Is the Salute to Israel Parade merely a school activity?

This coming Sunday is the annual Celebrate Israel Parade (formerly known as the Salute to Israel Parade), one of several ethnic-type parades that take place in New York City each year.  In general, the parade is a wonderful celebratory event, which thousands or marchers, floats, minor celebrities, politicians, and all the other hallmarks of large events in large cities.  The occasional politically-charged controversies, such as the annual appearance of about 15 virulently anti-Zionist Jews (who somehow always get picked up by the New York Times), are actually forgettable sideshows to what is overall a wonderful event.

I have been participating in the parade for most of the past 30 years, and I have recently noticed something that disturbs me far more than any controversy.  What has caught my attention of late is that the parade has largely turned into the world's largest Jewish day school event.  Just about any school that wants to maintain its bond fides as being Zionist sends a delegation to march, perhaps requiring all of its students to do so.  And, of course, most of those students have family members who come out to cheer from the sidelines, anxiously awaiting that one moment when their child walks by, resplendent in his or her special t-shirt and perhaps carrying a cardboard cutout of fruit or a harp or something else depicting his or her school's theme.  However, it often seems that there are very few people watching who do not have a carpool interest in the parade.

To the extent that we believe our own hype, this should trouble us as a community.  If we believe that the parade is our community's chance to demonstrate our pride in and connection to the State of Israel, then the fact that there are several city blocks along the parade route with almost no spectators should be seen as a disappointment at least and a communal failure at worst.  Especially given the fact that every other parade of this type brings out huge crowds, it is particularly glaring that our parade cannot do the same.

Perhaps this turnout issue is a case of one success feeding another failure.  On the one hand, be have been very successful in getting most schools in the area to be very active participants in the parade, and there is no doubt that the thousands upon thousands of students who march make the parade the wonderful event that it is.  However, as families "age out" of schools, they often feel that it is time to turn their focus and attention to other activities and other ways to spend their time.  If the Celebrate Israel parade is seen primarily as a school event, then it is one more thing to leave behind when your last child graduates high school.  I would suggest that it is important for those involved in planning the parade and our community leaders in general to foster the notion that this is an event that grows in impact as its numbers increase and that even if someone has no kids left in the school system, or if their kids have not gotten there yet, their support is vital to the overall success of the parade.

"Does Any of this Still Count?"

We have reached that point in the school year where my 8th graders have one overriding question on their minds.  As their thoughts turn to the senior trip, graduation, and the various ways in which they can show that they are all grown up, they often wonder, "Hey, Rabbi - Does any of this still count?"  On a basic level, they are asking why they should still have to sit in classes where there might not even be a final exam, and even for those classes (such as mine) where there is such an exam, they are wondering why they should bother studying.  After all, they have all gotten into high school, and their June grades will have no impact on their immediate future plans.

On one level, this is understandable.  While we stress to our students that things such as manner and respect and davening (prayer) do not recognize senioritis and should always be in play, it is harder to make that case for specific subject material.  No one is going to miss out on medical school because they daydreamed through the last month of 8th grade science and no one is going to fail to become a Rosh Yeshiva because they were doodling during a month of Gemara back when they were 14 years old.*

*Although one can argue that the people who become Roshei Yeshiva are probably the ones who were already serious at age 14.

But on another level, it reflects a natural outgrowth of our educational system.  So much of what we do in school is incentive based, and those incentives are generally grades.  Students are well trained from an early age to know that what really matters is the number or letter that appears at the top of that quiz or test or project.  They learn to ask things such as "will this be on the test?" and - even worse to my ears - "do we need to know this?"*  At the end of the day, our assessment-focused system, no matter what type of assessments we use, conditions our students to judge something's value by its connection to a grade.

*My answer to that question is well-known to my students.  "You need to know everything."  Kind of removes the uncertainty while stressing that everything that we do is for a reason.

As adults, we know of course that not all of life is like this.  While much of what we do is incentive-driven (in this case, the incentive is a paycheck), we also learn that there are many things in life that we do because we enjoy them or find value in them.  One can construct an argument that says that that is also incentive-driven, but if it is, it is in a way that is so different from the grade-based or salary-based incentive system as to be unrecognizable as being the same thing.  Our goal as educators is to find a way to convey to our students a love of learning - learning in general and our disciplines in particular - to the extent that they are driven to learn even when the tangible incentives fall away.

This was not intended as a Project-Based Learning post, but I believe that PBL can help in solving this conundrum.  When students' experience in class is about listening to a lecture, filling out homework sheets, and cramming for a test, it is often the grade and the grade along which propels them forward on a daily basis.  However, when given more control over their own learning, students gradually develop their own internal motivation towards their learning.  This is not to say that they will necessarily love a discipline just because that class was a PBL environment; but they are more likely to at least have a positive attitude towards the learning experience in general when they felt a sense of ownership over it, and not a sense that they were charged with merely regurgitating information back to the person who dispensed that information in the first place.  The more that we can make the learning experience belong to the students, the more that they will be willing to do it even after it "no longer counts".

My PBL Class gives me a glimpse of the Future of the Classroom

I admit it.  Right now, I am being somewhat unfair to my 7th grade Torah class.  They are in the middle of a rather large Project-Based Learning (PBL) unit for me, while at the same time they have to work on a project related to the Torah curriculum.  Each year, we ask each 7th grader to pick one mitzva (commandment) from somewhere within the curriculum and to research it further, ultimately devising a presentation that is displayed, science-fair style, at our annual 7th grade chicken dinner (which is a topic for a different post).  In other words, my class currently has two units of learning that they are working on for me, often with different work partners.

Fortunately, we have found a way to take advantage of this situation.  Within the context of my PBL class, the students have our allotted class time to work on their research.  While, in theory, they could be doing homework for another class, they realize that it is best to work on the material that I have assigned them, as this is the time that they have me available to answer their questions and guide them through the sources.  Having two projects due for me has led some students to switch off - working on one project in class one day and another one on a different day, depending on which one they require my assistance for.

The result is an interesting window into what could be accomplished with greater adoption of student-centered classrooms.  A number of years ago, a group of educators in Israel published a paper imagining what a high school would look like if modeled like a Beit Midrash (download the paper here).  Their basic premise was that the focal point of both the physical structure of the school and the schedule of the day would be time spent in a Beit Midrash, with students required to attend both mandatory and elective classes throughout their years in the school.  However, the main learning would be accomplished by students working independently or in groups, and making their own decisions on how to allocate that time.

What if, instead of five periods per week of Chumash and five of Gemara, my students had three or four of each, with the rest being used for independent work time which could be used for either subject, or some other subject?  Obviously, with me or another Judaic teacher present during that time, they might be more likely to work on a subject in which I could be helpful.  However, this would provide the students with the chance to hone their time-management and prioritizing skills.  They would know what needs to be accomplished, but once in control of making that learning happen, they would have the freedom to also decide when it would happen.

I will grant that this goes back to what I feel is the main question about flipped learning, blended learning, and all of their cousins.  None of them are anything new.  It is the way that adults learn, and it is certainly the way that both college and grad school work - do the readings, then come to class to discuss them.  The novelty is that we are trying to accomplish it with students at ever-younger ages.  And so, the issue that we would have to grapple with is are we ready to allow students in high school or middle school or even younger to not only find the material on their own, but manage and discipline themselves and their time?  At what point do we loosen our grip on our students' hands, and by how much?  Truly a question that serious-minded educators must always ask.

Teaching Students to Summarize via Twitter

One of the problems that I have encountered when asking students to work independently is that I need to
create some system of accountability.  In my Project-Based Learning (PBL) units, I often provide my students with many sources and options to learn, and I ask each working group to create a Google site as a hub for their running notes.  This allows me to constantly check in on their work and to therefore monitor how they are progressing, issues that they may be having, and so on.

However, I have often been bothered by the fact that many students, and we are talking about honors students here, are often not good at summarizing material.  Very often, I open a Google site to find verse-by-verse translation/explanation of material where a couple of well-thought-out sentences would have sufficed.  It reached a point where some students were so focused on the verse that they were reading that they lost sight of the greater context, often asking me questions whose answers were contained in the previous paragraph.

Today I finally decided to do something about this.  Rather than have my students walk into class, form into their regular work groups, and fan out across the building working on their assignments, I had everyone come into class together and sit down with an ipad (we use an ipad cart in my class) and a text.  Each student was assigned one section (one parashat ha-shavua) and told that they were to read five verses and then boil all of that down to one tweet.  Not one sentence - one, little, 140-character tweet.  They were to do the same for the next five verses, and the five after that, and the five after that (and five more tweets for further practice tonight).

Aware of the fact that my students tend not to use Twitter, and that there are likely parents that do not want their children to do so, I created a Twitter account for our class (@7AChumash) and had everyone log in and post through that account.  Blessedly, a Twitter account can be signed in on multiple devices at once and thus the entire class could engage in this activity at the same time.  You can see some of their results by clicking on the link above.

All in all, the students enjoyed this activity and benefited greatly from it.  For some, the challenge was how to shrink their tweets down by a few characters, and I explained that text language, abbreviations, and misspellings were par for the course.  For almost all of them, the process of determining which information was essential and which was less-important detail was a valuable exercise in the fine art of summarizing.  Hopefully, this will carry over into their daily research and their notes will become more focused while simultaneously becoming shorter.

The Jedcamp Model - A Disruptive Innovation?

One of the interesting aftershocks of this past Sunday's JedcampNJNY has been how much people have been talking the event, specifically people who did NOT attend.  I  have heard that many teachers who were unable to attend have been speaking with those who did make it, and they wish that they could have cleared their schedules.  Those who attended left the conference so energized from their experience that they have shared accounts of their day with colleagues and hopefully future local Jedcamps will benefit from an expand pool of participants.

Beyond that, there has been much talk in other communities about planning future Jedcamps.  One outgrowth of keeping an active Twitter feed (#jedcampnjny) running throughout the conference was that educators from California to Israel were able to follow what was happening in Paramus, NJ, and we were able to follow their plans to create Jedcamps in their local areas.  I had a late night (for me) web conference the other night with several fantastic educators from up and down the west coast, sharing my experiences as a conference organizer and helping them to crystallize in their minds what it would take to have a Jedcamp out there.  A similar chat is being planned over the next few days with educators in the Baltimore area.  Clearly, the idea of an unconference - the ease of planning, the minimal expenses, the absence of paid "experts", and the freedom for any stakeholder of education to play a leading role or at least a significant role in an important discussion - is a powerful idea and one that people want to replicate.

Perhaps most eye-opening to me has been the reaction from people and organizations who are often the ones planning more traditional conferences.  Ken Gordon, the social media point man for PEJE (Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education) posted on his Facebook feed this morning a link to a recent article about JedcampNJNY, accompanied by the question "Could the unconference be the future of the conference?"  I have received emails in the past few days from other individuals from several organizations who want to know more about our experiences in planning and pulling off Jedcamp, perhaps with an eye towards replicating the model to supplement or to begin to replace the traditional, more expensive, more labor-intensive approach to professional conferences.

This has caused me to reflect a bit about two aspects of Jedcamp that differ from traditional conferences.  The first is the local versus national aspect.  In this regard, I think that there is still a place for larger conferences.  Whether it is ISTE or ASCD or NAJDS, there is no question that national or international conferences provide the opportunity for people from vastly separated regions to come together for several days to meet, brainstorm, and engage one another in a manner that even the best webconferencing tools cannot match.  I have written before about how I effectively see my online networks as a basis for forming real, face-to-face networks with people, and live conferences provide the opportunities to do just that.  While many people in my networks are local and will turn up at a local event, I am blessed to have formed strong connections with people across the country and I rely on the national conferences to provide me with the chance to see and speak with them in more than 140 characters at a time.

The second aspect is the lack of experts.  True, some traditional conferences are stacked with genuine experts, by which I mean the people who have written the books and done the research and tested and refined the various methods for teaching or supervising or leading.  The ASCD conference is fairly good at this, as their program consistently reads like their book catalogue.  However, many other conferences offer a combination of famous keynote speakers combined with a lot of "local talent".  By local talent I am referring to wonderful educators who have been asked to present a session about something that they are doing in their classroom or their school.  Obviously, these individuals (and I have been one of them) are happy to present for free (exposure!), but they are also clearly the undercard to the few big names who attend the conference.

The Edcamp/Jedcamp model flips this approach.  While I have heard many wonderful keynote speakers, I note two things about them: (1) While their words are inspiring, their speeches do not offer that many concrete suggestions (see this post from Richard Byrne on this point) and (2) they have generally written their main ideas in a book or have shared them in a TED talk or have somehow made their inspiration available in a way that I do not have to spend an hour of a professional development day listening to them.  Not that I do not enjoy being entertained, but how much does that entertainment cost?

Instead, the Jedcamp model elevates the "local talent", but it makes everyone the local talent.  No longer is there a collection of teachers and administrators who have been selected to make a presentation, thus resulting in them having to spend untold hours perfecting their slideshows and delivery.  Instead, every camp attendee can appoint him or herself to get the conversation started, with the understanding that everyone who attends a session can have something to contribute to the discussion, and that that might produce a much richer experience than a slick (or not-so-slick) powerpoint presentation.

Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen has written extensively about what he calls "disruptive innovations", those innovations to a field that shake the very model of how business is done, ultimately changing the field and leaving behind those who still try to work the old approach (think about the decline of the video rental store in the face of Netflix).  While a Jedcamp still maintains many of the trappings of the traditional conference model, it possesses enough inherent innovations to possibly provide a new and more effective and  - dare I suggest? - more enjoyable way to provide professional development.

At Long Last - JedcampNJNY!

(My initial thoughts after JedcampNJNY)

The daily grind in the world of education is not an easy one.  Too much time spent on technical details, not always enough time spent giving each student the attention that he deserves.  Too much effort spent with parents upset that their child got a B+ and not an A-, and not enough effort spent collaborating with those parents on how to bring out the best in that child.  Too many professional development hours spent listening to "gurus" who dazzle on stage but do not stick around to follow up, too few professional development hours spent having heartfelt and meaningful discussions among practitioners about the struggles that they face every day and ideas for growing as professionals.

JedcampNJNY, held today at Yavneh Academy in Paramus, NJ,  provided an escape from that daily grind, and provided not only an amazing experience for those who were involved, but also an amazing snapshot of the fantastic educators that are currently working within the field of Jewish education.

I already described the basics of Jedcamp in this post back in February when we first announced that this "unconference" would take place.  But that basic outline could not possibly capture the energy that kept JedcampNJNY humming for six hours today.  That's right - over 70 educators gave up a significant part of a beautiful Sunday in April to attend a conference about, um, wait - what was this conference about?

Anything.  That's right, anything at all.  When the day began at 9am, the session board was blank.  By about 9:15, almost all of the twenty session slots had been claimed by people ready to lead discussions or make presentations, and some of the early feedback has been that we should have opened up ANOTHER room so that more people could present.  What dedication!  Here is a conference where people are upset that they could not present (and no one was getting paid to present!)!

Of course, people were upset for good reason.  Who would not want to present to a room of similarly devoted and motivated educators, all of whom were ready to contribute their thoughts, ideas, and experiences, and all of whom were ready and willing to challenge their own thinking to help themselves grow as educators?  We had teachers in their first five years of teaching sitting with thirty year veterans, teachers with administrators, formal educators with people from NCSY and the camp world - and all that mattered was that you brought your open mind and your willingness to contribute.

Going into the conference, one of our many concerns was that this would turn into an edtech conference - a concern since we knew that there were many attendees who were not looking for that type of confab.  Not to worry.  While there was an ample supply of tech-related sessions, other sessions ran the gamut from psychology to teacher/administration relationships to using motion in the classroom to the benefits of  humor (a session led by New York's funniest Rabbi).  Throughout the day, people were emerging from sessions wishing that the sessions could have continued, and people were generally surprised and disappointed that the 45 minutes allotted to each session had run out so quickly.  How often does that happen in a professional conference?

And the excitement and energy continued beyond the walls of Yavneh.  While we have not yet worked out a way to bring people in via skype to a Jedcamp, while we were meeting, Twitter was abuzz with planning for upcoming Jedcamps in Maryland and Los Angeles in the coming months.  People at Jedcamp were asking how they can be involved in the next one, and we may very well have to separate the NJ and the NY next time to accommodate the anticipated larger crowds once word of the success of today really begins to spread.  Blogposts of today's action have already gone up (here, here, here, and here) and more are sure to follow.

Hopefully, the excitement generated by today's unconference will have two major effects:

1. The attendees will bring some of what they learned back to their classrooms and their colleagues.
2. Future Jedcamps, both locally and across the globe, will take form, allowing other educators to engage in these productive conversations while widening their circles of who they consider to be their colleagues.

For those of you who were there today, a heartfelt thank you for making it amazing.  For those of you who have yet to attend a Jedcamp - what are you waiting for?  Organize one in your community today.  You'll be glad that you did.

Am I a PBL Cheat?

My students (yes, the same ones who did this project) began a new PBL unit today, but with a twist.  The unit focuses on Devarim Perek 15 (Deuteronomy Chapter 15) and related sections, which basically outline the Torah's economic system - gifts to Priests, Levites, and the poor; the seven-year cycle whereby the land rests (shemitta) and loans are forgiven; the 50 year cycle (yovel) whereby slaves go free and land is returned to its original owner; and the laws of Jewish and non-Jewish slavery.  The overall goals of the unit are for my students to connect these laws together and envision how a Jew living under those laws would balance their checkbook, as it were.

However, in lieu of them creating a final project, I am creating the project.  Obviously feeling that I have way too much free time on my hands, I am working to create more or less The Game of Life based on all of these laws.  When the unit is complete, the students will have to play the game and their success will be based on how well they learned the material.

I will admit up front that there is still a lot of work to do.  I am not completely sure how the game will work, and I am not completely sure how I will give them a grade.  But all of those are secondary considerations as far as this post is concerned.  My question right now is whether or not I am cheating on the principles of Project Based learning?  Generally, the point of PBL is for students to use their final project as a driving force to guide their learning.  As they come closer and closer to creating the project, their visions of the project interact with their learning process to make their path of inquiry fuller and more genuine.

However, I have now removed that final goal from their sights.  They no longer can envision the final product, since the product will not be something they create but rather how well they are prepared to face the world - or at least the imagined world that I create.  In a sense, they themselves become their final project.  Sounds cool - but is it PBL?  Thoughts and comments welcome.