Growing

Growing

a Program Development Planby Rabbi Erin Hirsh

Supplementary School Teachers by the #s . . .1. 500 schools, 7800 students, 500 teachersin Philadelphia

2. 230,000 students, 28,000 teachers nationally

3. < 1% of Supplementary School teachers have had a single class in both education & Jewish studies

Schatz. M. & Hirsh, E. (2013) NEXT education directors/teachers survey responses. Unpublished report, Gratz College, NEXT Program.About Pelie. Retrieved August 14, 2013 from www.pelie.org/about.Goodman, R. & Schapp, E. (2008) Jewish educational personnel. What we now know about Jewish education. Los Angeles, CA: Torah Aura.Goodman, R. & Schapp, E. (2008)There is a lot of lip service given to innovation, experiential education, differentiated learning and engagement, I read about ecosystems of complementary education, the need (or not) to emulate summer camp experience, the introduction of technology and the role of families in their childrens learning. What I dont read about is improving the quality of instruction. . .

This is the 800-pound gorilla in our educational ecosystem, and hes waiting to be fed. - David Steiner (2013)

Steiner, D. (2013) Giving our gorilla a much-needed banana. eJewishPhilanthropy. Retrieved August 14, 2013 from http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/giving-our-gorilla-a-much-needed-banana.Professional Learning for Supplementary School TeachersRAPIDLY DECLININGToday, amid financial constraints and declining affiliation rates, virtually every national Jewish institution, and many local ones, is in the process of restricting, redefining its mission, merging or even closing.

- Julie Weiner, The Jewish Week, 2013Movement Education ConsultantsCentral Agencies of Jewish Education

Weiner, J. (2013, Feb 1) For Jewish educational reform, a very messy period: Restructurings, closings define new landscape as JESNA mulls merger; are all the changes healthy? The Jewish Week. Retrieved August 14, 2013 from http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york-news/jewish-education-reform-very-messy-period.

How can we most easily address this challenge effectively and efficiently?

Online Classes

Free for Philadelphia Teachers due to the generosity of:

Our plan is to leverage the Philadelphia program in order to offer online classes to teachers BEYOND Philadelphia for a modest fee.

The virtually negligible cost or replicating programs on broader scales is an almost irresistible characteristic of technology today.

Online Classes are easily replicable and expandable

The Internet, the web, and digitally-connected global networking are todays Carnegie. These technologies have emerged as the basis of the 21st Centurys means for making popular educations learning and earning opportunities freely accessible to the people. Komoski, 2007

Once the classes have been built,they can be rerun immediately and indefinitely.

They can be tweaked and revised according to student input in a quick, ongoing manner

Komoski, K. (2007) 21st century teachers and learners: Prosumers in a bi-literate knowledge-driven world. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education 2007 Annual Conference, San Antonio, Texas.The entire NEXT program including specific class selections has been designed with direct input from supplementary school educators.

50% of the education directors in Greater Philadelphia

20% of the supplementary school in Greater Philadelphia

were surveyed by NEXT in 2013

Schatz. M. & Hirsh, E. (2013) NEXT education directors/teachers survey responses. Unpublished report, Gratz College, NEXT Program.Designing a Professional Learning ProgramLeaders see the whole of what is needed for high-quality professional learning to start with the end in mind and then launch, over time, a continual series of initiatives. Each initiative, however, has to be designed,not as an end in itself, but as a smart-part of a greater whole. Smart-parts do the work set out by the standard and the work in revealing information, raising questions, and providing experiences that enable leaders to connect one standard to another, to link context, content, and process. Eventually these smart-parts speak the language of shared purpose, working in their own ways to support common goals. - Cyd Weissman, Jewish Education Project Professional Development Requires a Discipline for Seeing Wholes

Weissman,C. (2008) Professional Development Requires a Discipline for Seeing Wholes. What we now know about Jewish education. Los Angeles, CA: Torah Aura.The online classes are Asynchronous

Designed specifically for supplementary school teachers

Generic ColaCoke Colavs.Which would YOU prefer?There are Complementary Components

Direct Teacher Observationsa Professional Assessment Toola Professional Growth Plan developmentMentoring programCommunities of Practice

SkypeLivebinderDropboxSurvey MonkeyWebstudy & MoodleEducators who use the [Web 2.0] tools for professional development . . . will find a community of other educators online. They can create a network of these educators to share with and learn from and can build a personal network to turn to regularly. Online, they can have access to best practices and the leader/practitioners and models that can show what strategies make a difference, and they can learn where and when to use them. - Solomon, G. & Schrum, L. 2010, p.10

Why are the Complementary Components important?

Solomon, G. & Schrum, L. (2010) Web 2.0 how-to for educator. Washington DC: International Society for Technology in Education, p10.

What does it take?

About online education& Rethinking 20th century education models

Were moving beyond teacher-centered learning . . .

To student-centered learning.

Online education understands the student is always a Prosumer.

Its like applying the process good teachers use when they gather and use feedback from the learners they are teaching, in order to improve learning outcomes. Good teachers have always been good, co-producing, prosumers.

Komoski, 2007This process of producer-consumer . . . co- production might easily be overlooked as relating to the current transformation of learning, but co-production is central to the learning process.

Komoski, K. (2007)

IntrinsicExtrinsicWere offering both INTRINSIC and EXTRINSIC rewards, by providing access to college and continuing education credit.

Online learning caters to students with different learning styles.The learning is not differentiated by the instructor

But it is highly personalized for/by the studentbut

Moving beyond Just in Case Learning . . .

Although students are physically separate from one another, Online learning can still be highly collaborative

Imagine how much better learning and teaching tools, all the textbooks and other learning resources that we and our students have been using over the years, could have become, had they been regularly revised on the basis of a seamless, automatic feedback from thousands of teachers and their students. . . by listening to students as learner-prosumers (i.e., producer/consumers of personal and national intellectual capital), teachers, curriculum leaders, instruction leaders, along with everyone in the educational publishing industry would have learned a lot. And, by applying what theyve learned, would have produced better quality learning resources and practices. The result would have been that students, the ultimate educational prosumers, would have had better learning tools, better teaching, and better, more effective learning experiences. - K. Komoski, 2007

Komoski, K. (2007)Measuring Participation

How many teachers PARTICIPATE IN . . .

Online Classes? Mentorships?

Professional assessments?

Professional growth plans?

And the MOST important question is . . .

DOES THE TEACHERS WORK IN THE CLASSROOM ACTUALLY IMPROVE OVER THE COURSE OF THEIR ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NEXT PROGRAM?

In other words . . .

may be one big