Dr. Idana Goldberg and Rabbi Yechiel Hoffman
Are there limitations to networked thinking? Can networked learning
be taught and learned? Rabbi Hayim Herrings's blog post last month on
eJewishphilanthropy , "How to Minimize the Risk of Network Un-Weaving",
questions whether a relationship-based network approach to community building
and shared learning might be too antithetical to the hierarchical systems
embedded in much of our institutional structures. We believe the two are not
mutually exclusive. Schools are certainly places where institutional hierarchy
remains important in ensuring educational excellence and the fulfillment of
mission and vision, yet in our work we have found that formal and informal
networks as well as networked thinking provide tremendous opportunities for
shared learning and growth.
RAVSAK: the Jewish Community Day School Network offers an opportune
case study in the evolution of networks and networked thinking. Founded as a
grassroots network of Jewish community day school leaders, at a time when the
fax was the latest technology, we have nonetheless only recently begun to
recognize the implications of the word network and its centrality to how we
fulfill our mission. As each of us separately began to realize
the power of cultivating networks to satisfy our personal and professional
goals, we started to consider how this way of thinking could stimulate change
in the field of Jewish education.
Today, RAVSAK understands the need to embrace strategies and
tools to maximize the potential of our Jewish community day school network for
the broad cross-section of our 130 member schools and their own internal networks
of professionals, board members, students and stakeholders. Over the past year
we have been working with Darim Online’s Social Media Boot Camp for
Educators, a program generously funded by The Covenant Foundation, which has invested in
the development of many networked approaches across the field.
When we started with Darim, we thought it was all about finding
the right technology, but as we’ve worked with our internal team (made up of
committed professional staff and lay people) and our terrific coach, Lisa
Colton, we’ve realized that it’s actually about finding the right people and
building the right relationships, and only then figuring out what the right
technology might be to help these relationships thrive. As a network, RAVSAK is
in many ways an unintentional one. Its members share certain affiliations, yet
often have interacted primarily through the professionals in the RAVSAK office.
In our attempts to change the culture of our network from a hub and spokes
model of learning, we are promoting new ways to decentralize knowledge and
increase peer-peer learning and interactions, through the creation of a variety
of network sub-groups.
We understand that successful networks emanate from
relationships that inspire trust and are considering new ways to engender this
trust, by emphasizing common interests, pre-existing relationships and shared
needs. We know that learning stems from listening and we are beginning to
implement new ways to hear the conversations that are happening within our own
network and those that intersect with ours, as well as finding opportunities to
generate new conversations. Beyond just providing the technology for a network
conversation, we are experimenting with various approaches to designing and
facilitating the learning experience in the network. By engaging in an
intentional process of trial and error, we can measure the effectiveness of
different tools, platforms and facilitative strategies. By training and
supporting a network facilitator, we can simultaneously design the network,
deepen relationships and cultivate a network culture of reflection amongst the
network’s members.
Critical to this culture shift’s success within our network is
to shift attention from the network as a product, and focus on cultivating the
individuals who build these relationships and think deeply about how networks
work – the network weavers. That’s why RAVSAK recently brought Yechiel Hoffman
on board to work with us on transforming our unintentional network into an
intentional one. Together, we hope to elevate RAVSAK's network engagement by
understanding the nature of the network's member's needs and positioning within
the network. We are working
together and with our members to create a model that reflects RAVSAK's strategic
plan, and embodies and inspires the values and learning goals of the
network’s participants. We need to recruit, train and coach the network
facilitators to support Ravsak's networks and become part a new cohort of
network weavers impacting our field.
Eventually, we may not need individual network weavers woven
into our institutions and networks. Eventually, every Jewish educator, communal
professional, board member and Rabbi will naturally gravitate to fostering,
nurturing and facilitating those in their networks to connect, grow and
collaborate. But as referenced in the Rabbi Herring's blog post, until institutions embrace networks
and systems thinking, we depend on those who gravitate personally and
professionally to this mode of thinking and behaving.
At this moment when technology has created disruptive
opportunities for decentralized systems and shared learning, questions like
Rabbi Herring’s are important opportunities for interrogating what formal and
informal networks offer to Jewish organizations, the field of Jewish education
and our work as Jewish professionals. We have found the theoretical and
historical frameworks underlying network theory as well as the demonstrated
learning and growth that comes from utilizing and activating natural and
designed networks to be valuable in our own work. Rabbi Herring may be accurate
in determining that many organizations rely on vertical hierarchies operating
under command and control, and are more activity driven than mission driven. We
believe the horizontal platform model of networks, oriented around influence
rather than power, is the very reason we need networks and networks weavers in
our system. We should not be afraid that new models demand a shift from old
paradigms, but rather explore how these new models prepare us for the
inevitable new paradigms. The question becomes less how we un-weave our
networks, but how we cultivate a field in which learning through networks
becomes commonplace and as essential to leadership as any other skill.
Dr. Idana Goldberg, is the Associate Executive Director at RAVSAK
Rabbi Yechiel Hoffman, is an Educator, Nonprofit Leader and
Community Organizer, who is working as a consultant to RAVSAK on their
network-weaving efforts.
This post also appears on JewPoint the Darim Online Blog:
It's nice to see that some people still understand how to write a quality post.!
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