Simply Dealing with the Complexities: MTEI Israel Seminar
This summer, the Mandel Teacher Educators Institute (MTEI) spent their annual 10-day seminar in Israel (June 30 – July 10) focusing on the theme of Israel’s complexities and challenges for Jewish educators today. By definition a difficult subject to reckon with, participants spent their time grappling with different issues and narratives through encounters with other educators, trips, text study, culture and the arts.
Thirty-three senior educators participated in the program led by MTEI director Gail Dorph, which was open to current members of the program as well as its alumni. Among the participants were those enrolled in the Bay Area MTEI program, alumni from the MTEI national program and five others involved with a program about visions in Jewish education, who spent the ten day period studying with Dr. Daniel Marom and his team from the Visions in Jewish Education Project.
|
The chief goal of the Mandel Teacher Educators Institute, which runs a two-year course of study, is to develop leaders who can stimulate significant change in teaching and learning through improved and creative professional development for teachers in their institutions, in their communities, and at the national level, across the United States and Canada. |
Seminar participants examine classroom cases |
The Israel seminar aims to model the kind of learning community that it hopes participants will create in their own settings. The program provides participants with a taste of what serious collaboration on issues of teaching and learning can be like. In addition to learning new frameworks for analyzing teaching, they read and discuss Jewish texts about teaching and learning, examine classroom videotapes and curriculum materials, and study students' work.
One such opportunity for learning was an encounter between MTEI participants and Israeli teachers, facilitators and instructors connected to the Ovnayim Institute, a non-profit organization for educational knowledge and practice founded and directed by Mandel School for Educational Leadership graduate Shevi Govrin. This group meets regularly to write and discuss cases that present dilemmas related to teaching and learning.
The afternoon of mutual learning took place at the Jerusalem based Mandel Leadership Institute (MLI) and featured the examination and discussion of cases from the classroom.
“Investigating cases is a strategy to engage teachers in discussion of some of the practical and difficult challenges of teaching,” said Dorph. “Because case writing invites teachers to reflect on real dilemmas they face, they provide a rich opportunity for conversation and exploration of enduring dilemmas that relate not only to subject matter and pedagogy, but also on moral and ethical values.”
Participants examined cases which addressed issues of the complexity inherent in educating students in Israel and in the US. The US case “Eighth Graders Talk about Israel” described a class discussion about the students’ connection to Israel, while the Israeli case “With Joy and an Open Heart” described a Bible teacher’s conversation with a 16-year old student who resented being obligated to learn Bible at school.
“Conversations such as these, which are rooted in our practice, beliefs and passions, are likely to create transformation of practice and attitudes because different readers challenge each other to reexamine their values,” said Shevi Govrin.
Both MTEI and Ovnayim are projects designed to engage educators in reflection on classroom practice, albeit with slightly different foci. Using case discussions is one such strategy, and in this case, not only succeeded in creating an interesting conversation about adolescents' Jewish identity, but also shed light on some of the differences and similarities faced by Israeli and American educators.
To read more about the Mandel Teacher Educators Institute click here