Jewish Education Talks

Join us for a brilliant episode with Dr. Sharon Silverman, the incoming Chair of the Board of Trustees of Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. She is an educator, academic, and published author. Scroll down for a full bio.  

Student Voices: We Believe in You 

Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership

This discussion is filled with insights and wisdom about education and teaching and learning practices. It is peppered with personal anecdotes that illustrate Sharon's points and highlight her belief that stories are a great way to learn. A few details to look out for in the discussion: 

• Overall approach: While students have many similarities, each one is different from the next and we need to concentrate on how they differ from each other.
• What is emotional awareness?
• What is self-efficacy?
• What is persistence? 
• Practical suggestions for teachers based on these three components of the Believe In You model. 
• What is "applied Jewish learning"?
• "When you're green, you are growing. When you're ripe, you rot!"

I hope you enjoy this episode and learn a lot. The quality of the conversation more than makes up for the limited quality of the audio recording itself. 

Who is Dr. Sharon Silverman? Learn about her work below.

Dr. Silverman is a founding partner in the consulting firm of TRPP Associates. She is an educator and independent scholar with degrees in learning disabilities and educational psychology. She is the founder and former director of the Learning Assistance Center at Loyola University Chicago where she developed LEAP, an award winning student access and retention program and a learning center at the Stritch School of Medicine. Dr. Silverman served on the Board of St. Augustine College in Chicago, the first bilingual institution of higher education in Illinois. 
 
At Columbia College Chicago, Silverman helped develop The Learning Studio, an academic support center for students. At Harry S Truman College in Chicago, she worked with faculty and staff to develop a robust tutoring and tutor training program.  Dr. Silverman also helped The Adler School of Psychology develop a Center for Learning and Teaching. She continues to be a mentor/reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission.  She is a member of the Board of Trustees for Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago.
 
Internationally, Dr. Silverman was a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa and subsequently received a Fulbright Alumni Initiatives Award for a project, "Sharing Cultures" connecting students and teachers in a virtual learning community at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and Columbia College Chicago.   Other awards include a Rotary University Scholar Grant to continue her work in South Africa and a Fulbright Senior Specialist Award at Suleyman Demeril University in Kazakhstan.  She was an invited keynote speaker at the International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace Research in Cyprus and an invited scholar at Kazakhstan-British Technical University in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
 
Dr. Silverman along with Dr. Martha Casazza co-authored the following publications: Learning Assistance and Developmental Education (Jossey-Bass, 1996) and Learning and Development: Making Connections to Enhance Teaching (Jossey-Bass, 1999), and Partners for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (iUniverse, 2005) and Student Voices: We Believe in You (iUniverse, 2017).

Saul Kaplan shares some of his experiences and wisdom about Jewish education in this short interview. Some of the powerful ideas he mentioned are:

• The importance of ownership
  • an example of what this looks like
• The importance of the teacher
• Considering the input/output process to ensure the system has coherence
• Education as "the opening of minds" (my words, not his)

I really enjoyed speaking to Saul and hearing his ideas. I personally benefit from his prior work on a daily basis and this interview shows a bit of why he was successful in putting together a framework that has lasted so long and is still beneficial to our school. 

What are the implications of Jewish education's obsession with programmes? Why do we have a proclivity to deploy programmes? In this episode, which is based on personal experience rather than objective findings, I explore this issue and the potential for a different approach.

The key theoretical claim I make is to view programmes as a positioning act rather than a well-grounded educational decision. The position taken depends on the context but has some general characteristics, for example, that the position dichotomizes and paints the Other with one brush. It is therefore difficult to question the educational power of an established programme because to do so involves opposition to the taken position. You want to ask questions about the educational value, but the programme represents, by its very nature, a position taken (often implicitly ideological) that resists any attempt at questioning. 

For those interested, I borrowed the concept of "position-taking"  from Rob Moore and Johan Muller in 'Voice Discourse' and the Problem of Knowledge and Identity.

Although I don't state it in the episode, alternatives solutions to deploying programmes would involve addressing systemic goals and developing talent within that framework. Rather than creating further fragmentation through additional sub-systems, you would look to address goals through a holistic lens and problem solve in a whole system manner where implications of proposed solutions apply to all aspects of the system. 

I think this idea really plays out in the online situation forced by the worldwide shutdown of schools. The resources that are thrown around as solutions represent programmes that are deployed in a school system. I understand the value in these resources as a short term solution. But as a permanent or long-term approach, I really wonder whether schools relatively indiscriminate adoption of resources is wise?

Along with teachers and schools around the world, we have, in a matter of days, transferred to 'remote/digital/online' teaching. I have found it difficult to transfer the cultural aspects of the school - those Jewish aspects that rely heavily on a physical presence at the school. For me, this includes things like Tefilla, ceremonies for significant Jewish dates, informal activities, corridor interactions, Jewish initiatives, charitable initiatives etc - things that create an 'Avirah' (atmosphere) in the school. 

In this podcast, I reflect on the nature of these challenges in the hopes that a better understanding will lead to a better set of possible approaches. By the end of the episode, I identify what my "next-step question" is. 

I offer a theoretical lens to frame this problem based on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). This thinking was inspired by Dorian Love's blog post. I also refer briefly back to Ep 010 - the difficult part of education. How do we foster disposition development in students? Or, if you believe in 'identity goals', what is the connection between student learning and student identity formation? Put into the context of an online environment, these questions become all the more stark. 

Join Rabbi Gavi Ziegler and me for a meandering conversation - I ramble, he is direct and clear! - about Jewish education. We explore what he enjoys about his work, what goals his school has for Jewish education, the challenges they face, their focus on values and integrating values across the school. 

Gavi's recommended resource is Rabbi J. Sacks's book "To Heal a Fractured World". 

At the end, Gavi shares a powerful message (he heard from Rabbi Sacks) to give us strength during this time of lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic. 

I share Basil Bernstein's three fields of knowledge: 

• production
• recontextualization
• re-production

Using this as a lens, I present a second idea about the quandary that Jewish day schools face in trying to meet the diverse needs of a diverse community. Since no real philosophy of Judaism within the community can be 'imported' into the school to meet diverse needs - because it doesn't exist, partly due to the fact that Jewish day schools are often the only institution in which diverse communities may combine (cf. the siloing of denominational synagogues) - a new philosophy has to be produced. Thus, Jewish day schools may serve as rich seeding grounds for new ways of thinking about Judaism. 

It turns out that Jewish day schools, in addition to knowledge re-production (teaching and learning), may need to become sites of knowledge production and knowledge recontextualization. This may point to the complexity inherent in such endeavours as foundationally complex rather than merely technically complex. 

I know, I know, it's all tricky!! But hear me out and what I have to say in this overly simplistic analysis. In essence, I want to point out that the difficulty in education, the real sticky bit that we have not quite figured out, is how the integration of knowledge in the individual cultivates a particular lens/identity (perhaps this is a spectrum?) in that individual. 

• How do we minimize the loss of learning/content? 
• How do we facilitate the integration of knowledge? (I.e., How do people learn and therefore how should we teach?)
• How do individuals develop identity? 

All questions (above) with lots of answers. I'm not saying these fields are simple, I'm saying they are well developed and well understood, at least by some experts in the field. 

What is missing is this: how does the individual move from being a novice to being an expert, not just in terms of technical knowledge and ability, but in terms of their dispositions and intuitions.

Not sure if this makes sense to anyone besides me... hmmm... lol. sorry 'bout that. 

Yael Fish is Head of Department - Jewish Life and Learning at a Jewish day school. She shares a few golden tips for early or starting teachers. Briefly, they are: 

1. You can learn from your mistakes
2. Balance what works for you versus what the team (or school) requires
3. Don't take it too seriously
4. Make your students feel good
5. Have a mentor (who 'works for you')

I hope that everyone is indoors and safe. Here are a few thoughts about the challenges that this pandemic has created. Obviously, there are many more challenges than this and much more to say about it. Please stay safe and take the time, fifteen minutes every day, to zone in and think meta - think about the things you can do to make your days better. Blessings to you all. 

Topics in this epsiode

• My background as a teacher with EdTech
• My background as a student (online/distance)

• Interaction between teachers and vendors
• EdTech community hype
• Over-emphasis on EdTech
• What type of research is done

Things that are missing in an online environment

• Support through the 'grief' process in learning new stuff
• Teachers are expecting more from kids (especially re instructions)
• Learning conversations are stilted and unnatural
• Skills (as a conceptual whole) to thrive online - analogy to a novice apprenticed to a master to gain 'in-group' status

The danger of this mass move to online/remote teaching is that ideas are disempowered (Papert). What does this mean for the pathway (i.e., the discourse going forward) - the types of questions/assumptions that are debated and enacted?