Phillip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, a British statesman and man of letters, is purported to have said on March 10, 1746, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”
Nearly 300 years later, those words still ring true and certainly should speak to Jewish educators. Our work is “worth doing” in order to develop in the next generation a healthy Jewish identity and sense of connectedness; given those stakes, it needs to be done in the best way possible.
What might that “best way” entail?
At least in part, it should include collaborative practice. A spiraling scope and sequence―considered best practice for teaching―needs input from all teachers to create seamless boundaries among subjects and from grade to grade. When we present challenges to a community of practice, the discussion generates a more robust list of solutions than when we grapple alone with an issue. There is value in feeling like we are part of something larger than our own classrooms in a profession where one’s primary rewards are gleaned from students’ successes.
Why, then, do most schools create schedules in a way that is penny-wise, but pound-foolish?
Some visionary heads of school insert weekly slots into teachers’ schedules for curriculum roundtables. This is precious time when teachers...
brainstorm, cultivate, refine, and assess yearly visions, unit plans, and individual lessons;
share ideas and discuss difficult moments in the classroom; teachers learn from one another; and
interact with like-minded adults rather than their young charges.
There are incredible benefits to conducting weekly curricular roundtables. I have seen paradigms where an entire year’s TaNaKH (Bible) curriculum was fleshed out, beta-tested, and then evaluated and revised. As a matter of fact, one prerequisite for a number of Judaic professional development initiatives is to schedule, at a minimum, biweekly curriculum roundtable time. I have seen a math instructional leader receive input from every teacher in the trenches to inform decisions on investing in new curricula. I have seen teachers benefiting from a regular time in which to learn a new approach to Hebrew language teaching. And I have seen teachers almost visibly relax when they knew that for the next hour, they were in a cohort of colleagues with whom they could professionally “let down their hair.”
What teachers who began participating in roundtables have shared is that, as they worked together, they learned from and drew strength from each other. As a result, the classroom outcomes became richer leading to better-educated students.
It sounds ideal. So why doesn’t every Jewish day school create round tables for general studies, Judaic studies, and Hebrew language?
One answer is that logistically and financially, it sometimes feels impossible to do. Logistically, a school needs to be large enough to have other staff members teaching or monitoring students while the teaching staff meets. For small schools, this is highly impractical, if not nearly impossible. Of course, teachers might be mandated to meet during hours when students are not on campus. That would entail paying the teachers beyond their contracted teaching hours; a hurdle that is often insurmountable. Or perhaps, students could have early dismissal once a week, as some schools do, to facilitate meeting times among all of the faculty members. In many places that attempt to do this, there is a large pushback from parents, both about the necessity for additional child care during working hours and about the truncated instructional time. There is also significant pushback from teachers who may not see the value of working together and may view this as only one more burden in their already onerous schedules.
I believe that the above reasons do not address the fundamental issue surrounding the absence of curriculum roundtables in most schools. I think that it occurs because the field needs more professional and lay leaders who are visionary enough to see the value of the roundtables and view the cost-benefit ratio positively. If the leadership sees value, the teachers will also view this as a productive use of their time.
Conducting roundtables is certainly not my original idea. Nor does it date back only 300 years. King Solomon, described in Melakhim I (I Kings) as the wisest man in the world, noted in Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 4:9 that: "Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor.” In Mishlei (Proverbs) 27:17, he points out that, "Iron sharpens iron; so a person sharpens the countenance of his friend." Solomon understood that working together will garner more robust results.
I strongly encourage school leaders, as you begin to think about next year’s academic schedule, to consider building in time for teachers to conduct productive and positive weekly―or even bi-weekly―convenings. In that way, we will be doing something worth doing―educating our children in a way that will allow us to do it even better than we already do.