Bringing a Spirit of Innovation to Town

How do we take a community that is wonderful, but often staid, and help its day schools and Jewish educational institutions learn how to innovate and become more exciting places in which to learn and, by extension, make the Jewish community itself a more exciting and engaged community? 

Through a series of conversations with the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge and among our day schools, we asked that same question about innovation and excitement. 

Two schools stepped up, interestingly both centrist Orthodox schools that sensed a need to spice up tefillah (prayer education). Nobody expected that a portion of the work to foster innovation in a Jewish day school would involve immersive activity in a virtual or socially distanced prayer setting, but that turned out to be a significant part of the work. 

Midway through the”Tefillah Re-Imagined” initiative, which will be extended because of the pandemic’s impact on our schools, we have already learned some important lessons.

External Expertise Can Advance Innovation

First, we learned that the investment in bringing visionary educators from outside of a school and community helps those in the school to better appreciate what is working well, what isn’t, and what can be done to aim for excellence and impact. The two schools that are participating in this initiative have now conducted baseline surveys of their students’ engagement in tefillah. Some of the survey results indicate that although the students can recite the prayers fluently, and although in some cases, they have taken classes in bei’ur tefillah, the explanation of the prayers, they still have not personalized the experience of prayer, nor internalized the importance and impact of prayer on their lives. This will happen when teachers and students engage more interactively with each other on what the prayers mean for each particular student. 

Tefillah is a Series of Teachable Moments

We also learned from this survey that in a school (as well as in a community), prayer isn’t a “class” for which you simply show up. It is an opportunity for premier teachable moments that can become the most impactful daily Jewish educational experience. This discovery would not have occurred without the outside coaching, assistance and encouragement that led to the implementation of the surveys.

Reflective Practice Advances Change
Next, we learned that reflective practice among teachers is critically important. Research shows that most educators teach in the same way that they learned when they were in grade school, even if it wasn’t very effective back then. The question of “what was the most memorable learning/prayer moment of your life as a student?” made our teachers wake up and take a look at what would be needed to create new memorable learning and prayer moments for their students.

As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, we are all resistant to change. The educational coaches (in our case, staff of the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge and the schools’ administrators) reminded  teachers that they need to take risks to get any kind of reward for the teaching they are doing. Although at the beginning of this process, teachers often claimed that their tefillah sessions were progressing wonderfully, once they conducted surveys and intensive observations, they came to realize that the traditional recitation of prayers and requiring compliance and silence was not working. They are now poised to try out new approaches to connecting students with prayer and striving for engagement rather than compliance. This will involve some experimentation and multiple iterations to achieve the desired outcomes of students immersing themselves in their own meaningful prayer moments.

Innovation Moves Quickly and Slowly

Last, we learned that pandemics both speed up and slow down innovation. They speed it up by virtue of the fact that all teaching during lockdown moved teachers and learners out of their comfort zones, allowing (or requiring) some innovation. On the other hand, that innovation was slowed due to the many other challenges schools were facing.

For us in Broward County, Florida, the changes taking place in our two schools are noteworthy, but aren’t the real end game. Our larger goal is to lead all ten of our community’s day schools to recognize that change and innovation are not playthings, but are integral to achieving educational excellence in our classrooms. And it’s not just about day schools. Our hope is that the same spirit of change and innovation can be carried over into congregational education and youth education in our communities. 

Our next steps will be to take the learning that has occurred at Brauser Maimonides Academy and at Sha’arei Bina High School for Girls and share them with the other schools in the community. If this experiment is successful, we will create a community educational culture that appreciates experimentation and innovation in pursuit of excellence.  

The real measure of success will not just be what we achieve in those two fine schools, but in response to our initial question, we will soon be asking: How do we continue to make the Jewish community itself a more exciting and engaged community?

Originally published in eJewishPhilanthropy