Collegial relationships that make LGA stronger...

I am in Atlanta at the North American Jewish Day School Conference and enjoying my time here immensely. I have family in Atlanta so the fact that I get to spend some time with my brother and sister-in-law is an extra bonus. Morah Devorah is here with me plus a few other educators from our area. We hardly get to see each other because there are closer to 700 people here. The beauty of this conference is that it is completely cross-denominational. Jewish schools from across the spectrum are here. We all share one thing in common - educating the future leaders of the Jewish community.

The landscape in Jewish day school education is becoming so diverse. Some schools look very similar to LGA while others have a distinctly different feel because of cultural differences. Yet, we all strive for excellence, which of course is subjective.

I spent a good part of yesterday in a PEJE workshop dedicated to Development professionals. We had a session called "Speed Dating." There were close to fifty of us in this session. With a partner, we sat across from one another and had three minutes to get to know each other and our schools. We had to talk about a success and a challenge at our school. We also had to hand our partner our business card. We did this for an hour or so and I networked like a champion. Making connections and taking away some ideas that were really thought provoking to see how we could fit them into our valley community. I walked away intrigued by the creativity of the Jewish day school community. Again, some of these ideas may not be so desirable to implement in our school or community.

Throughout the conference, one major aspect is networking not only yourself but your school. Leveraging air time with important people and there were a lot there. Here's the good and exciting news...LGA is on the national scene as a school that embraces academic excellence, rigorous learning, creativity at every corner and is doing things right. We won a national award for creativity. School administrators are asking me how we are doing it. Really exciting stuff.

We are growing! I wish I could say this about every Jewish day school but it isn't happening. Demographics aren't in our favor but you know what is - our faculty and our innovative approach to learning. I appreciate these two factors even more than I did before I left.

Let's keep growing and thinking. See you soon.

You make me blush when you say that, but GO ON!

With much anticipation and almost 100 percent certainty, students at LGA look forward to recess. It's a lot of fun at LGA! There are a myriad of activities for students to take part in. We are fortunate because there is a lot of green space for students to explore, and the playground built a few years ago still gets a lot of attention from both small and big kids. As I blogged before, Four Square is a major part of the landscape of recess. At our weekly all-school meeting, 5th and 6th graders announce "all-school" recess games, while younger students look forward to hearing the choices with much excitement. Some games are popular, garnering close to thirty students of all different ages playing, while others draw a smaller crowd. What makes them all similar is that everyone, no matter the age or skill level, is not only invited but encouraged to play. My office window looks out at this game, and I often peer through my window with pride, because it is times like this when our small school really works well. Some might say it is out of necessity, but I don't agree. 

At almost three years of age, my own son, Raviv, can hold his own with the big kids of kindergarten, and yet also enjoys parallel play with his younger sister, Danya, as she toddles about in our family room. I see how much Raviv appreciates learning from the older kids he interacts with. I wouldn't change a thing about how he is learning negotiation, seeing and imitating behaviors in other children (that Rebecca and I might not always want to have emulated) and picking up new vocabulary words every day.  Many of these experiences aren't with his age cohort. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what he learns from his peers, but these multiage interactions have developed his skills even greater than I thought possible. He goes to preschool and is with ten other 2-3 year olds all day. In the afternoon, he joins with his friends from the middle classroom. He is in love with every single child in that classroom. We have to tear him out of there when we pick him up at the end of the day. It is this appreciation that makes my reaction to recess standards at LGA even stronger. 

Navigating an elementary school playground can sometimes be a daunting task. Luckily, recess at LGA is, for the most part, a joyous experience. It's pleasant. When the whistle blows signaling everyone to line up, it goes to a whole other level. The 6th graders help corral everyone else into lines. A hush falls over the assembled. The leaders ask four or five different students for something we call "compliments," which are exactly what it sounds like. "I want to thank Mara for playing soccer with me. She showed me how to kick the ball the proper way." "I want to thank Yoav for including me in the game of Four Square." "I want to thank the 5th graders for letting me join in on the game of tag." Et cetera. 

It's the kind of moment that makes you do a double take and blush. The younger students are seeing and hearing the older students being nice to each other. Before students walk into class, they are taking a collective deep breath and appreciating others. Not a bad habit to teach our kids.

When the big guys do it right

Wednesday was a great day for the entire Jewish community. PEJE (Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education) awarded twenty-five $25,000 awards for ideas of innovation around three different discreet yet closely linked areas of school governance: endowment building, student recruitment and annual fund. They were looking to motivate the greater community to think of creative new ways to innovate the entire Jewish day school field.

I am proud to say that Lander~Grinspoon Academy was one of the winners. We submitted a proposal for our "Double Chai campaign" from the summer. Double Chai was a combination of social networking, rallying a community and finding the right amount to "ask" for from our community all focused around bolstering our annual campaign. The momentum that we built from that project was stunning. And now being acknowledged by a national organization for the work that we did is so gratifying. 

The original intention of my blog was to talk about being Jewish in a small community. The Pioneer Valley is a little bit of everything. It is rural. It is urban. It is suburban. It is exurban. It is really whatever you want it to be. The people you meet here are unique individuals, many of them choosing to move here because it is this valley life they are seeking. One thing that holds true (for me at least) is that it is sometimes challenging to have a "big" Jewish life with all of the trappings that come with being in a bigger community. Please don't mishear me, I appreciate my friends and colleagues here and in the almost four years that we have been here, we have made incredible friends and met amazing individuals who are unique and interesting each in their own right. 

But what this blog has turned into showcasing what a fine school LGA is and how we as a community continue to reflect on educating young people on a daily basis. LGA has been able to find the right balance of progressive education all the while seeking out multiples perspectives to traditional timeless lessons in both Judaic and general studies. This school and this community has the right vibe - hip, young, progressive yet academically challenging, high standards for all students (no matter where they are) and yet nurturing intellectual curiosity. Many schools do all of those well but one thing that makes us stand out is the COMMUNITY. The community that has been built here is unbelievably unique. Children are given examples of how community works on a daily basis. 

I have been attempting to illustrate them with this blog and hopefully will continue to do so. Double Chai reached out to the greater community and it responded. And now, PEJE has said what we did here at LGA was worthy of winning an award so that we could showcase for others that with a little ingenuity and creativity (and maybe a little people power!), we could find new ways to fundraise for the school. 

PEJE is in the business of helping day schools thrive and this challenge award was the best example of that. I maintain that we need more of these types of challenges to motivate our community. I cannot wait to read all about the other entries. PEJE got it right. For me delving into these other ideas is like eating a bag full of Jelly Bellys. Once you rip open that bag, there will be 140 other flavors to salivate over. Some you'll really enjoy exploring and want more of and others won't be your taste but you can understand why someone else might find it tasty.

Would I feel differently if LGA hadn't won a Challenge Award? I'd be lying if I said it wouldn't be as easy to jump on the bandwagon but I'd still be very intrigued and motivated to see what had worked for other communities and where we could improve. 

So, Todah Rabbah, PEJE! Lander~Grinspoon Academy, the Solomon Schechter School of the Pioneer Valley thanks you for this gift. We hope you'll enjoy a few words from our community. 

Could that be challah that I smell?

I have always been someone who enjoys routine and schedules. Knowing where I need to be when or anticipating something in the future has always been quite satisfying to me. As a father, I have completely come to appreciate Shabbat in a completely different way. One day "off" every week means recharging my proverbial battery. Celebrating Shabbat is the ultimate "recharger." In our house, Raviv enthusiastically waits for Shabbat to arrive. The rituals for Shabbat have become second nature to him. He describes it as "our at home" day. We rest, eat great food, read, play, walk. It's great!

With that being said, there is a rhythm to the LGA week that I (and many students and faculty members) have so come to appreciate. Like everything we do here at LGA, our students straddle two distinct worlds, both the secular and Jewish. Children get much needed free time and exploration of activities that the week just doesn't allow for. Every Friday, this building comes alive with getting ready to celebrate Shabbat and the weekend. 

There are a number of rituals here at LGA that makes our celebration homey and lovely. Around 11 AM, every Friday morning, I find a group of Gan (Kindergarten) students making homemade challah. In small groups, they work with one of their teachers to create these doughy and light masterpieces. The smell gently and deliciously fills the main hallway of our building. The Gan often makes more than the requisite two needed for their classroom and delivers them to members of our greater community who are either elderly, sick, or just in need of a delicious Gan challah. 

Morah Amy helps Mira braid the challah.

Mira and Madeline coat the challah with an egg wash for extra shininess. 

Every Friday afternoon, we end our learning early so that we can either gather as a whole school or in small clusters to celebrate Kabbalat Shabbat. We find this time essential to our week. This transition from formal learning to a celebration and reflection of our week behind and ahead of us is an important goal we are teaching  for our school. We are teaching our children to be thoughtful reflectors and to think to themselves about the big (and not so big) questions that often adults have a hard time contemplating. Our Kabbalat Shabbat time is a favorite of our students both current and past. It is the place where many school traditions are formed. 

One such tradition is when members of our 6th grade class write a song for Rosh Chodesh (the new month) about the month that just happened in Torah and holidays to come. Our students study the Bible as both a text that offers a seminal connection to the Jewish people and a rich piece of literature that is beautifully written and allows students to question many aspects of life. Our 6th graders take their responsibility very seriously when it comes to writing these often very funny verses. Students are integrating so much when they write these songs. Enjoy last month's ditty... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaDSt-WjJCc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Morah Devorah, Moreh Aharon and Moreh Dov have worked hard to create a fun, raucous, song filled Kabbalat Shabbat with both new and old tunes. Child friendly yet truly enjoyed by adults alike, LGA has created a bridge to Shabbat and the weekend that is made of memories and connectedness to the Jewish people in really unique ways. Join us for our next all-school Kabbalat Shabbat! You won't be disappointed. 

We do it because we love it...

I am going to start with three statements that I hold as true in my mind about the relationship that lay leaders play in the vitality of the independent school world and that are especially true in the case of Lander~Grinspoon Academy.

1) LGA is a dynamic and complicated organization with many people invested in making it a school of excellence every day. We are not a school with a large overhead of administrative resources.
2) Most independent schools and LGA included depend on the greater community to support it in a variety of ways including both human and financial resources.
3) It currently takes and will continue to take both lay leaders and paid professionals to make LGA a place that maintains to be on the forefront for both the Jewish people and the educational world.

LGA, like many small schools in its shoes, has relatively few administrative positions. As a matter of fact and clarification, our school administrator (Ashley) and myself are the only full time administrators (all of the others have some teaching responsibilities or are not paid to be here every day) outside of the faculty. The school from its roots has depended and continues depend on a strong and robust lay and volunteer leadership to accomplish our mission and vision of being a strong Jewish day school.

On Saturday night, we gathered at the National Yiddish Book Center to put the spotlight on one such lay leader whom from the moment she stepped onto the scene at 257 Prospect Street was an active and fully committed member of our LGA community.  

You see finding lay leaders like Karen Kuhr are rare. Karen’s combination of fierce loyalty, getting down to brass tacks; working hard for the organization that you care so much (in this case her children’s school) about; taking on projects that no one else will do and most importantly rallying the troops for support.  This is all Karen and yet this is and has been so many people at LGA Schechter. This school was built with that in mind. It is with much pride that I could probably look at many people in this room and thoughtfully think about what you have done. This school will always remain that type of community. When it comes to building community, ours is the envy of other schools. Why is that? Because of the genuine compassion of the parent community towards this school, which in turn gets filtered down to our children. For that I thank each and everyone of you.

As many of you know, Karen and Saul love to throw a party. One of my first introductions to this community was their infamous summer party held right before the start of school. They love to host and love to make it big! They fulfill the ultimate mitzvah of Hachnast Orchim, welcoming the stranger. If the school (or I) ever needed to host a small affair, if we are ever short a host for Night Around the Table, Karen, graciously and enthusiastically offered up her home. Saul, with his easy going vibe, always comes along for the ride.

A few weeks ago, we read Parashat Vayera. In this Torah portion, three angels come to the tent of Avraham and Sarah. They do not know these angels, yet Avraham and Sarah open their home widely and with much gusto to make their guests feel welcomed in their home.  They prepared a feast for people that they didn’t really know. Karen and Saul imbue the virtues of welcoming the strangers becoming unbelievable role models for our community.

Karen, Saturday night was our night to say thank you for all that you have done. But it also represented all that everyone has done for this community to make Lander~Grinspoon Academy, the Solomon Schechter School of the Pioneer Valley, the fine community school that it is. 

So here I go again, using that ever so important word community that gets so overused but is really the essence of our school - one community working together to create a powerful and relevant education for our children. To all those people who spend countless hours at meetings, volunteering, shuttling back and forth, sharing your passion, or giving your dollars, THANK YOU! Know that you are appreciated and how much of an impact it has on the everyday of the school. Karen is one example of someone who leads by doing but she has many who follow her shining example. 

What! Another day off...

Yesterday there were, perhaps, many an LGA parent mumbling expletives about the fact that there was no school. After a long holiday weekend, I appreciate bringing Raviv and Danya to their appointed places, relishing the fact that they are in good hands and we are all back to our routine. So why, then, was there another day off yesterday? It was probably the most important day off that students have taken in a long time. While they were enjoying another day of rest and relaxation, our faculty was deeply immersed in the work of creating a document for a "Vision of Good Teaching" at LGA. This isn't just a one-day, months-long, or even year-long project. This is a multifaceted, ongoing collaboration that is taking our school on a journey to even higher places. Our main question of focus has been, and remains, "How do we make schools a place for teacher learning?"

Yesterday, we focused on two additional questions with four ancillary objectives: "How do we observe to improve learning and teaching?" and "How can standards affect teacher performance?" In the above picture, you will see the four goals of the day. I want to focus a bit on the word niceness. We also used the word politeness a lot. Many elementary schools (and especially LGA) are places that are generally  pleasant, polite places to work. For the most part, faculty members treat each other with the utmost respect. When it comes to their work, they have interacted with each other in rather perfunctory ways - exchanging niceties, never observing each other's classrooms, and assuming that every lesson, from every teacher, every day, is adequate. 

These past three years, we at LGA have started to break down this rather blind vision, and have said our doors are open to learning for everyone in the building. But we haven't been doing this work alone. It is through our time spent with the Mandel Center at Brandeis University that we have really shaped this vision for good teaching. We owe a huge amount of gratitude to Mandel for politely pushing an agenda forward that is in groove with our's as a school. LGA does an excellent job of teaching our students. We must commit to doing the same thing with our teachers. It can't be a one-sided proposition. We are now focusing on the differences between "niceness," "judgement," and "inquiry." As a faculty, we are moving toward "inquiry." In small groups, we started by challenging ourselves to look at a text entitled "Developing Practitioners, Developing Practice." In this article, the authors talk about having "to un-learn the politeness norm that dominates most current teacher discourse." There is a lot to ponder when it comes to this point, largely because of what I mentioned in the previous paragraphs. By nature, we want to be collegial. It's the "nice thing to do." It's part of our school culture.

So how do we become a faculty that takes "inquiry"seriously? We are attempting to hone our skills by splitting into small groups who do "rounds" of observation of each other. We acknowledge that it will be a complicated scheduling task, but it will be worth it. Faculty is being split into groups of five, with a mix of general studies and Judaics teachers. 

Just as when doctors practice rounds, our teachers will explore deeply why certain teacher moves are used. There will be exacting protocols for discussion, and time set aside for teachers to inquire about the lesson that allows for risks to be taken. The teacher will have an opportunity to reflect on what he/she thought went well, and what didn't go as anticipated. It's this commitment to teacher learning that sets LGA apart. When we seek medical attention, we appreciate how doctors are consistently self-improving and staying on top of the latest findings even after years of practicing medicine. Shouldn't we hope for the same for our teachers? 

The word "thanks" can be so complex

I'll admit something right up front. Sometimes I have a hard time remembering to say "thank you." Don't get me wrong -- I am usually so appreciative of any type of gratitude that people show me or the school. It's not that I don't have a good memory. As you may or may not know, I have a freak-like capacity for remembering names and faces. When living in Boston, Rebecca and I went out to dinner with a work colleague and her boyfriend. They invited another person to join us, someone we didn't know. Within minutes, I told him that we had met once before at a random party several years earlier. Rebecca and our new friend sat there astonished by the fact that I remembered this very casual encounter at a crowded house party. I went on to tell him that he had a twin brother and was friends with an old roommate of mine. In short: I have no excuse for not remembering to say "thank you."


Fortunately for me, I am part of a community that takes saying thank you very seriously. Students and faculty members prove this every day. It is more than the simple yet meaningful task of saying thank you that we, as a school, consider such an essential part of a child's education. It isn't negotiable for us. Many of our students come from homes that share these values -- put that thank you into action. We ask our students questions like, "How do you want to change the world?" and "What are you grateful for?" We we don't expect trite responses; we want students to contemplate these questions during their time here. 


When beginning to think about this topic, I did some research. I stumbled upon an article by Melinda Beck from The Wall Street Journal entitled, "Thank You. No, Thank You." In the article, Beck writes, "Kids who feel and act grateful tend to be less materialistic, get better grades, set higher goals, complain of fewer headaches and stomach aches, and feel more satisfied with their friends, families, and schools than those who don't, studies show." When I was reading it, I thought of students at LGA and the overall gestalt of our community. It is a nice one. This article is talking about LGA.  Students here genuinely care about each other. We don't expect all of them to love each other, but we do expect respect for differences. We are teaching our students how to be grateful for their strengths and "not-yet strengths" that they have been blessed with. When faced with opposition from a student, often you'll hear a classroom teacher say "every single student in our class is working on something." This time of the year often makes us reflect on what we are thankful for. But it can't be the only time of the year that we think of saying thank you, because if so, then we have failed as educators. Throughout the year, students have the opportunity to ask deeper questions about themselves and why being thankful is such a complex idea. 


This Wednesday, as we prepare for Thanksgiving, the whole school will spend the day involved in different service-learning projects. For some of them it will be a culmination of a unit learned, while for others it will be the first time they are learning about terms like homelessness, poverty, and injustice. Still others will be challenged to think past themselves. For all of them, it is just a brief snapshot of being grateful and giving thanks -- and another compelling reason why this school is just that special. Thanks! (See I remembered...)