Networks That Learn

Since I first started this blog a little over two years ago I have focused on issues related to Jewish education in particular and education in general. My role in the field has shifted my vantage point, and my study towards an Ed.D through Northeastern University has provided me new tools and knowledge to think about my vision for education and the field of Jewish education as whole. I am deeply invested in cultivating a systems approach to Jewish education that will enable a design and experimental approach to transforming our field, primarily through a flattened approach to utilizing networks for conversation, collaboration and change. This is present in my doctoral research, my professional work as a consultant and soon to be employee of a Conservative congregation as the Director of Youth Learning and Engagement, and in my informal efforts to develop Jed Lab with members of my professional learning network.

Back when I worked in the entertainment industry, I only through of the word network as a verb, as in "I went to the showcase to network." Ever since I immersed myself in the world of Jewish education have I started to appreciate that network is really a noun, a structure of relationships bound in three dimensions by time, space and purpose. I think the reason I have been drawn to network thinking and networked learning likely because I intuitively seek out relational learning experiences, and I was an early adopter to using technology to discover and develop relationships (I met my wife in an AOL chat room in 1997).

As an educator, I have always been more interested in the process of learning that in discovering the best way to manage a classroom. For me, networks provide another structure and theoretical framework to understand how learning truly occurs. My work in the classroom as a teacher at Milken Community High School, as a volunteer for LimmudLA and as a Jewish nonprofit professional, I always emphasized relationships and experiences as a the primary ways to foster learning, growth and transformation. This occurs informally and formally for my students, my volunteers, my program participants and my colleagues. As I became more aware and practiced with networks, I have become more intentional and strategic in designing and facilitating dynamic network conversations and collaborations. 

Watch this great Tedx presentation by Mark Turrell, where he provides an excellent overview of the elements of Network Thinking:

Exploring networks creates a great opportunity for learning about what formal and informal networks mean to Jewish organizations, the field of Jewish communal service and education and our work as Jewish professionals. It is critical to understand the background behind frameworks for networks, and the learning and growth that comes from utilizing and activating natural and designed networks. Rabbi Hayim Herring posited that too many organizations rely on vertical hierarchies, operating under command and control leadership models, and are more activity driven than mission driven. I believe the horizontal orientation of network models emphasizes influence rather than power. For this very reason we need networks and networks facilitators to offer flattened relationship building and influence into a system where vertical structures create a great deal of repetition, competition and silos. We should not be afraid that new models demand a shift from old paradigms, but rather how these new models prepare us for the inevitable new paradigms as explored by Jonathon Woocher.

While we develop a common language for network thinking and weaving, we must understand that common terminology, such as "network weaving" and "network weavers" originated from a single author, June Holley, who coined the term. Her efforts culminated in a book used to support her ideas that individuals within a network can “knit the net” in “connecting those individuals and clusters who can collaborate or assist one another in some way.” While "weaving" may not be the perfect metaphor for this activity, June Holley and others such as Beth Kanter, have elevated the conversation of the role of networks, and the opportunity to use technology, including social media, to do so. Their work stands on the shoulders of great thinkers like Karen Stephenson, who provided the frameworks, conceptions and models to understand, utilize networks and evaluate our application of networks. I hope to explore new metaphors for network engagement that emphasize the relational process of network engagement, rather the structural elements of networks. 

My investment in networks began with connections fostered through shared purpose and interest. At the DeleT Alumni Network in 2009 in Los Angeles I recognized the bound teacher network of individuals trained through a common framework and with common language. We shared interests, passion and a desire for change in the field of education. We established meaningful relationships during our short period of time together at the conference, but developed a structure for engaging in collaborative research, advocacy and peer support.

Over the last four years, my engagement in the DeLeT Alumni network has provided me with a collegial support system as I have transition between jobs, assumed leadership positions. I have amplified my network engagement through opportunities the DAN has provided to go to three of the four of the North American Jewish Day School conferences, the first two as a DAN leader representative, and the last one as part of a group of 40 teacher leaders. In 2010, we collaborated with the Pardes Educator Alumni network for a joint conference. These were not just opportunities to be exposed to new ideas, content areas or professional development, but ripe opportunities to take advantage of developing meaningful relationships and established new conversations about the field of Jewish education and our work in it. 

For the most part, network weaving occurs informally, through people self-taught and self-motivated to foster relationships that bind and activate those who find commonality through ideas, purpose and action. For these people, and the institutions that are now finding roles internally to support them, their efforts go beyond simply enhancing the social links between members of their networks. Network weaving operates within a theoretical framework for structurally understanding that our field is recently adopting. Network thinking fights against the nature of isolated programs as silos, but understands our system structurally as a complex and layered set of individuals and organizations linked spatially and temporally across mission, geography and programming. 

What network weavers offer institutions, whether they be schools, synagogues or communal agencies, is a new way of thinking about activating individuals to collaborate and create in innovative and dynamic ways. This has been achieved in the field of social justice by community organizers, emblematic in the synagogue world by the URJ's Just Congregations. In the field of Jewish Education, several network organizations, including Hillel, YU and the Jewish Education Project have hired professional staff to engage in network weaving as key element to their overall strategy of engagement.

As I continue to immerse myself in developing my own professional learning networks, and to study networks in my academic work, I am thrilled to see the evolution of the conversation about the impact network thinking and behavior is having on our field. Many educational schools and organizations have worked with leaders in the field, like Darim Online, to understand how to re-imagine their institutional systems and embrace social media technology to address their network functions. Many organizations have invested in personnel and resources to further efforts to internally and externally weave networks within their institutions, member networks and the field as a whole. These include varied organizations with a range of strategic visions and models, including academic institutions, like Yeshiva University's YU 2.0 program, network organizations, like the Jewish Education Project, foundations, like Avi Chai and their new HaReshet program and engagement programs, like Birthright Next's NEXTwork initiative.

I am now working with Ravsak, who first exposed me to the power of networks through their extensive programs for the network of Jewish community day schools. Together, we hope to design a strategic and intentional model for engaging the network of educational leaders within Ravsak's network of member schools. This will entail training, developing and coaching network facilitators who will be as effective in fostering network learning as the great Jewish educators are in fostering learning in classrooms, camps and other settings.

For my doctoral research, I am exploring how organizations can facilitate organizational learning to cultivate network relationships amongst individuals and groups. I will create a case study, which I hope will be a valuable resource to our field by addressing: (1) What learning activities, on individual and group levels, facilitate and promote the sharing and interpretation of knowledge within networks? (2) How do individuals engaged in networked learning further their individual learning and collaborate to act upon shared understandings? 

As a professional passionate about the field of Jewish education and communal service, I want to address: 

1. How will we invest in a paradigm shift of thinking? This requires identifying and allocating the proper resources to do so, and to understand our network and field of education as a system? We need to invest the resources in understanding our network and field of education as a system. We need to use use tools, such as causal loop diagrams and systems diagrams, to understand the interactive elements of our systems, and the causal relationships that reveal how one variable within the system affects another. These systems thinking tools, like causal diagrams, allows us to understand how change in one part of our system (such as pricing for Jewish day schools) affects the whole system. This requires identifying the appropriate system archetype that reflects the narrative and templates for our field and networks. Each archetype provides its own “theme, storyline, patterns of behavior over time, structure, mental models and effective interventions,” allowing us to understand and diagram our system appropriately. This will enable us to see whether the bureaucratic organizational structures so familiar to our Jewish organizations truly reflect the needs of our organizations, networks and wider field. See the video below for a visual description of systems mapping.

Causal Loop Diagram

  


2. Will we invest in understanding network theory and its applications, using survey tools to study our organizations? Do we want to run the risk of these very influential frameworks and models being integrated as mere buzz words? Will we cultivate a new model of leadership to reflects the power of connectors, in Gladwell terminology, so that network weavers are developed and trained? If we want network weavers to fully appreciate their impact on the system and reflect the mission of the organizations they represent, then we need to cultivate network leaders that are not simply self-taught or those that happen to be present on social media. This means not just expecting that anyone within a network can facilitate a network's learning and activation. We need to design ways to train, coach and support our best connectors in mastering their skills and integrating into our most complex networks.

3. Are we willing rethink paradigms of leadership, where relationships of influence are as important as centers of power? While change may be slow to many Jewish institutions, the shift to network thinking provides a window into the ways technology and process thinking have altered the landscape of the world in general, and the Jewish world particularly. The advent of the Digital Age has transformed how people gather information, communicate with others and access power, so as to empower the many, rather than limit control to the few. We need network weavers to continue to connect people to others, but also to support the process of activating those with new passions for exploring this new found access, communication and knowledge.

4. Are we ready to embrace network weaving as not just a means to fostering social relationships, but as a new mode of education and learning? Network weavers serve at their best when they are facilitators of network learning. This requires rich knowledge of organizational learning theory and practices. Through organizational networked learning models, weavers enable organization's members who have gathered and interpreted knowledge and to share that understanding with others. A network weaver connects, activates and facilitates groups of individuals and organizations to coordinate, align and collaborate to create new models of engagement.

Let's start by building relationships. In the near future, I hope to write about the connections between Ron Wolfson's Relational Judaism approach and Networks.

So if you made it through this whole post, and we don't know each other. Let's connect, and expand our networks and learn together.

For more on networks in the Jewish sector, watch Dr. James Fowler's presentation from the 2013 Jewish Funders Newtork Conference:

Knowing in the 21st Century

know/nō/Verb

To "know" can mean many things, including:

1.     To grasp with clarity

2.     To regard as true

3.     To have fixed in the mind *

4.     To have experienced of

5.     To Become aware

6.     To possess knowledge*

7.     To have sexual intercourse with (Biblical)

Educationally, knowing has long been a goal for the learning process. However, within the process of schooling, whether for general or Jewish education, what “knowing” was privileged and for what purpose has varied over time.

Andrew S. Molnar, in his article “Computers in Education: A Brief History”, cites Nobel prize winner, Herbert Simon, that developments in science and information process have changed the nature of knowing. While in the past knowing meant having information stored in one’s memory (definition #6 above, and perhaps #3), knowing has evolved to become the process of having access to information and knowing how to use it (close to definitions #1, #4 and #5 above). With the act of knowing changing due the changing nature of how we access and store information in the digital age, we must consider how we educate Jews different to “know” what is necessary to engage as Jews. 

Currently, much of our schooling frameworks, curricula and pedagogies promote the learning of information that can be stored and later utilized, such as the acquisition of information from primary Jewish sources, whether Rabbinic or Biblical, the rituals and holidays engaged in throughout the calendar and lifecycle events and even Jewish narratives.  Perhaps, the question now needs to be how to we construct educational efforts and design schooling that will prepare students with great access to information to use the information properly, to discern what information is appropriate for their chosen path and how to design self-directed engagement with information, so that they will “know” how to use the abundant information recently made open and available, like never before in our history.

In valuing a new form of “knowing” as vital to living and doing Jewish in the 21^st century, we redefine our notion of Jewish literacy.  Jackie Marsh, in her article “New Literacies and Old Pedagogies: Recontextualizing Rules and Practices” designed research that determined that the changing nature of what it means to be literate in the outside world dictates that schools must generate new methods, content, learning process and mediums to better reflect these changes. How too must Jewish literacy models reflect the outside world? We must consider new texts, rituals and technology used to engage in Judaism in the 21^st century, and not depend on pedagogies and notions of literacy that reflect a Jewish way of life and engagement that has been passed by as we turned the century and entered into a digital reality. Why do we need construct our student Jewish learning around teaching how to utilize tools, content and mediums such as Facebook, blogs and popular culture? Why don’t we teach practices that reflect the breadth of engagement in Jewish world, and ask our students to struggle with the tension for changing rituals and practices? Why not have students explore online articles such as this one on Tattoos by Dvora Meyers on Tablet as a way of engaging in thoughtful textual analysis as a 21^st century model for engaging in Jewish practice and behavior?

As Marsh argues, changing literacy models demands a change in pedagogy and the role of the teacher. Patt Herr demonstrates in her expiremental research documents in the “The Changing Role of the Teacher (Industry Trend or Event)” that the primary goals of schooling have been to transmit culture, from the past generations to the current generation, and to prepare youth for the world we live in.  Jewish Education, having been heavily influenced by universalist tendencies inherent in public schools, function to serve these dual purposes. However, more focus has been paid to the transmission of culture than to effectively preparing youth to live Jewishly in the world we live in. The digital world will make it much more complicated and much more necessary to develop students ability to learn how to live as Jews in the digital world.

This demands models of teaching that deviate from the “Sage on the Stage” model of a teacher Jewish education remains much more comfortable with in formal environments.  This model, established as far back as Maimonides, fits comfortably with the model centralized Rabbinic figure of authority. This was not always the case; for even in Talmudic times, teachers served as facilitator of learning in the “guide on the side model”, a model we need to reclaim and enable Jewish education to be at the forefront of changing the teaching paradigm.

A teacher as guide will be better enabled to move our youth beyond being smart, to being wise, for Judaism as far back as Pirkei Avot has valued Chochma (wisdom). Marc Prensky pushes us beyond the bifurcation of digital immigrant and digital natives to recognize those who have digital wisdom as most capable within the digital world. In “H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Widsom”, Prensky recognize that in the digital age, widsom means to access the power of digital enhancements and the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities. For Prensky, like Simon, sees wisdom as the highmost realization of knowing how to discern the difference between right and wrong in engaging with the tools and information made possible in our digital age. Prensky makes the case that the ultimate knowing we can enable our students with is moral rather than technological.

We need to consider the fourth son from the Passover seder, the one who does not “know” how to ask.  The worst we can do as educators is not prepare our students to “know” how to access the information and knowledge in order to ask the right questions, moral and otherwise.  We need to utilize our Jewish wisdom to teach how to be digitally wise, in discerning right from wrong

In  “Redesigning Jewish Education for the 21^st Century: A Lipmann Kanfer Institute Working Paper” by Jonathan Woocher, Renee Rubin Ross & Merideth Woocher, a case was made for a Jewish educational paradigm designed for a changing digital world. The authors designated three design principles: 1)Learner as active agent;

2) Power of relationships and the social experience of learning; 3)Life Centered Jewish Education.

It has been three and half years since this work was first introduced to the Jewish education conversation. How far have we come? These design principles laid the groundwork for better understanding how to cultivate a generation of Jews who will truly know what it means to be and do Jewish. Will they be wise? Will they know how to utilize and discern the Judaism they can now encounter on their own? Have we truly built or transformed the model what it means to cultivate a literate Jew, in terms of content, process and medium?

What makes 21st Century Jewish Education Unique?

What might be the unique nature of 21st Century Jewish Education which sets it apart from the education we have encountered until now?

The changing nature for how people learn, gather information, collaborate and communicate in the 21^st century greatly impacts both the nature of Judaism and education. If we are to understand education as the process of teaching and learning new skills and understandings through the development of cognitive, affective and sensory-motor processes.  In the spirit of a Deweyian progressive educational model, Jewish education has the potential to engage learners where they are at in order to empower them to further their own learning initiatives. However, we must go beyond educational purposes, such as socialization and acculturation, and focus on empowerment, leadership and lifelong learning theories.

Much of previous educational models heavily focused on the acquisition of skills and content knowledge that would offer the literacy needed to access Jewish learning, spiritual, ritual and social engagement.  As the nature of how Jewish communities are forming, the growing influence of innovative start-ups, the influence of online information sources, search devices, aggregating sites and social networks present new challenges and opportunities for growth. As new paths for personal Jewish journeys and communal engagement develop, Jewish education must rethink both the process of learning, and content and skills needed.

21^st Century Jewish Education must rest on three pillars: 1) Student centered learning (PBL, Inquiry learning, Constructivist learning, etc.) 2) Experiential learning 3) Collaborative learning. While none of these pillars represent a unique approach to education for the 21^st century, or are particular Jewish approach, they each provide a unique framework to address the specific needs of preparing today’s learners to adapt quickly and engage in lifelong learning. 21^st Century Jewish education utilize technology to allow learners to deepen and broaden the reach of their learning and empower learning to obtain more control over the choices and learning path. As such, 21^st Century educated Jews should be more able to determine their own learning journey, able to identify sources of legitimate information, create learning communities globally and gather experts and guides to support them, all for the purpose of become holy personally and being a light unto the nations.  This truly exemplifies the model established in Avot (1:6) "Make for yourself a teacher and acquire for yourself a friend, and judge each person favorably."

Dr. Eliezer Jones' video on 21st Century Learning