Found in Translation

Here is the link to my latest blog post, "Found in Translation"which is my first attempt at reflection (as an individual participant) on our experience last week.

Enjoying reading everyone's work and looking forward to next steps!

Kol tuv, Jon

My Newsletter Column from Last Week

Although I had written about Weissbourd before, I couldn't resist doing so again.  Here's what I wrote:

Thursday, October 18, 2012

What are the most significant impediments in today’s society to the moral development of our children?  TV? Video games?  The internet?  According to Professor Richard Weissbourd, a child and family psychologist who teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, it isn’t any of the above.  His research has consistently concluded that more dangerous to our children than TV, video games, or the internet is today’s unprecedented focus on the achievement and happiness of our children.

Dr. Weissbourd’s name may be familiar to you as I wrote about his work in this column twice last year.  This week, due to the largess of the AviChai Foundation, I was one of seven Jewish Day School administrators and one of forty Independent School leaders from around the globe, who had the opportunity to learn in person from Dr. Weissbourd and his fellow faculty in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  When I read his work a few months ago, I found myself nodding in agreement.  When I heard him in person this week, I found forty other Independent School administrators doing the same.

Among the arguments he made, Professor Weissbourd noted over the last few decades schools and parents have been investing more and more time and energy into ensuring that children feel good about themselves and less and less time and energy instructing children as to how to make others feel good.  It’s as if we have assumed that if our kids feel good, they’ll act good; if we build them up and ensure their happiness, everything else will fall into place.  After all, he asked us to compare the number of times we have heard parents say of their children “All I want is that they should be happy” with the number of times we have heard parents say “All I want is that they should be kind.”

Yet Weissbourd notes that there is no research to support the notion that people who feel good about themselves tend to do good for others or that those with poor self image act poorly toward others.  For example, it was once thought that bullying stems from a deficiency in self esteem.  The bully, in order to mask his or her insecurities, lashes out at others to prove to themselves and others that they have power and, thus, value.  Build our kids’ up, then, the theory went, and bullying will subside.  Reasonable as the theory sounds, it has been debunked by research.  There is no corollary between bullying and low self esteem.  In fact, many bullies score quite high in that area.  What bullies lack is empathy and empathy doesn’t come from telling kids that we just want them to be happy. It comes from telling them that we just want them to be kind.

In fact, if there is a correlation between being happy and being good, said Weissbourd,   it works in the reverse.  Being good often leads to being happy.  Weissbourd was quick to point out that we as educators and parents should not use the pursuit of happiness as motivation for morality (eg, “do what’s right because it will make you happy”) but he said the correlation does seem to be there.  Empathy, kindness, and taking an interest in the welfare of others, after all, are the necessary ingredients for building successful relationships.  And it is in meaningful, deep, and successful relationships that true happiness is found.

Upon hearing him say that, I couldn’t help but think of the fact that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks maintains that at its core, the Torah is all about relationships: our relationship with G-d, our relationship to the Jewish people, and our relationship to mankind.  The Torah’s narrative is centered around the idea of brit or covenant.  A covenant is a sacred relationship in which two parties agree to care for the other.

So if happiness is to be found in caring relationships, and caring relationships are the foundation of Torah, then thanks to Professor Weissbourd, with some help from Rabbi Sacks, I walked away from that session in the Harvard Ed School with a more profound understanding of the the pasuk in Mishlei which we say each and every time we put the Torah away: “deracheha darchei noam vi-chol netivoteha shalom,”  “the Torah’s ways are  ways of pleasantness and its paths are paths of peace.”  The Torah demands of us that we be good.  And if and when we are, we’ll come to appreciate what pleasantness, happiness, and peace of mind truly are.

LRP Questions about Susan Moore Johnson

Here are my LRP Questions from Susan Moore Johnson's presentation:

• Does Professional Culture impact LRP?
• What is the impact of the generational gap on LRP?  Any differences between L, R, & P?
• Is there anything intentional in hiring or retention that creates this kind of gap?  Would hiring or retaining for LRP create a particular "experience profile"?
• Are there LRP implications to having short-term vs. long-term; first-career and mid-career; and/or differently prepared teachers on faculty?
• How do professional preferences of different generations of teachers impact LRP in schools?
• Is there an LRP metric to use in the interview process?
• How do professional preferences of different generations of teachers impact LRP in schools?
• Which parts, RECRUITMENT, INDUCTION or RETENTION leads to increased LRP?
• Do we give potential applicants an opportunity to sample LRP as part of the interview process?
• Can there be LRP mentors for new teachers?
• Do we give potential applicants an opportunity to sample LRP as part of the interview process?
• LRP New Teacher Orientation?
• Can there be LRP mentors for new teachers?

On another note...I read this book awhile ago, but now wonder if it is worthy of a reread through a LRP lens: Carol Ingall's "Down the UpstairCase"?

Round #2 of LRP Lens Competition

• Teaching the World- Nora
• Supporting and Retaining the Next Generation of Teachers - Jon
• Raising Moral Children:The role of Schools - Jay
• What is your School's Value Proposition and How do You You're Providing It?-Jonathan

Cell phone #

Jonathan Cannon - 301-674 -0377
Zippi Schorr - 443-463-5107
Gil Perl - 901-481-0674
Jay Goldminstz - 551-404-2304
Jon Mitzmacher - 702-306-2000
Nora Anderson-917-842-1845
Ruth Gafni - 201-788--6568

Welcome to Boston

Hi,

Hope that you had a good journey. Anyone who will be in town, we plan to meet in hotel lobby at 2:15 and go together.

My cell # is 301 674-0377. Please would you comment on this by adding your own cell and I will form a list.

Thanks,

Jonathan

Soul of Parenting

For the last couple of years I have been writing a regular column for Ramaz parents about religious parenting. I started again this week, shared it with Steve who in turn suggested that I share it with all of you.
Looking forward to meeting/seeing you next week. Shabbat Shalom. Jay

NATURE VS NURTURE REVISITED  - THE TWINS
Debbie was 45 when she learned that she was adopted. Not only that, but she learned for the very first time that she had a twin! Although separated as infants, the two girls grew up with different families only 45 minutes apart in New Jersey. Debbie was eventually reunited with her twin sister Sharon with whom it turns out she shared a surprising number of traits. One intriguing difference - Debbie was raised as a Jew; Sharon was raised as a Christian. When they finally met, they were enriched by one another's faith in ways that almost none of their adoptive siblings could relate to.  They seemed to share their religious passions almost genetically. As Sharon said, "I think I am programmed to be religious...whatever religion I was exposed to as a child would have been very important to me throughout my life."

Debbie and Sharon were part of the world renowned study called the Minnesota Twins—but not the baseball team. Its real name is the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA), a longitudinal study of twins who had been separated at a very young age, raised apart, even in different countries, and then reunited years later. I became intrigued by it in the wake of a question from a parent of twins who responded to some earlier comments I had written about nature versus nurture and, fortunately, a comprehensive book on the subject was just recently published. What better way to examine this issue than by examining identical twins who had been raised in often completely different homes. For if we can remove "nurture" as a factor, namely, the influence of our families when we were growing up, then we can better identify what is "nature" and we can ask how religious would we be? How much of faith is something that is in our DNA versus something that we were raised with? If my parents had not dragged me to shul, would I still be religious?

Debbie and Sharon were just one example. Another is two volunteer firefighter brothers who didn't meet until age 31. Both had been raised by Jewish adoptive parents. Both thought of themselves as Jewish when asked. But neither of them showed any interest in religion; was this coincidence, family environment or genetic destiny? (Of slightly different interest is the famous case of Oskar and Jack - one of whom was raised in Nazi Germany and became part of the Hitler Youth and one of whom was raised as a Jew in Trinidad and went on to become an officer in the Israeli navy.)

The study (not without its critics) ultimately concluded that the role of genetics was huge across the board, relating to everything from personality to preferences in food and jewelry. While we tend to recognize some of the genetically determined characteristics or character traits of our children, we sometimes miss the fact that religious sensitivities could also be one of them which the study seems to strongly confirm. In the area of religiosity, they determined that there was a 50% genetic influence! A subsequent study of twins  (Bradshaw and Ellison 2008)  found the number to range 19-65% depending on what aspect of religiosity was being measured. Assuming that these statistics hold true for the general population as well, what are the implications for raising religious children? How much influence can any of us, whether parents or schools, have on initiating children into religious life if it's all encoded in their DNA from the very outset?

The answer, of course, is quite a lot. One of the founders of the Minnesota study framed the issue not as a nature vs. nurture but rather "nature via nurture." That is to say, genetic factors are expressed by "influencing the character, selection and impact of experiences during development." (Born Together Reared Apart, p. 104)  Some kids (who grow up to be us) have a predilection toward the spiritual - toward singing, toward awe and wonder, toward prayer and a sense of the transcendent. While others are inherently less comfortable with these things -- this does not mean that they do not need these experiences, for we are all born in the image of God and all of us have a soul, however you define it. Rather, it means that such experiences do not come quite as naturally to them. They require even more nurturing or more focused nurturing in this regard.

In short, all of this gives special meaning to King Shlomo's admonition to "educate each child according to his own way." What works for one child may not work for another. While one may love shul-going, another may find it irksome, while one may see the beauty of Shabbat in the lighting of candles, another may find it in singing, while yet another may need it framed purely in its connection to family.

As I've said once before, this is the way that I have always read the midrash which comments on the verse that Rivkah knew that she was experiencing an unusual pregnancy. Says the midrash, when she passed a bet midrash, Yaakov would kick vigorously; when she passed a pagan house of worship, Esav would kick vigorously. Is this not the Rabbis anticipating the Minnesota Twins study? But, as Rav Shimshon Hirsch notes, Rivkah and Yitzchak made the mistake of treating both children the same. Had they not tried to make Esav into another Yaakov but instead had cultivated his own unique inborn spirituality, then perhaps he would have turned out quite differently.

In practical terms, ask yourself how much of your own religious sensitivities might be encoded in your DNA?  Which of your parents are you most alike in this regard? What aspects of your home life or life experience did or did not influence your genetic predisposition?

Now ask the same questions about your own children. And then the big final question: how will your nurture their religious nature?

Shabbat Shalom.

 

 

Rabbi Jay Goldmintz Ed.D.

Headmaster

Ramaz Upper School

212-774-8078

From Zippi-book review of book she just read and recommends

School of Hard Knocks

‘How Children Succeed,’ by Paul Tough

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

Published: August 23, 2012

Most readers of The New York Times probably subscribe to what Paul Tough calls “the cognitive hypothesis”: the belief “that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills — the kind of intelligence that gets measured on I.Q. tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns — and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.” In his new book, “How Children Succeed,” Tough sets out to replace this assumption with what might be called the character hypothesis: the notion that noncognitive skills, like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success.

Enlarge This Image

Illustration by O.O.P.S.

HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED

Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

By Paul Tough

231 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27.

“Psychologists and neuroscientists have learned a lot in the past few decades about where these skills come from and how they are developed,” Tough writes, and what they’ve discovered can be summed up in a sentence: Character is created by encountering and overcoming failure. In this absorbing and important book, Tough explains why American children from both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum are missing out on these essential experiences. The offspring of affluent parents are insulated from adversity, beginning with their baby-proofed nurseries and continuing well into their parentally financed young adulthoods. And while poor children face no end of challenges — from inadequate nutrition and medical care to dysfunctional schools and neighborhoods — there is often little support to help them turn these omnipresent obstacles into character-enhancing triumphs. The book illuminates the extremes of American childhood: for rich kids, a safety net drawn so tight it’s a harness; for poor kids, almost nothing to break their fall.
Though Tough examines at length the travails of both groups, it’s the plight of disadvantaged children that compels his interest and emotions. In his previous book, the well-received “Whatever It Takes,” Tough followed the efforts of the educator Geoffrey Canada to turn his social service organization, the Harlem Children’s Zone, into a “conveyor belt” that would reliably carry the neighborhood’s children from infancy through primary and secondary school, into college and the middle class. In Canada’s story, Tough found a deep and complicated character fighting to accomplish a valiant goal in the face of terrific odds. In “How Children Succeed,” Tough is working in miniature, sketching a handful of poor children and their mentors, and these depictions sometimes lack the force and distinctiveness of his portrait of Canada. But they are keenly and sensitively observed, and occasionally even whimsical, as in his captivating account of Kewauna Lerma, a Chicago teenager. Growing up in the erratic care of a feckless single mother, “Kewauna seemed able to ignore the day-to-day indignities of life in poverty on the South Side and instead stay focused on her vision of a more successful future.” Kewauna tells Tough, “I always wanted to be one of those business ladies walking downtown with my briefcase, everybody saying, ‘Hi, Miss Lerma!’ ”
Here, as throughout the book, Tough nimbly combines his own reporting with the findings of scientists. He describes, for example, the famous “marshmallow experiment” of the psychologist Walter Mischel, whose studies, starting in the late 1960s, found that children who mustered the self-control to resist eating a marshmallow right away in return for two marshmallows later on did better in school and were more successful as adults.
“What was most remarkable to me about Kewauna was that she was able to marshal her prodigious noncognitive capacity — call it grit, conscientiousness, resilience or the ability to delay gratification — all for a distant prize that was, for her, almost entirely theoretical,” Tough observes of his young subject, who gets into college and works hard once she’s there. “She didn’t actually know any business ladies with briefcases downtown; she didn’t even know any college graduates except her teachers. It was as if Kewauna were taking part in an extended, high-stakes version of Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, except in this case, the choice on offer was that she could have one marshmallow now or she could work really hard for four years, constantly scrimping and saving, staying up all night, struggling, sacrificing — and then get, not two marshmallows, but some kind of elegant French pastry she’d only vaguely heard of, like a napoleon. And Kewauna, miraculously, opted for the napoleon, even though she’d never tasted one before and didn’t know anyone who had. She just had faith that it was going to be delicious.”
Many poor children don’t develop the resilience Kewauna has in such abundance, and the reason, Tough says, can be traced back to their troubled home lives: “The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet.”
Children can be buffered from surrounding stresses by attentive, responsive parenting, but the adults in these children’s lives are often too burdened by their own problems to offer such care.
Rich kids, Tough adds, may also lack a nurturing connection to their mothers and fathers — not so much in their early years as when they enter adolescence and the push for achievement intensifies. He explores the research of Suniya Luthar, a psychology professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Luthar “found that parenting mattered at both socioeconomic extremes. For both rich and poor teenagers, certain family characteristics predicted children’s maladjustment, including low levels of maternal attachment, high levels of parental criticism and minimal after-school adult supervision. Among the affluent children, Luthar found, the main cause of distress was ‘excessive achievement pressures and isolation from parents — both physical and emotional.’ ”
Though the title “How Children Succeed” makes the book sound like an instruction manual for parents, it’s really a guide to the ironies and perversities of income inequality in America. Tough, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, portrays a country of very privileged children and very poor ones, both deprived of the emotional and intellectual experi­ences that make for sturdy character. The political and economic consequences of our unbalanced society have been brought to the fore by debates about the causes of the Great Recession and the claims of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Paul Tough brings us news of the psychological effects of income inequality, through stories of the people who feel these effects most acutely: our children.
In one of the most affecting parts of his book, he reflects on his decision, 27 years ago, to drop out of college. “It hasn’t escaped my attention,” Tough notes ruefully, that many of the researchers he writes about “have identified dropping out of high school or college as a symptom of substandard noncognitive ability: low grit, low perseverance, bad planning skills.” And yet this same research helped him realize that he was lucky to be allowed to make his own mistakes. After leaving Columbia in the fall of his freshman year, he bicycled alone from Atlanta to Halifax. Following another aborted attempt at college, he took an internship at Harper’s Magazine and embarked on a successful career as a writer and editor.
Fewer and fewer young people are getting the character-building combination of support and autonomy that Tough was fortunate enough to receive. This is a worrying predicament — for who will have the conscientiousness, the persistence and the grit to change it? 

And the winners of the LRP Lens competition are...

Educating for the virtues in the era of Truthiness and Twitter
Howard Gardner-

Gil

How Great Independent Schools Can Become Great Learning Organizations to Enhance Students’ Experiences

Richard Light - 

Ruth

Working with Teams: Mount Everest Case
Monica Higgins - 

Zippi

How to do things with Books
Leah Price -

Jonathan C.

Although, everyone will attend all sessions, I am asking that the person responsible for the session take particular note of the implications for day school leadership and be the discussion facilitator about that session. I think that everyone got a session that they requested and I took the one that no-one asked for but someone had to and I am looking forward to it! Those of you who didn't get a session this time will take one of the sessions from the second half.

In terms of the timing of planning sessions, we are trying to be sensitive both to the need to plan the LRP overlay and also the reality that we all have "another job" that may need attention. To that end, we will have a working dinner on Tuesday and Thursday evenings that will begin at 6:00 pm. with a hard stop at 8:00 pm. after which there will be no further programming. On both Tuesday and Thursday there will be no programming between the end of the ISI sessions and the start of dinner. Wednesday will be more informal as we are going to two receptions one at ISI and then one hosted by AVI CHAI at the hotel (Oh how we have to suffer sometimes for the cause of Jewish Education!) and following the completion of the receptions we will have a 1 hour planning meeting. We will need to see how lunchtimes work in order to determine if we can get together at that time for additional discussion.

 In order to achieve our goals in this time frame and adhere to these start and finish times, we will need to be very efficient with our planning time. To that end, I  ask that we come to the planning sessions with prepared thoughts and ideas about how we can apply an LRP overlay curriculum to these courses so that we can make progress and not go around in circles. The session coordinator  will facilitate a discussion on their session that will last no more than 30 minutes (Gil and Ruth-you are on for Tuesday evening!). The purpose of these discussions will be:

•   To identify parallel outcomes to those addressed in the ISI that apply to LRP
•   To identify texts and other material that will be useful in achieving the above
•   To determine 1 or 2 specific examples that speak to the LRP workplace that are somewhat analogous to examples used during the ISI sessions.

Thanks for your willingness to be involved in this exciting project

Shabbat Shalom (nothing else happening this week)

Jonathan

A couple of thoughts

From Steve: I wanted to share an impression that I have from reading Howard Gardner's piece. It's a shame that Howard Gardner has never studied Talmud. He would have a very different appreciation about how ancient sources can be interpreted and  made relevant for any time and place. His proposed Agora or Commons for us Jews is probably an open page of Talmud with the conversation across the ages inviting our input and reactions. Somehow, in this LRP world of ours, that heritage of moral dialectic, proof of argument, and reinterpretation of ancient ethical and moral concepts needs to be juxtaposed to Gardner's position. Perhaps our ISI participants can teach Howard Gardner a thing or two!.
 

Click here to link to another great blog post (except the bit about me, and possibly the title) from Jon Mitzmacher about participating at the ISI.

Friday's Call

Time 2:15 PM EST
Call in details: 1-888-846-3997, passcode 4883082

Goals of call:

1. To discuss a framework for connecting HGSE ISI topics to LRP (possibly to make up more initials in case we haven't got enough!)
2. Allocate each of the sessions to one member of our group so that person can focus before, during and after the session with a particular lens as to how it can be framed in the Jewish educational environment. Obviously, all of us will be doing that for every session but each of us will take the lead for the designated class.
3. Wish one another Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach for a change!!!!

As a reminder, below are the first four sessions:

Educating for the virtues in the era of Truthiness and Twitter
Howard Gardner

How Great Independent Schools Can Become Great Learning Organizations to Enhance Students’ Experiences

Richard Light

Working with Teams: Mount Everest Case
Monica Higgins

How to do things with Books
Leah Price