Jewish Learning

Supporting Each Other Judgement Free

School is beginning and this year, more than ever, educators in early childhood centers and religious schools need support. A year and a half of changing plans that we worked so hard on, learning entirely new ways of teaching, comforting others while feeling uncertain ourselves, and doing our best to create a sense of community while students are separated into pods or logging into class from their homes has left educators running on fumes.

As we all dig deep to ensure that the start of this school year is as special and exciting as we can make it, our Jewish tradition offers answers as to where we might look for support. Hinei ma tov u’ma naim, shevet achim gam yachad: how good and pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to sit together (Psalm 133:1). We are in this together and we understand one another’s struggles and achievements, as educators, better than anyone else. While early childhood centers and religious schools welcome children to campus at different times and for different programs, the educational leaders of these departments can find time to sit with one another on a regular basis, without a formal agenda. Having this time set aside to speak with someone who inherently understands what we do and the intricacies of the organizations in which we work, can become the extra emotional sustenance that we need to propel us into this new school year.

This year we can make an extra effort to support our fellow educators by sitting together without judgment through:

• Joy: sharing our successes with students and watching their growth, watching our teachers develop professionally, celebrating lifecycle events, enjoy the moments when we get to feel a sense of “normalcy”, and laugh at the silly things that we see and hear when our students are with us.
• Hardship: the personal and professional challenges that Covid creates for educators, the shortage of teachers and money to pay them what they deserve, and the fear of our students, staff, families, or ourselves becoming ill.
• Change: the ways that we have had to learn to adapt to teaching our students in new ways, the ever-changing guidelines and mandates placed on schools, and the ways that many aspects of our jobs have dramatically changed since Covid began.
   

Rose Orlovich, MAEd, MAEd ECE
Director of Education
Lee and Frank Goldberg Family Religious School
Congregation Beth Israel, San Diego, CA

Congregation’s Lay Leader, Executive Director, and Youth Director Joins Director of Lifelong Learning to Reimagine Education and Engagement

Jewish history is a story of creative adaptation, creative disruption, and creative collaboration, according to Dr. Miriam Heller Stern, Director of HUC-JIR’s Schools of Education. Dr. Heller Stern spoke at the recent URJ Biennial Extension: Creativity and Collaboration in Jewish Education workshop.

I, along with our congregation’s executive director, youth director and chair of the education committee, attended this thought-inspiring workshop.

Citing the book Lifelong Kindergarten, by Mitchel Resnick, Dr. Heller Stern reminded us that the learning environments of youngest students are places of play in which they learn to work with each other as inventors and problem solvers.    

Dr. Heller Stern also explained that Jewish education and engagement should be a lab for fostering creativity to develop learners’ skills and mindsets to continue our sacred story.  

During the workshop, participating teams of lay leaders and professional staff members collaboratively explored these important issues and questions around Jewish learning:

• How might the evolving demographics and landscape of the Jewish community inform our thinking about Jewish education and engagement? How can we better understand the diversity of our learners, spaces, and communities?
• Where, beyond the ‘walls’ of normative spaces, might we reach our potential learners? What will it take to attend to the whole student and the whole family, as they strengthen habits of mind to think and act creatively?
• What is the change we hope Jewish learning will bring to the world?
• How might we reset our organizational cultures to be more open-minded and rethink assumptions about the “why” of what we do... so that we can get to a better “how?”

While we were only able to begin to consider these questions, it did leave us inspired. It also reminded us that, as leaders, we have the power to collaboratively adapt and be disruptive so that we can enable our learners of all ages to continue to write the story of our evolving Jewish history.

Katherine Schwartz, EdD, RJE
Director of Lifelong Learning
Congregation Har HaShem on the Margolis Family Campus
Boulder, CO 80303

President, ARJE