Robin Kahn's Blog (Our educational Director)
Highlights from the Leadership Institute
Shalom Congregants and Friends,
Many of you know I am a fellow in a three year Leadership Institute affiliated with Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and the Jewish Theological Seminary. The program’s three “pillars” are Leadership, Pedagogy and Content. The past two weeks my 34 fellow Fellows had our intensive summer training, during which we immersed ourselves in Torah study, leadership training and reflective practice. While I was away I shared some highlights with the education committee chairs and my professional colleagues. Below are the highlights. Read, skim, scroll through as you please. Most importantly enjoy and thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom, Robin
Day 1: Optimistic
Hi "Everyone":
I just returned from HUC to the Upper West Side where I am staying for the next 2 weeks. Day 1 of the Leadership Institute was great and I am optimistic that the next 2 weeks will be very beneficial for me both personally and professionally, and ultimately for our entire community.
Two highlights of the day were:
(1) Beginning to get to know my colleagues better and reconnecting with some I knew from other places -- a college hall-mate and a colleague from Boston. Playing Jewish geography is always fun.
(2) The other highlight came when we worked on visioning and sharing our personal visions for Jewish education -- what stood out after this session was that I am very lucky that my vision for Jewish education is closely aligned with BAI's vision. I also feel fortunate (and sometimes take for granted) that I work in a community where we get along. (This is far from the truth at some of the shuls my colleagues work at.)
Today's bonus: Bumping into a mentor from Boston and seeing Andrea Weiss's name on the 5th floor directory! ...and finding a parking space on the street!
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom, Robin
Day 2: Inspired
Hi "Everyone":
Day 2 at the Leadership Institute proved to be as good as (and perhaps even better than) Day 1! I am able to match more names with faces and Jewish geography never gets old. (Today I learned that one of the mentors’ daughters is good friends with Hannah Charlson.)
I began my morning about 6:50ish (before my alarm, shocking I know), easily found a Starbucks and did my reading assignment from Erica Brown’s Inspired Jewish Leadership. Shira Kline, a NYC Jewish educator, led tefila this morning – it might have been the most inspiring tefila experience I have ever had. I am looking forward to “trying” some of her techniques out.
Our morning session focused on leadership roles and vision statements. I am happy to report that when the amazing session ended and I reread BAI’s mission, vision and guiding principles, I still felt inspired. The real highlight of the session was that my role during the role play was the chair of the education committee.
Education Committee chairs Phyllis, Jeff, Spencer, and Corinne, I am in awe of your commitment to BAI, our education program and your real support of me, my colleagues, the teachers and the parent body. Every shul should be blessed with leaders like you!
After lunch we sang the “Make Me A Sanctuary” song that Harold loves and that I cannot get out of my head. I am learning to love it and enjoyed learning another verse in Aramaic to add to the Hebrew and English verses.
This afternoon our session focused on the “History of Leadership” which, as a historian, I found fascinating – it never occurred to me that subject of “Leadership” had its own history. I have also been thinking a lot about a comment a colleague made about using leadership as a verb rather than a noun. In other words, “I am exercising my leadership” rather than saying “I am being a leader.”
Tomorrow I am looking forward to seeing Andrea Weiss in person and more great learning.
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom, Robin
P.S. I learned from my NYC colleagues that in Manhattan they don’t have “parking lot meetings” – the important impromptu meetings-after-the -meeting. Hmmm…..
Day 3: Immersed
Hi "Everyone":
Day 3 has come and gone and my LI peers and I are fully immersed in our leadership development. Fittingly, this morning we immersed ourselves in Torah study and used midrash as a means of connecting our lives with those of the families in Genesis.
Today’s highlights were chatting with Andrea Weiss (and Rebecca Tauber) and getting to see Cyd in action - she led one of our sessions. I also ran into a colleague from Boston who I had not seen in years and met the Education Director from the reform shul in King of Prussia. Both are participating in a different professional development programs also at HUC this week.
After today’s sessions, I want to share with you two ideas that struck me and that I am thinking about:
- In any group discussion, anyone who doesn’t participate in the first 10 minutes in some capacity is highly unlikely to participate at all.
- In a study done of public schools in Chicago, students whose parents were involved performed ten times higher in academics than their peers in the control school. Other factors contributed to students’ success, but parent involvement had the greatest impact.
Towards the end of our day we immersed ourselves in watercolors and oil pastels as we reflected on what we’d learned. The session reminded me of the importance of using multiple intelligences and was facilitated by Julie Wohl. Julie is the illustrator of a new family siddur published earlier this year and her artwork is featured on the cover of the most recent USCJ magazine. (She is also the Education Director at the shul where David’s father-in-law was the rabbi.) As a side note, this week I am staying in the apartment and goldfish sitting for the author of the same siddur, Rabbi Lauren Kurland, and I am pleased to tell you that the goldfish is still swimming (i.e. not floating!).
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
Laila Tov,
L’Shalom, Robin
Day 4: Storytelling
Hi "Everyone":
The message I am carrying with me from the LI today is about storytelling. A large part of my day was spent sharing some of BAI’s successes as well as some BAI dilemmas (and I got some fresh insights and perspectives). Of course, I also had the opportunity to listen to my colleagues share success stories and dilemmas from their institutions. When my colleagues shared, I practiced listening and in many cases shared a new perspective with them.
(As an aside, last week at the annual meeting Rabbi Ackerman mentioned that he was a happy Rabbi; I am similarly a happy Education Director and learning that many of my colleagues do not share that sentiment. I am a very lucky Education Director.)
The idea of storytelling fascinated me. Some thoughts about storytelling that I have been dwelling on:
- Stories evoke emotions, and how they are told and who tells them is important and symbolic.
- We, the leaders, need to agree to tell the same story about any one aspect of BAI.
- We, the leaders, need to remember that all our members are storytellers – whether we want them to be or not – and each member tells their own version of our story. This makes the stories we tell to our members all the more important.
- We need to recruit storytellers from our members to purposefully tell our story to the larger community.
Another theme of today was process. If the ability to process and reflect well determines success, BAI is positioned well. After lunch today, we had a large group discussion in which we processed the process we were using to determine a process which we then processed.....and reflected on. (I am not kidding!!!)
After sitting all day, I decided to walk back to where I am staying at 96th and West End and headed up Broadway from 4th Street. It was a great walk and along the way I stopped for my favorite food – ice cream. (Oh yeah, I volunteered to coordinate a leadership ice cream sundae party next week – everyone has to bring in a topping that represents their leadership style. I am bringing in ice cream cones – I know it’s not really a topping. Can you guess why?)
Tomorrow I am looking forward to lunch with my mentor and my mentor group.
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom, Robin
p.s. This afternoon Nadine Slavitt, the Family Torah Study coordinator, forwarded me an email from the USCJ informing me that BAI has been awarded a “Gold Award” in the area of Family Education for our Family Torah Study Program. This is a success story! Go Team!
Day 5: Teamwork
Hi "Everyone":
Together Everyone Acheives More. Get it? So today’s theme was teamwork. Our presenter, Jo Kay, presented us with a framework for understanding how teams develop and suggested that teams go through stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, re-forming or transforming. I’m looking forward to sharing the details of this tool with you when I get back. In the meantime, I think our professional/lay leadership team is somewhere in the performing stage, perhaps on the cusp of transforming, though not quite there yet.
In our role play this morning about teams, I was assigned the role of the rabbi on an intergenerational congregational trip to Israel. Fun! In the case study we were given, the “Executive Director” was not part of the team going on the trip. (Grace, have no fear, I insisted you come with us.) During the role play, our leadership team assembled at a café on Emek Rafa’im. (Everyone had a iPad and since we are a “performing team” no one was distracted by email. We were focused on our agenda and each other.) Our meeting consisted of debriefing, processing, and reflecting on the previous day as well as planning what we were going to do the next day. One dilemma was that our tour guide was speaking above the kids’ head – after using a “protocol” we realized that if we included the tour guide on the team we might better meet the needs of our congregants. I think some days it must be fun to be a rabbi.
This afternoon we learned how to create scavenger hunts for cell phones using the internet. We were divided into teams and set loose on NYU’s campus to “hunt” for sign and symbols of leadership. My team won because we had the most points, but really we lost – when we debriefed and processed how we functioned we had different ideas about how we worked together. I was reminded that there is no “I” in team.
The best quote I heard today was: Blessed are the flexible - they never get bent out of shape.
Thank you for allowing me to participate in this professional development program. On Wednesday, November 16, I am looking forward to having you join me at the Institute when “synagogue leadership teams” come to the Leadership Institute together.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Fourth of July!
Go Team Go!
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom, Robin
Day 6: Super!
Hi “Everyone”:
I hope everyone enjoyed the Fourth of July Weekend. I spent the weekend in NYC with both friends and LI colleagues. Much of my weekend was spent relaxing, writing and reflecting and reflecting some more. (Are you getting a theme of the program?) One specific highlight was a Shabbat dinner with my Upper West Side LI colleagues. Spending Shabbat with these new friends outside the walls of HUC and JTS was beautiful.
I felt refreshed as we regrouped this morning. I know you share my sentiment that celebrating is an important part of leadership and community, so it should not come as a surprise that this morning our first order of business was celebrating with Rena, our colleague who got married over the weekend. Siman tov u’mazel tov was the refrain during breakfast.
After breakfast, we discussed David Brooks’ Op-Ed piece that appeared in last Friday’s NYT. Brooks writes about school reform and the secular world: “The real answer is to keep the tests and the accountability but make sure every school has a clear sense of mission, an outstanding principal and an invigorating moral culture that hits you when you walk in the door.”
Brooks’ words struck us as relevant to our work as leaders and Jewish educators. (Yes, if you are raising kids – or have raised kids – I consider you a Jewish educator; in fact, I consider you your child’s primary Jewish educator.) I hope you will take a look at the full column: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks
Israel in our education programs was our next topic. My “take-aways” from this session are that teaching Israel is complex, that I am not the only Jewish educator who struggles with how to teach Israel, and that we are not the only shul trying to figure out the goals of our Israel Affairs Committee. One of the frameworks presented helped me begin to sort out the different ways we are portraying Israel in our community. I will share it with you when I return and I am very excited about an assignment we (yes, we, the leaders of BAI) have for the fall: an “Israel Assessment.” I’ll need your help compiling data about Israel in our congregation. (More to come on that.)
At the end of this session a draft of our itinerary for our Israel trip in February was passed around. Yippee! I can’t wait to be in Israel with this group!
Rabbi Larry Hoffman, a sociologist of American Judaism, then presented us with a survey of American Jewish history and helped up see that turning points in AJH were all responses to events of the times. This led to a discussion about our generation, the “9/11 Generation,” during which he encouraged us to get to know our learners and their needs and to think about the world we are living in. (It really does always come back to relationship building!) Also, according to Rabbi Hoffman, for Jews today synagogue membership is seen as a choice, not an obligation as it once was, and a buzzword for American Jews today is “spirituality.”
Lunchtime was about sharing our favorite resources and we spent the afternoon focused on our individual leadership and our roles in our congregation. Two ideas from this session:
- Commandment #1 of Leadership (according to R. Ellen Lewis) is: Remember to take care of yourself. (This will explain why I decided to exercise tonight, which meant again walking home from 4th Street to 96th Street, rather than doing my homework….ok, you know me well enough…I will take a look at the chapters assigned for tomorrow.)
- “Supervision” can be read literally as “super vision”. R. Lewis suggested that when two or more leaders work together on a vision together, it is more likely to be super.
This evening, I had dinner with a colleague whom I wanted to get to know better and who, like me, sees herself in a synagogue where she is supported by her lay leaders and the rabbi and believes, also like me, that she is working in a performing community. It was great!
I am now super tired and super excited!
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom, Robin
Day 7: Challenged!
Hi “Everyone”:
This morning we worked on several texts b’chevruta (with a study partner). Each text allowed me to think of the Torah as a symbol of something different: protector, teacher, gatherer, guide or even a symbol of vulnerability. Our discussion then centered on the idea that regardless of the role it played in each text, the Torah is a sacred object. The question we challenged ourselves with was, “how do we share the Torah’s sacredness with our children?” Personally, I think it’s by demonstrating communal reverence for the Torah, and the image I shared with my chevruta in the closing moments was of our Beit Midrash students gathering in the sanctuary every Shabbat morning as we rise and the Torah is lifted from the ark.
Then the challenges came: (1) assuming the roll of the Executive Director in a congregation where things are “going well.” (2) Taking on the role of a child who doesn’t like their teacher – this one was really a challenge! (3) What happens when I make a bad hire (i.e. the teacher isn’t connecting with the kids)? How do I show support and empathy to the key players: the teacher, student and parent? How do I deliver constructive and helpful feedback? The Leadership Challenge is a very appropriate title for tonight’s reading.
Perhaps the most helpful framework presented today challenged me to think about my role on different committees. We were asked to consider when we are “experts” vs. an “extra set of hands” vs. a “collaborator” and in which roles we are most and least comfortable.
My day ended with a walk through Washington Square Park with some of the other Conservative educators, where we shared our thoughts on what’s happening in the Conservative movement. And then my walk uptown….
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom, Robin
Day 8: Torah Lishma
Hi “Everyone”:
Today was the best yet! After a musical tefila experience we spent the day immersed in text study and chevruta learning.
With Marjorie Lehman, a JTS scholar, we looked at rabbinic texts about a female figure, Yalta, and the different role she played in each rabbinic vignette. At the end we were asked to think about the varying leadership roles we take on and to reflect on when and how we are like Yalta.
Throughout the afternoon we studied with Rabbi Larry Hoffman. R. Hoffman shared with us some texts about the Jewish community in Salonika, Greece in the 1700s: population records, sermons and responsa. In sum, after a period of growth, the community and particularly the Jewish community’s synagogue attendance declined. We looked at possible reasons why: a drought and the growth of the coffee industry. I learned that congregants hanging out at Starbucks on Shabbat morning is not a new dilemma for Jewish leaders. More on this to come, perhaps in the 9am hour on a Shabbat morning at BAI over a cup of coffee. The session reminded me to always keep my eye on the big picture and what’s going on in the secular world to help me understand trends and patterns in the Jewish community.
Later R. Hoffman guided us through the Yotzer Or blessing (said after the Barchu and before the Shema). We looked at how it can be understood mystically and learned that the interpretation of the blessing rooted in the Middle Ages was a response of the Kabbalists seeking community and closeness to God. The current interest in the Spirituality Movement mirrors this, as contemporary sociologists have suggested that today’s Jews are in search of God and community.
R. Hoffman suggested that perhaps the Jewish community is in the midst of a revolution. It is fitting that as I was walking through Union Square, I heard Tracey Chapman’s “Talkin Bout A Revolution” being played.
Today’s Torah study was as delicious as our “leadership ice cream sundaes.”
Tomorrow is our last day for the LI Summer 2011. I am very much looking forward to having you join me with this cohort in November and to being home for Shabbat. See you soon.
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom, Robin
Day 9: Celebrating Learning
Hi “Everyone”:
Rabbi Lauren Kurland, the author of a new siddur for families (and whose goldfish I fed last week), led tefila this morning and demonstrated ways to use her siddur, many of which might be adaptable for use in our family services. For me the highlight of this session was seeing a friend in a rabbinic/educator role, a role I had not been privileged to see her in before.
We spent our last day together reflecting on our past two weeks of learning. We were challenged to consider ourselves as revolutionaries. In our concluding session the most common words were community, relationships, collaboration, leadership and reflection. During our concluding ceremony we celebrated our two weeks of intensive learning and growth with singing, dancing and humor.
I am on my way home and looking forward to celebrating with you soon.
Thank you for supporting my professional development.
L’Shalom and Shabbat Shalom, Robin
Previous Posts
Ruth`s Journey is Your Journey! - Shavuot 5773 (Most Recent)The Power of Ten -- May 2012
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Israel Education and the Diaspora
Shalom From Tel Aviv
Shalom From Jerusalem
Shabbat Shalom From Jerusalem
Shalom From Haifa
Reinventing Jewish Education
My Dreams for 5772
Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel - a must read
Highlights from the Leadership Institute (Current display)
BAI Education Program Receives National Recognitio
What Sammy Spider Saw (Annual Meeting June 2011)
Tables & Community: Dvar to the Confirmation Class
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Worksheets: Raising a Respectful Child Meeting
Bibliography of Books on Bullying
Does God Care Which Team Wins The Superbowl
NYT Article on Children`s Play
iTunes
Kosher Nation
Talking to your kids about God