating - exactly the time-slot when religious school is in session. And when I say "many," I think back to the last time that Halloween fell on a day when our school was in session.  Out of 75 students, exactly six showed up. One kid brought his mom, and I overheard him telling her, "You see, I TOLD you I would be the only fifth grader here!"

So this leaves religious school principals in a complicated position. On the one hand, it is hard to rationalize closing school for a non-Jewish holiday (I'll say here, parenthetically, that although some Jewish schools and teshuvot take a strong stance against Jews participating in any non-Jewish celebrations, I find unconvincing the arguments that Halloween is a "Christian" or "pagan" celebration.  True, it has pagan roots, but so do many Jewish holidays and rituals.  There are indeed Celtic neopagans celebrating Samhain on October 31, but that's not really the issue here.  And, we aren't talking about cancelling school on November 1, "All Saint's Day," but on "All Hallow's Eve," the night before; Halloween can be confusing and problematic for Christians too).

On the other hand, how do we ignore the reality that many of the kids will skip school, and that this will impact the experience of the ones who do attend?  Do we take a public stance on whether or not it is okay for kids who do attend - and faculty - to come in costume? 

So what to do?  I know of several schools that close for the day and instead run an in-service for their faculty.  This is a sensible response, and consistent with how some schools handle other holidays, such as Veteran's Day or Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Other schools allow for, or even informally encourage, early dismissal - a sort of compromise approach.

Still others offer special programming on the day, meant to entice students to view school as both a worthwhile alternative to trick-or-treating and to feel rewarded for their attendance.  One school I know offered a program on demons, ghosts and witchcraft in Judaism; another ran "Purim in October." 

We are in the fortunate position at Congregation Emanu-El of running a one-day a week school that offers classes on Sundays as well as weekday afternoons. We have a general policy of encouraging students who are unable to attend on their usual day of school to attend on the other day.  In fact, we've had students who regularly alternate between Sunday and weekday attendance, including children of divorced parents who have alternate custody over weekends and kids who change their day of school with the change in sports seasons. This year, we will suggest that parents whose children might miss school on the 31st should send their children on the 30th instead.  I'll let you know in the comments section how this goes.

This is, of course, just the first year in a new cycle of dealing with the "October Dilemma."  In 2012 and 2013, when Halloween falls on a Wednesday and Thursday, it will conflict with the schedules of many religious schools.  Then, in 2014, we'll turn this problem over to the clergy; they'll have to figure out how to handle attendance at All Hallow's Eve of Shabbat.

Best. Chanukah. Video. Ever.

The Great Dreidel Spinoff 5771, from Temple Sinai in Dresher, PA.



Hats off (or maybe on, it's a conservative synagogue) to David Monblatt, Director of Congregational Learning.


I also want to give a shout-out to Temple Emanu-El of West Essex, New Jersey, for a video with great photos of their edible menorah competition (more easily viewed on their flickr photo-stream):



Best quote -- Rabbi Mark Kaiserman, on the miracle of the oil: "The Bible is full of miracles [but] this is not much of a miracle"

Hebrew Teachers -- Take Heart!

One of the baffling questions Jewish educators in the diaspora face is whether we should prioritize teaching Biblical Hebrew, prayerbook Hebrew, or contemporary spoken Hebrew.  In her article What Kind of Hebrew, Isa Aron observes that while there is overlap between them, each is "different kind of Hebrew, or, more precisely, a different aspect of the Hebrew language," requiring dissimilar methods of study. 

Thanks (once again) to the Lookjed list, I have just learned of a very interesting resource that is on-line – a list of the top 1000 words most frequently appearing in the siddur and tenakh and a comparison of the frequency of their use in modern Hebrew literature (the original source is Prof. Shlomo Haramati, 'Havanat haNikra baSiddur uvaMikra' published by the Jewish Agency, Department for Religious Education and Culture in the Diaspora 1983) .

On the charts, the left-hand column (marked with roman numerals I – V) indicates how often a word appears in the siddur (a I indicates 500 or more times), and in the right-hand column, how often in the Bible (again, a 1 means at least 500 times). The middle column (alef-hey) is how often the word is used in contemporary Hebrew (alef is most frequently).

Now, couple this with Rahel Halabe's assumption that the top 100 most frequently used words actually account for nearly 60% of all the words that are used, and it becomes clear that any word that receives a rating of I – alef – 1 would be an especially useful word for your students to know.

And what are some examples? Yom, Lo, Hu/Hi, Melech, Natan, Aseh, Olam, Shem...

So, if your students manage to learn only 100 useful words over the course of their Hebrew studies, as long as they are the right words, it will actually give them a huge head-start not only in understanding the siddur, but also in reading the Bible and in conversing in Hebrew!

An excellent resource for discussion of teaching Hebrew in the diaspora is the wiki The Hebrew Project.  Of particular note are Avram Mandell's description of his "Derekh Ha-Limmud" program, the Hebrew literacy "manifestos" of Nachama Skolnik Moskowitz and Isa Aron, and Lifsa Schachter's essay on teaching the Hebrew alphabet and decoding.  But there are many other interesting and useful things to discover there.

Lookjed is a project of the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education.

Good Teachers Make a Difference. No, Really?

The NY Times finally tells us what we've all known all along - and does it really, really well. I can even (almost) forgive the writer, Elizabeth Green, for ending a sentence with a preposition:

"When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to."

[The photo to the right is copyright Benjamin Norman for The New York Times.] The article begins by noting that paying higher salaries does help to attract and retain the best and most qualified teachers.  However, it also notes that we need to simultaneously be focused on improving pedagogy and content knowledge through professional development,  because of the vast number of teachers that the education system requires to operate (and especially at a time when the baby-boomer teachers are retiring).

The main focus of the article is Doug Lemov, author of an as-yet-unpublished, 375-page long taxonomy of 49 essential teaching techniques (apparently, he distributes it at training seminars, and it will be available from this spring).  Much of the piece describes effective classroom management techniques that the Times illustrates with videos narrated by Lemov. I suspect that every one of our Religious School teachers would benefit from watching these brief videos - and especially the Hebrew teachers.

The article is on-line as of this morning, and already is getting much buzz around the blogosphere (a term I use derisively, btw.  Nothing better than reading a piece in which the author writes "I haven't finished reading this article yet, but I had to post...").

You'll want to read the whole article so that you can read in context little gems like these:

"All Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining. In Boston, he declared himself on a personal quest to eliminate the saying of “shh” in classrooms, citing what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh.’ Are you asking the kids not to talk, or are you asking kids to talk more quietly?” A teacher’s control, he said repeatedly, should be “an exercise in purpose, not in power.”"

"...One [student] is playing with a pair of headphones; another is slowly paging through a giant three-ring binder. Zimmerli stands at the front of the class in a neat tie. “O.K., guys, before I get started today, here’s what I need from you,” he says. “I need that piece of paper turned over and a pencil out.” Almost no one is following his directions, but he is undeterred. “So if there’s anything else on your desk right now, please put that inside your desk.” He mimics what he wants the students to do with a neat underhand pitch. A few students in the front put papers away. “Just like you’re doing, thank you very much,” Zimmerli says, pointing to one of them. Another desk emerges neat; Zimmerli targets it. “Thank you, sir.” “I appreciate it,” he says, pointing to another. By the time he points to one last student — “Nice . . . nice” — the headphones are gone, the binder has clicked shut and everyone is paying attention.

"Lemov [explains] “Imagine if his first direction had been, ‘Please get your things out for class,’ ” he said. Zimmerli got the students to pay attention not because of some inborn charisma, Lemov explained, but simply by being direct and specific. Children often fail to follow directions because they really don’t know what they are supposed to do."

The article also notes that "content can’t be completely divorced from mechanics" and that different types of knowledge - mathematics, reading, science - require not only general skills but also ones unique to the subject. The implications for Jewish education are clear: There are skill sets that make for effective teaching of, say, Hebrew, that aren't necessarily the same as teaching about holidays or transferable if you can effectively teach French. Teachers need to be able to deeply understand the material and then be able to effectively share that knowledge with a room full of students who have diverse ways of thinking and learning.

"“If I’m asking my students a question, and I call on somebody, and they get it wrong, I need to work on how to address that,” [fifth-grade math teacher Katie] Bellucci explained in February. “It’s easy to be like, ‘No,’ and move on to the next person. But the hard part is to be like: ‘O.K., well, that’s your thought. Does anybody disagree? . . . I have to work on going from the student who gets it wrong to students who get it right, then back to the student who gets it wrong and ask a follow-up question to make sure they understand why they got it wrong and understood why the right answer is right.”"

Interestingly, although Lemov's taxonomy, or a similar mathematics-content-driven approach developed by Deborah Loewenberg Ball at the University of Michigan, can be used as a metric to observe what makes for effective education, there isn't clear evidence that these skill sets can actually be taught.

"Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University ... favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. He has an understandable reason: While study after study shows that teachers who once boosted student test scores are very likely to do so in the future, no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?"

Which brings us back to the original point: Now that we may be able to assess what skills are evidence of effective teaching, we need to offer salaries that will attract and keep the most qualified people in the classroom.

I'm encouraging all of my school faculty to read the article, and especially to watch the videos that the Times has posted. This is some good stuff.