Keystones: Bringing Jewish Values to Action with Lisa Schopf

Lisa Schopf, North Campus Principal, Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School of the Nation’s Capital in Washington DC

Sharon Freundel:

I’m Sharon Freundel, Managing Director of the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC). Welcome to JEIC’s Keystones Podcast Series. The keystone is the central stone at the summit of an arch, locking the whole together. We believe that a strong Jewish Day School education is what holds the Jewish people together as we look towards the next generation.

In today’s episode, we will hear from Lisa Schopf from the Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School of the Nation’s Capitol in Washington DC on the impact of empowering students to see themselves as informed agents of change.

Lisa Schopf:

I'm very excited to be talking about our program called Scholars Forum: Contemporary Context. The idea behind that is that there's so much going on in the world today. There are contexts that our students are consciously involved in and circumstances they just navigate through without really giving a lot of thought to, and these subjects are ones that can empower them to see their place as agents of positive change, as involved participants, informed participants. So what we try to do is cover some topics that may not necessarily come up in a regular middle school curriculum and that allow us to integrate the subjects that they are studying, as well as some core guidelines that we have through the school of incorporating our Jewish values, connecting and learning through Judaic texts, and using our learning to take concrete and positive action, even today as students today, and perhaps when they get older, but also taking their learning to empowered action now.

The idea was to have a dedicated time in the schedule for each grade in the middle school, during a different trimester of the school year, focused on a theme, and each of the three years of a student's journey through middle school would cover a different theme. There are two that remain consistent, and one that we switch out every three years. Right now, we're involved in Mayim Chayim, living waters, water equity and access. And that is our theme or our study for the year. And sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, depending on the trimester, engage in a study regarding that topic and then take their learning into action.

They all start from a place of considering where water comes up in our Tanakh (Bible), and we share and brainstorm different episodes throughout Tanakh where water is a central part, even a character in the narrative. And through that, the students generate an idea about water in our lives more generally, that water is not just the resource we all depend on for our lives, but water continues to shape our lives in formative ways. And we see that in Tanakh and then we take it to other contexts.

In sixth grade, they focus on local environments, and they examine how water equity and access has been an issue or concern in their local community, extending through DC, Maryland, and Virginia. We go out to Rock Creek Park, which is across the street from our school, and we do a water analysis. And we also have begun the process of doing a water audit at our school.

And this is an opportunity for them, as I've mentioned, to integrate Judaic texts, and values of tikkun olam, and also STEM, so we'll be working with elements of math, measurement, and engineering to think about ways that we are taking the data we get from our water audit to suggest actions that our school can do to be even more careful and conscientious citizens of the world and caring for our resource of water.

We bring in speakers who talk about organizations that help and for inspiration and for broader knowledge. And I should add that all of our studies, all of our grades, also go on trips to launch and deepen our understanding. So we went on a boat ride, every grade went on a boat ride on the Anacostia River. We are part of the Anacostia watershed. And we think about, you know, we learn about what we are going to be trying to think more deeply about and give informed ideas on. So through the water audit and through our water study, we're going to be taking actions more locally.

Seventh grade already had their trimester of this study. And they examined, again, all of these Jewish texts and values. And they took their study to look at ways that water issues have been affecting different peoples across our country in different ways, looking at drought and looking at decisions that some governments made about the source of their water and the impact that had on different communities. And they created case studies based on their learning, and through images and graphs and charts, they gave over information about the subject that they studied.

So they also examined the power of a case study, that it's not just about that specific case, but that it can be something that draws the viewer’s attention or the audience's attention into a specific narrative or story. But then they extrapolate from that broader understanding and lessons. An example of that would be looking at the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, to understand how race, gender, class, government action, finances all interplay in affecting our current experiences of water equity and access. And then they use those case studies to inform and inspire others.

Eighth graders are going to be looking at this on a global level. And they’ll be looking at water issues affecting our world. In the past, when we've done this, we also brought in speakers from Innovation Africa who talked about how they used electricity to work with pumps in remote areas of Africa to access the aquifers under the ground to bring fresh water to people in areas of Africa. Innovation Africa is an Israeli company, and it is an example of how we can use technology and empathy to really make real change in the world. And when our eighth graders go to Israel, we visit and connect with Innovation Africa representatives there as well; we go to their offices, and we have a really nice connection there.

Our eighth graders in the past created podcasts related to their studies about issues related to water equity and access around the world. And our current eighth graders will also be working on an art installation related to this subject, most likely a mobile that will be in our school, connecting with these themes of water and its essential nature to our world, and hopefully that will serve as a beautiful and important and significant inspiration and reminder of our always and consistent responsibility to being mindful about water and also to be thinking about how we can use a thought, an idea, a passion, and our caring to help others.

Water is not the only subject we cover. Last year and the years before that, our theme was civil rights and social justice. That evolves as current circumstances and our world dynamics change. There is a consistent course of study. This is not the only place, certainly, that our schools study civil rights and social justice, but it is a place where we help to bring about this understanding, and it’s a nuanced understanding, that even as we embrace the promise and vision of America, we continue to be part of an ongoing effort to bring that promise and vision to fuller fruition for all. So in our studies, we think and look and focus on the people who joined together across all different seeming-divides to bring that promise to its fullest articulation, and we know and we commit to being part of that story unfolding ever more into the future.

So the students use their study to impact, always taking our learning into action. And this is all learning lishma, it's learning for the sake of learning. This is not a graded course; they do produce, and they work on skills like research and analysis and writing and certainly STEM and Jewish text study. But it doesn't show up on the report card. But what's wonderful is that it's authentically meaningful because they're creating something that will reach a broader audience, that is to be shared, that is not just for a teacher to say, “Yes, check; that's great,” but that it is reinforcing what we truly believe about learning and about our Jewish values and the inspiration we can gain from our texts, that this is not for, you know, just getting through a course – that this shapes our lives and informs how we can engage in our world.

Then we have the year, the third year in the cycle is always a little bit different. Our one year we did, we looked at how memory shapes our identity. And we looked at the zichronot that we are required to remember in our faith, but we also thought about the stories we tell to cultivate our own school memory because we were tasked with making the school's 30th anniversary documentary. And we went through many artifacts and conducted over 40 interviews, and they learned all about making films. And then we had a wonderful red carpet event at AFI Silver Theatre in downtown Silver Spring, and they got dressed up, and they sat in on a panel, and answered questions about the documentary. And again, that's another example of how they took all of this learning, this learning about memory and identity and shaping our story, and they took it to an action that is enduring; that documentary is still part of our story and on our website.

In 2020, a difficult year for a number of reasons, it was also a census year, and our students studied the census and looked at all these different questions. So the questionnaires from 1790 through 2020 and learned how they could understand more about society at that time just by looking at the questions that were asked about society at that time. And then they wondered, how can we make ourselves, our voices, count now? Because we're talking a lot about counting, which is what the census is about. And each cohort, because at the time in 2020, we had moved also into cohorts, we took a different avenue to have that impact to be counted. One group made a website for children who are fighting cancer, another group organized a drive, another group worked at a place that prepares foods and distributes it to people who are experiencing homelessness, another group just took gloves and garbage bags and went out onto the local streets and cleaned them up. So everyone kind of took their learning to action.

And next year, we'll let you all know. But we are leaning towards doing a study of local, national, and global elections, with the focus being on students’ identifying issues that they care about, and then committing either on an individual or a class level to action that will foster positive impact and change in that particular area of interest, trying really to emphasize issues in elections and not personalities.

So we're very excited about this, the Scholars Forum in general, because it's an opportunity for us to live what we all have expressed as our goals as educators – fostering meaningful, relevant, purposeful, authentic learning experiences, where students see that learning is a step toward engagement and impact and allowing us to bring forth all that that informs who we are in terms of our Jewish values, all that we learn: Judaic texts, civics, STEM, and take all of that together as whole students and whole people to make a difference now.

Sharon Freundel:

To find out more about this topic and other ways to catalyze radical improvement in Jewish Day Schools, please visit our website at JewishChallenge.org.