Networking the Unintentional Network: RAVSAK as a Case Study in Progress

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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

idana@ravsak.org

Rabbi Yechiel Hoffman, is an Educator, Nonprofit Leader and Community Organizer, who is working as a consultant to RAVSAK on their network-weaving efforts.

yechielhoffman1@gmail.com

This post also appears on JewPoint the Darim Online Blog:

http://darimonline.org/blog/networking-unintentional-network-ravsak-case-study-progress

A New Learning Paradigm (and not a Buzz Word)

It is clear to me that the 21st Century Jewish educational endeavor must develop its capacity for innovation and creativity. Jonathan Woocher makes the case in his article "Reinventing Jewish Eduation for the 21st Century" that we need a new paradigm for Jewish education in which innovation and change is the natural order, rather than a response to crisis.

For any new paradigm to emerge, Jewish education must forefront its change efforts around a movement that aims for the field, its institutions, its leader and its beneficiaries to thrive, and not merely to survive. Survivalism offers a comfortable feeling of security locked in a nostalgic authorization of past glory, upended by contextual infringement. To thrive in an age of rapid change and discomfort requires an embrace of chaos, uncertainty and willing experimentation, hallmarks for the innovative enterprise glorified in Silicon Valley, Israel's "start-up nation" and the technology revolution.

Firstly, we must forget the buzz words of innovation, design thinking, gamification, 21st century skills, etc. I am not sayin these concepts are not important, or critical to the future of Jewish education, but simply relying on these words to make us sound smarter at conference, at back-to-school nights and to funders is not going to improve the quality or value of Jewish education in order to make us thrive.

I believe the secret to Jewish education thriving in the coming century actually lies within something we all know well, and have done well for over two millennium:

Learning

The core of the field of Jewish education's capacity to innovate and grow resides in our organization's capacity for learning. Our organizations will evolve as every individual within our organization become agents for our organizations to learn. We will only be able to continuously improve at the rate to which our students learning needs grow if educational leaders can learn more effectively and faster. Rather than relying on tradition competencies, such as costs, Jewish education can create a clear value advantage over any competition (of which there is much), by emphasizing organizational learning.

So, thinking of your organization, which of these six organizational learning principles (Wang and Ahmed, 2003) do you want your organizations to thrive by?

1. Triple Loop Learning (See Video Below for explanation of Double and Triple Loop Learning)
Learning how to learn depends on constantly questions existing products processes and system. Organizations must engender the capacity to ask where the organization should stand in the future marketplace, rather than simply asking what is wrong, and how to correct and prevent flaws.

2. Organizational Unlearning
Organizations need to abandon current beliefs and methods even when producing reasonable results. Rather than prolonging a successful product, process, policy or system, organization must be willing to move on in order to create something better.

3. Knowledge creation
Ultimately, innovation capacity is considered a continuous process knowledge creation, which occurs through radical changes that lead to the accumulation, dissemination, retention and refinement of knowledge.

4. Creative thinking
Innovation occurs only through unexpected moments of creativity and insight, rather than predictable patterns.

5. Competence-orientation
Typically organizations try to attain a competitive advantage by being better and cheaper than competitors.  The organizational imperitive should be to make current competition irrelevant and focus on being open to new opportunities that assure performance on terms established by their own standards of excellence.

6. Organizational sustainability
Organizational learning is directly correlated to organizational outcomes and to continuous improvement. However the nature of the Jewish education market requires an emphasis on value innovation through a creative quality process as the only way to sustain competitive advantage. Only by delivering new value to the marketplace can a Jewish educational organization truly become sustainable.

So rather than simply emphasizing affordability, and other survivalist practices, Jewish education needs to veer from temporary profitability and incremental changes.  Instead, we must place a large scale emphasis or creative and innovative change rooted in organizational learning.

I hope to use this blog to further explore organizational learning, innovation and the importance of understanding these frameworks and tools to create the vibrant, valuable and successful paradigm for Jewish education in the 21st century.

I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and explorations on these topics, either through comments on this blog, on twitter, or via direct communication.

References:
Wang, C.L. & Ahmed, P. (2003) "Organizational learning: a critical review". The Learning Organization (10:1), P. 8-17.

What Can Jewish Ed Learn from Jewish Start-Ups?

A few years back Joshua Avedon and Shawn Landres coined the term Jewish Innovation Ecosystem to describe and explore the burgeoning growth of innovation in start-ups and traditional institutions. Having spent the last 20 months leading an organization attempting to thrive in this new ecosystem, I often wondered what I can learn to share with the field of Jewish education.

I especially feel it is pertinent to reflect on the impact of innovation on Jewish Day School education, having just experienced the frantic and frenetic rush of the NAJDS, where Naomi Korb Weiss, Debra Frieze, Tony Wagner and others provided critique, vision and tools for a new framework for leadership and innovation in Jewish Education. The strong support, collegiality and collaborative spirit of my JDS PLN (Professional Learning Network).

After a twenty month self imposed hiatus from blogging (being Executive Director of LimmudLA did not leave much time for reflection or writing),  I am inspired to return to blogging. I intend for this blog to continue to be a means of fostering a conversation that can hopefully extend beyond my own questions, observations and ideas and become a launching pad for transforming abstract ideas into practical reality.

I left schooling to lead a lean mean community organization, that was just leaving its infancy stage and into life in the the second-stage start-up phase. At LimmudLA, we depended on innovation as a process to maximize limited resources to serve a broadly fined target demographic for a specific mission and set of values. Our innovative process, engineered through organizational learning enabled our programming, volunteering, fundraising, communication, community partnerships, and organizational systems to increase efficiency, productivity and value.

So it seems fitting that having explored the world of of innovation, startups and Jewish communal experience and learning, what can we learn. How does my experience leading LimmudLA reflect upon the current state of 21st Century Jewish education?

The 5 Questions for Jewish Education:

1. How do we prepare learners for lifelong learning that reflects 21st century adult experience?
1. What do today's students need to know/be able to do in order to be able to engage as adult learners?
2. What assumptions are we relying on about how Jewish adults are learning that may not match up with reality?
2. How does innovation as a process of creating new value, become engendered in our schools organizationally and as an educational objective?
3. If choice is a central modality of adult Jewish life in the 21st century, how do we create schools where students can safely learn to navigate, discern, course correct when empowered to independently choose pathways for their journey?
4. What is the role of technology in building community and enabling individualization?
1. How do we ensure that offline engagement and unplugging remain critical components to our lifestyle?
5. How can we foster, identify and activate natural and latent networks within our school, between our schools and to our local and global communities?
1. How can schools develop vibrant and fruitful collaborations with community leaders and organizations to promote increased ownership, integration in our students educational journeys and organizational effectiveness?

Innovation, Passover & 21st Century Tools (updated for 2013)

This week, Jews around the world celebrate the national birth of the Jewish people through the holiday of Passover.  One of the primary tenets of celebrating the Passover holiday is the commandment to “remember” (Exodus, 13:3) and commemorate what happened to the Israelites in Egypt. Furthermore, the Israelites were commanded to “tell your son” (Exodus 13:18). Historically, during the period of the Second Temple, Israelites began to engage in the Passover Seder experience an innovation of experiential learning in order to fulfill the injunction to “remember” and “tell” the exodus narrative from generation to generation.

The Seder experience serves as a complex educational model, integrating Jewish and Greek methodology, hands on ritual, a rich text and intricate number and word play, all to promote active participation and inquiry from its participants. Familiar elements, such as the Karpas and Afikoman, originate in Greek custom. The repetition of the number four creates patters. The structural order creates a planned pacing designed to enhance the sensory and learning experience, within which we touch (Yachatz), taste (Karpas), speak (Kadeish), listen (Magid) and even smell (Marror).   This innovative educational tool serves as a model for how we in the 21^st century aim to utilize new tools, adapted from the environment we live in order to satisfy age-old educational processes.

We, as lifelong learners, should use the tools of our time, just as the Rabbis in their time used the Greek tools and methods to enhance the storytelling and experiential learning experience for the Passover holiday. Today, we must utilize the new technological tools, whether digital or not, but we must keep in mind that when we say “technology”, we really mean the tools that have been brought to market in recent years. As the Passover Seder proves, we have always been using technological tools to enhance learning experiences to be more participant-centric and experiential.

Technology enables us to learn, both skills and content, but cannot become the central purpose of the learning experience.  The new technology of today surely becomes dated even more quickly now than ever before (anyone use ICQ or AOL Chat anymore?). As educators, we must play with as many tools as possible, become familiar with those we don’t access and embrace the reality that we will never have knowledge, let alone mastery, of every tool available, let alone the one’s our students use. In our capacity as educators, we serve our students as partners to plan and guide our students in how to utilize these great tools to meet the same educational purposes as ever before.  Since biblical times, story telling critically served to foster between generations the memories and values inherent to a people. Today, we need to foster expertise in digital storytelling, which teachers can master using sties such as Digitales and the University of Houston’s Digital Storytelling Site.

The Passover Seder has evolved over time, incorporating customs that utilized the technologies and methods of the contextual environment they evolved from. This year, two new tools incorporate the spirit of open source to allow Seder leaders and participants new tools to enhance their learning experience. Haggadot.com and DIY Seder provide a range of tools to allow users to post, comment and share content and tools for their Seder experience, by constructing their own planned experience and a personalized Haggadah. These new tools, specific to 21^st Century technology, clearly provide a model for how new tools clearly impact the educational process of Jewish experience.

Update Passover 2013:

This year, G-dcast unveiled a brand new FREE IOS mobile app "Let's Get Ready for Passover" that introduces children (of all ages) to the narrative of Passover preparation through an interactive game. It includes a short hidden object game that teaches about Bedikat Chametz (the ritual search for leavened foods) plus a Passover recipe. This simple game provides easy access for learning about the holiday experience beyond the exodus narrative, in a way that embraces storytelling through gamification.

I hope this Passover season, you will consider how the Seder learning experience and methodology can impact other Jewish experiences. What other new tools will we utilize to renew and advance the experience of Jewish life in the 21^st Century? This year make your Seder memorable.

Racing to Nowhere in the 21st Century

In the last year two movements have been dominated my thinking about the future of education:

1. The questions of the culture surrounding education, as explored in the film Race to Nowhere. 
2. The preparation of learning for the world of the 21st Century as promoted by initiatives, such as The Partnership for 21st Century Skills. 

This weekend I read an article in the Jewish Journal by Milken Community High School's Head of School, Jason Ablin, sharing his reflections and commentary about Race to Nowhere, titled "Waiting to Nowhere." I find myself conflicted about some of my Head of School's conclusions and omissions in his critique, such as the role our schools have played in promoting this race, but I definitely agree with his assessment of the film.

“Race” contends with a serious subject in an unsophisticated and simplistic way, both minimizing the problem and its possible ramifications. One teacher in “Race” calls the current test-crazed American educational system “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Unfortunately, the film addresses the issue in exactly the same manner.

Simultaneously, I happened to be reading for my doctorate course on 21st Century Jewish Education Marc Prensky's Teaching Digital Natives. Prensky argues that great contextual changes in the world we live in demand a change in the methods of education as well.

Today's students will not live in a world where things change relatively slowly (as many of us did) but rather one in which things change extremely rapids-daily and exponentially. So today's teachers need to be sure that, no matter what subject they are teaching, they are teaching it with the future in mind (Prensky, 2010, P.5).

Prensky proposes a pedagogy of "partnering" between teachers and students. His metaphor for the educational experience differs from the traditional metaphors, such as "keeping the train on track" or "watering a tree so it can grow big and strong".

...today's kids are more like rockets....Why should we think of today's kids as rocket? At First blush, it's their speed; they operate faster than any generation that has come before. Although little may have changed in the rate kids grow up emotionally, there has been enormous change in what today's kids learn and know at early ages, and therefore, many think, in the rate they grow up intellectually (Prensky, 2010, P.11).

Prensky warns:

As with all rockets, kid's fuel mix is volatile. Some go faster and farther than others. Some lose their guidance or their ability to follow direction. Some go off course or stop functioning unexpectedly. Some even blow up. But as we get better at making them, many more hit their mark, and it is our job as rocket scientists to help them do so (Prensky, 2010, P.11).

I started to think about the incredible connection we need to explore between Prensky proposed pedagogic model and the culture of schooling superficially explored in the A Race to Nowhere. As we investigate and project into the future of Jewish education, how do we reconcile our desires to construct a new pedagogy centered around student's passions, interests and innate mode of learning, when the culture of schooling surrounding them promotes entirely oppositional values.

While I have invested much of my work over the last few years into developing a model of 21st Century Jewish learning, in both my classroom formal curricula and experiential learning experiences, I constantly have to face the reality of the culture of schooling within which Jewish education, especially day school education, finds itself. As much as my students embrace constructivst learning and PBL over traditional text oriented and teacher centric models of Jewish learning, they still struggle to muster up the will and motivation to engage in learning when facing the very pressures that the Race to Nowhere film describes. As more and more of our Jewish day schools aim to appeal to families seeking the factories that yield college ready students, as depicted in the film, we must consider the cost in effectively developing engaged Jews, lifelong learners and a generation prepared for 21st century life.

Many of the values espoused by Prensky and others as being core to the 21st century learning model evolve out of a deep concern for the student, constructing methods and frameworks that center learning around the student's experiences, interests, knowledge and tools. However, all of this depends on the student being interested in engaging in schooling for the same purpose and the same drive as one does for life beyond school. Prensky aims to blend the "in" school and "out" of school learning experiences through the "partnering" pedagogy, but what if our 21st century student do not wish to do so. What if they want their "play" to be open and driven by their passions, but they want their "work" to be structured, goal oriented and determined by an authority that can promise to make achievement possible no matter what the cost.

As I enter spring break, after a long second semester with seniors for my high school, my students claim to be made lazy and numb to learning from the three and a half years of hard work and the college application process. Once their acceptance to a college has been determined, school becomes less critical, and they choose to opt out of the learning process as the race comes to a close.

One student shared with me:

However, the last few months (sic) have been fragmented and dull in my eyes and I do not want to leave this school with that memory...When in high school can the students truly explore their passions? There's a lack of student freewill considering that everyday is spent in a fourwalled classroom.

 At this point, I am only formulating the question:
"For the 21st Century, can we truly build a partnering model, if we continue to promote the race to nowhere?"
 
Will we as educator accept the responsibility for not just cultivate new modes of learning, but also taking accountability for our culpability in promoting the race to nowhere? Does Jewish education bear an additional responsibility to break down the social constructs that sustain the race to nowhere? While much responsibility lies with the parents who buy into the socio-culturally constructed race, what responsibility do schools have to stand up to their "customers" and tell parents "no, your student can't take six APs as a Junior" or "your student can't be the student government president, star in the school musical and keep straight As". When do take a stand against unmitigated homework, Sunday reviews for APs and private college counselors? Why do students need to visit every college they apply to, apply to 20 colleges and then have to decide between their 8th and 9th choice because they over reached for their first 7 (but were absolutely certain they would get in)? Why do we allow students to fib their transcripts to show they ran clubs and engaged in community service when they never did so? When will be able to intrinsically motivate our students to engage in learning about their heritage, religion and beliefs without holding a grade over their head? When will we truly be able to have an honor code and not just penalize students for cheating?

We can not expect students to opt into an idealic model of 21st Century learning, in whatever form, unless we are willing to create a model of schooling that contains social and cultural purpose and meaning, for our society, for our families and for our youth.

I hope to explore potential responses to these critical questions in coming posts, but I eagerly await your responses as well.