March 2019: School Culture

School leaders wear a multitude of hats: they lead staff in curriculum and instruction, they deal with budgets and raise money, they help staff understand and respond to the impact of trauma, they involve parents, they […]

To me, culture is an image. It is a succinct idea. It is, as an example, my friend’s proud description of her native Colombia’s passion. Passion is the unique quality of her culture. Passion infuses every […]

THOMAS R. HOERR, PH.D. A school’s culture is the set of expectations, attitudes, and practices that define everyone’s behavior. Some of it can be described and defined; much of it is simply “there,” not necessarily in […]

RABBI JOSEPH B. SOLEVEITCHIK, zt”l Adapted by Rabbi Abraham R. Besdin from a eulogy delivered by the Rav in 1972 for Rabbi M.Z. Twersky, zt”l, the Talner Rebbe The Pattern of Dual Leadership The most authentic […]

RABBI DR. URIEL LUBETSKI Planning for Student-Teacher Relationships Although we are aware of the importance of creating positive relationships with students, not all educators purposefully plan for it. As teachers prepare for their year, they construct […]

Gefilte fish, large noses, Seinfeld, kugel, light skin, doctors, lawyers, accountants and last names like Friedman, Goldberg, Katz, Rosenberg and Schwartz. When a Sephardic student sees these American-Jewish stereotypes, he does not see his family, friends […]

A good deal of school culture discussions center around the culture of a constituency within the school (usually teachers or students) and how to make changes to that culture. Of course, culture is a much more […]

Take a moment and list the top three companies that you’d want to work for (if you weren’t so invested in educating future generations, of course). Did you make your picks? What do they have in […]

How a New Job Description and a Family Model Can Increase Social Emotional Learning, Promote Inclusion, Improve Academics and Unify the School Culture DR. BECKY BAILEY We often think academics are schools’ primary purpose. Any social-emotional […]

MRS. MIRIAM GETTINGER We all have memories from our elementary school experience. One of my most poignant memories centers around a classroom discussion during Chanukah at the Hebrew Academy of Greater Miami during an Ivrit class […]

RABBI BEREL WEIN Judaism and hence any form of Jewish education have always had to swim upstream against the currents of the surrounding cultures of the countries where Jews resided. Even though these cultures in the […]

RABBI DR. YERACHMIEL GARFIELD When Dr. Irvin Scott stood in front of Longfellow Hall at Harvard University and said he wanted to tell us his story, I assumed his lecture would be entertaining but not impactful. […]