As a pluralistic Jewish high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, with students from a wide range of backgrounds, the questions we grapple with most frequently is: how do we create points of entry for Jewish learning among our diverse population? Our attempts to answer this question require that we step back and revisit our purpose and check how our pedagogy aligns with the mission of our school. It demands that we consider the ways in which we strive to satisfy our school mission, and the ways in which our larger educational purpose informs our choices in the classroom. As an instructional leader, I strive to create a discernment process among faculty that is as inclusive as possible. I believe that people are more likely to fulfill the vision of a school or institution when they are part of the formation of an articulated vision. As a result, I wanted to create a process that demanded that teachers come together and invest in creating a shared vision, identifying areas where we might diverge, areas where we agree and create a shared plan for our next steps.
“I wanted to create a process that demanded that teachers come together and invest in creating a shared vision, identifying areas where we might diverge, areas where we agree and create a shared plan for our next steps.”
I believe that there is power in group decision making. It assumes a belief in the wisdom and creativity of individuals and the deep power of groups. It asks of us to listen actively, to be patient with the process and embody a flexible approach to decision making. As Dean of Jewish Studies and Hebrew, my goal is to create a culture where Jewish content, teaching and learning is at the core of what we do. To do that well, we must create an environment where colleagues work together in a constructive and productive manner. I also believe that it behooves any organization to harness the creativity and intelligence of its members in that process. As such, it was my priority to create an environment where people could identify and solve problems, plan together, make collaborative decisions and thus deepen their personal commitment to our work.
Allow me to outline how this process went. When we began this work, I had our department look inward to launch us on a journey of genuine inquiry and curiosity. At our first department meeting of the academic year, I had teachers respond to the personal question “Why am I doing this work? What do I think is the purpose of Jewish education?” Each teacher had four minutes to share, and I asked them to ground their response in a text, a picture or a story. After each teacher spoke, we used a “final word” protocol to pair up and reflect back to each other what we had heard. The goal of this first meeting was not to reach an agreement. This was a meeting to listen to each other and better understand our colleagues’ ideas around why we do what we do.
Immediately after that first meeting, I asked faculty to respond to two prompts: One thing that they learned from their colleagues and one thing that they noticed or that surprised them. Teachers responded with thoughtful observations. One idea captured the imaginations of many of those present. It was the idea that the teachers are at the school in order to “craft a new Judaism that does good to the world built from the pieces that still work.” This idealistic and ambitious articulation of our goal for the Jewish studies at the school prompted many questions within me and among those present; “I sometimes feel like the challenge at our school is that there are so many wonderful pieces of Judaism that ‘still work’ but we don’t have enough opportunities to teach them, or teach them extensively enough. What range of approaches to Judaism are we enabling our students to craft with what we teach them? How do we decide which aspects of Judaism we share with them so that they can ‘create’ their approach and do good to the world? Is our department aware of the role that each of our classes plays in this potential development?” These reflections were compiled into a shared document which we read in between our meetings and directed the course of the next meeting.
One of the ways to ensure that collaborative vision planning ensures that individuals are heard is to have their ideas and questions guide and shape the meetings that follow. As such, in preparation for our second meeting and to build on our observations and questions, I asked teachers to read an article that outlined the 18×18 Educational Framework and to think about how it resonated or did not resonate with what we said or heard at our previous meeting. While the department grappled with the language and content of the framework, the meeting was very generative and we arrived at a mutual understanding and an agreed upon challenge. We came to a consensus that “practice” is a lacuna in our curriculum and offerings. Many Jewish high schools emphasize meaning-making skills and intellectual pursuits at the expense of practice. For example, those immersive, experiential, and often communal Jewish practices like day-long Yom Haatzmaut celebrations or Zimriyah sessions, are often relegated to a few minutes of the academic week or cut completely, in order for academic learning to happen. Or the playfulness of cooking, or creating art to decorate the school, for an upcoming holiday that is often the hallmark of a Jewish elementary school experience is missing in high school. Students tend not to engage in the cultural richness of the tapestry of Jewish practice, and if they do, it usually is in the classroom and around a text.
“For collaborative vision planning to be successful, one cannot enter into the process with a goal in mind. Rather, together we remained in the world of ideas—discussing, imagining and hypothesizing together.”
Where do we go from here?
These facilitating meetings provided an opportunity to support profound personal learning as well as an opportunity for us to listen to one another’s ideas. For collaborative vision planning to be successful, one cannot enter into the process with a goal in mind. Rather, together we remained in the world of ideas—discussing, imagining and hypothesizing together. When we identified a problem, in our case a lacuna of practice, everyone understood the reasoning behind that problem because we had all participated in the conversation. We had allowed opposing views to coexist, we had asked questions of clarification and everyone was given a chance to speak. Collaborative vision planning pushes people to carefully think through the logic of the issues at hand. We agreed that Judaism is a living practice and as such we wanted to see more courses that build in Jewish practice or add it to existing courses. So where do we go from here? It is at that moment, that as a group we moved from the world of ideas to the world of action.
Just like our other meetings, we used our own observations to plan next steps. In this case, we decided as a group to create an inventory that addressed the questions we raised.
- Where do we have practice embedded in our classes?
- Where is it embedded outside of the classroom?
- Does it represent the diversity of the Jewish experience?
- How can we introduce practice in a way that is pluralistic?
As is the case when one does an audit of anything, we noticed areas where we are succeeding and areas where we can grow. We individually and collectively made a commitment to taking certain steps to respond to our holes. Our teachers of Tanach agreed to introduce a Divrei Torah writing component to their classes in each grade to scaffold the skills required to produce words of Torah to others. Our Jewish history teacher committed to tracing the modern historical development of a specific practice, with an experiential and self-reflective component. Our Rabbinics and Jewish Thought teachers committed to inviting more student conversation around their own Jewish practices so that they are exposed to the diversity of practice at our school. As a department, we committed to generating ideas for holidays and creating a database of practices that are integrated into our classrooms. We committed to supporting the Jewish life team to support students to create small presentations for our communal time around chagim that offer a deeper introduction to the practices of the holiday and we committed to facilitating and supporting more text-based tefilot options. We also decided to expand our elective class called “L’Chaim: Jewish Celebrations and Consecrations,” which is a class explicitly created for the purpose of exploring the varied ways in which Jews from the many Sephardic and Ashkenazic cultural streams have developed unique ways to eat, dress, sing, toast, pray, and celebrate Jewish experience. In this class, students are encouraged to consider their own Jewish heritage and connections and put their own personal stamp on celebrations.
In conjunction with our own department work, we also initiated two pluralism task forces. One made up of students and one made of administrators and teachers. Our department meetings aligned with the desire to revisit and return to our pluralism mission and bring other departments into the conversation that we were having as a Jewish Studies department around diversity of ideas and practices present and missing in our school. Jewish identity formation hadn’t felt like a whole school endeavor and felt particular to Jewish Studies, but we wanted to make Jewish pluralism and Jewish practice part of everyone’s work. Both task forces studied the same texts around pluralism and the student task force is working on creating authentic and innovative all-school Jewish traditions and opportunities for collective practice such as Rosh Hodesh. We have invited students into our conversation around practice and ways to imagine incorporating more diverse practice opportunities in and outside of the classroom.
We still have so many questions generated from our meetings and they remain at the forefront of our work. There is a sense that we are moving towards shaping our vision of Jewish education and also an acknowledgment that this is not something that can be written up in a document once and then closed. This work is not static and every year we should be grappling with the profound question of the purposes of Jewish education, given the specific setting of a pluralistic Jewish day school.
