Friday Letter - 9/7/12

With the summer days waning away, the Upper School faculty came back to Williston Park last week to set up classrooms and begin our preparations for the 2012-13 school year. Beyond these usual preparations, we sat to explore how we approach teaching and learning. In small groups, teachers reflected on their own learning experiences and discussed the implications of the changing world, particularly with technology. We continued to work with the staff on the roll out of Moodle, a learning management system that will support classes in the Upper School.

It was exciting to see the students arrive in the building and watch them greet old friends and meet new ones. We started our day with a school-wide tefillah in the High School and in the Middle School, where Rabbi Josh treated us to a visualization of the tension between the fixed routine of our davening and our desire to engage spiritually through a scene from one of my favorite movies, Dead Poets Society. 

The 9^th graders and their peer connectors headed off to the Midway Jewish Center (graciously filling in as our rainy day location) for a fun and engaging 9th grade orientation. Outdoor educators from Nassau BOCES worked with the students to help them grow together as a class while engaging in problem solving activities.

The Middle School celebrated its first bat mitzvah of the year with much nachat (joy) and energy on Thursday. Later that day, E2K kicked off its first session of the year. Elsewhere, the 9th and 10th graders in the Sci-Tech program began their first classes in this exciting new endeavor.

Looking ahead, we have the High School Shabbaton around the corner (9th grade sign-up and 10-12th grade signup). I strongly encourage all high school students to join us for this event. Meet-the-Teachers Nights are also coming up (MS - September 12; HS - September 20) and I’m looking forward to meeting parents that evening.

Thank you to everyone for your ongoing warm welcome and support as I begin this new position of Upper School Principal.

A 200 Year Strategic Plan?

Artist Raghava KK has a 200 year plan. What!? These days I'm lucky if I know what my plan is for next week, let alone 200 years from now. Raghava's plan is ambitious and has an incredibly long time horizon, but maybe he is not as crazy as he sounds.

In thinking about his 200 year plan, Raghava thinks about and attempts to answer some big questions. What does he want his legacy to be? How does he want to be rememberd. Raghava picked the 200 year threshold as he felt that by then anyone who would have come in contact with him would have passed away.

In contrast, the recommended timeline for a school's strategic plan is shrinking from a five year length to the 18 months that some strategic planning consultants are recommending. With that short of an event horizon, it almost seems that we're making a series of tactical decisions rather than true strategic ones.

The real challenge, though, is keeping your eye on the true goal of a strategic plan, i.e. bringing your school's mission to life and realizing the school's vision. With his 200 year plan, Raghava has firmly got his eyes on the end goal. By doing this, he is slowly establishing his own personal vision of who he is and how he will be remembered.

While I don't recommend that your school begin extending its strategic plan out 200 years from now, it is important that you continually assess that your strategic plan is addressing both your school's short-term tactical needs (e.g. more revenue or more rears in seats) with the direction that you envision the school heading. This will guide you towards a realization of the purpose of the institution.


This is no easy proposition. Bookcases are littered with well intentioned strategic plans that live on in some netherland of not quite implemented. These well intentioned documents were overwhelmed by the day to day needs of the school and then were promptly forgotten until the next strategic planning session. The trick is making the plan so reflective of your school's mission and vision that it seems so interrelated with the purpose of the school that everyone finds it compelling and therefor wants to help implement it.

Pinterest Project Update

It's been almost a week since I gave out the Pinterest assignment to my 7th grade Rabbinics class. Their reaction to the initial assignment was interesting. Most of them were not aware of the site, but were pretty awed by the basic display of graphics and text that makes up a Pinterest board.

At this point, I've received links to graphics from slightly more than half the class. The "pins" have been from a variety of sources and most strongly relate to the topic. What's been most interesting, though, is that there are other Pinterest users following the board and some of them have "re-pinned" the items on the board.

I'm still trying to decide what the next step will be in this Pinterest experiment. I'm certainly considering using it for other units as I think the challenge of succinctly summing up what a picture means to you is an excellent skill. Furthermore, I think there is value in getting the students to think about a text through a visual media. I'm considering re-using the pictures in the test for this unit, perhaps as a writing prompt.

What's missing, though, is the interactive element that should go hand in hand with a social network. This assignment would be more powerful if I was not serving as the conduit for the students to interact with Pinterest. Given that I'm working with 12 and 13 year old students, I'm not sure that I want to be the person who sets some of them up with their first social networking account.

I'm considering bringing the next version of this assignment into the Google Site that I have successfully used with previous classes.I'm just not sure that it will have the visual flexibility that Pinterest has brought to this project.

School-based Social Networking?

I have been a little skeptical about the use of social media in schools. It's not that I don't see the potential benefits for providing a space to practice digital citizenship as Matthew R. Winn lays out in his article in Learning and Leading. Actually, after reading the article, I thought it was a great idea. Create a safe space where students can engage in Facebook-like activities without the potential risks that Facebook and other open social networking platforms can have. It's the digital equivalent of having students practice driving in a simulator.

My skepticism emerges because I'm not convinced that students would actually use it. I've participated in a few restricted social networking sites and, to be honest, I never went to them because they never became part of my routine as have Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

I want to clarify that I see creating an in-house social network as different from using classic Web 2.0 sites
like Ning and Wikispaces. Using these sites, can add a valuable element to instruction. The first time that I assigned students to post on a discussion board on a Google Site prompted a wonderful reaction from the students and allowed some of my quieter students to join in the conversation in a more meaningful way as well as extending our class discussion. Students engage in these assignments because they are homework or part of a class project. I'm not convinced, though, that they create a place for practicing the digital citizenship skills that they will need on Facebook or whatever the latest social networking site is.

So, I'm curious if other schools have taken the plunge that Winn's school has and invested in an internal social networking site and how faculty, students and parents have embraced it. Do students use it? Is it enhancing digital citizenship? Have you noticed changes in other on-line behaviors?

Picture Who?

My school is honoring its retiring headmaster who has been the school's leader for the last 29 years. Last week, our archivist walked into my office with an interesting challenge. She needed to collect as many pictures of the headmaster for several different tributes that were being worked on.

Oy! Ordinarily, this would be a daunting task. We have digital cameras in every classroom and have been generating so many pictures that we needed to move several years worth of photos off the server to an external hard drive, just to make room for the photos that were coming in. Given my busy schedule a a middle school administrator, I was not going to sift through this image by image to find the right pictures.

Enter Picasa. Not the photo sharing site that Google runs, but its desktop-based application. Somehow the whizzes at Google have figured out how identify the presence of a face in a picture and then allow you to tag the picture with someone's identity. After looking at the unidentified faces that Picasa had found, I tagged several pictures with our headmaster's name and was in business. Within a few minutes, I had found dozens of images that included our headmaster, including a few where he was just in the background.

With thousands of images for Picasa to look at, this may take me a while, but at least I can be pretty passive in the process. The only moments that my intervention is needed is to confirm that Picasa is identifying the right faces as our headmaster. When it's done, I'll be able to create an album of the pictures, burn it to CD, and hand it to our archivist.

We have also started using Picasa to look for people that we do not want in pictures, such as students for whom we did not receive consent from their parents to use their image for marketing purposes. By "teaching" Picasa to identify their faces, we now know which pictures are off limits for publicity purposes.

Picasa is not perfect. While it offers some great features beyond face recognition, such as a light weight photo editor, it really is meant for a home user. In our server-based environment, my Picasa installation does not speak to our marketing coordinator's version of Picasa on his desktop. It will scan network drives, but its database is kept locally. It also does not offer an easy way to archive your tagging, so that you do not lose the database if your computer is re-imaged.

Despite these liabilities, Picasa seems to be working to help us identify who we are taking pictures of. With its low price (did I mention that it is free?), it has been pretty easy to install throughout the school. I'm curious, though, if there is another product that would work better in a network environment so that we can share the burden of identifying who is in our pictures.

Testing the Waters with Pinterest

Like many people, I have spent the last several weeks quietly laughing about my wife’s fascination with Pinterest. Very quickly, she has amassed a collection of photographs and web links about a host of topics ranging from recipes to DIY ideas. From a short distance, I was wondering with why we needed one more social media site.

In recent days, I’ve started to undergo a conversion of sorts. I’m not ready to spend hours “pinning” pictures on the site, but am wondering what it can be used for. Ali recently wrote on EdSocialMedia about how Pinterest could be used for schools. Resource collecting made perfect sense to me, as well as a few other uses, but I was wondering if it could be used in the classroom.

With that in mind, I’ve started a little bit of an experiment. Starting next week, I will be teaching a new unit in my 7^th grade Rabbinics class that focuses on the concept of “wrongdoing with words.” This is a pretty juicy section of the Mishnah (Bava Metzia 4:10) that compares wrongdoing with words to stealing:

Just as there is wrongdoing in buying and selling, so there is wrongdoing in words. One may not say to him, "How much is this item?" if he does not want to buy it. If he was a penitent, one must not say to him, "Remember your former deeds!" If he was a descendant of converts, one must not say to him, "Remember the deeds of your forefathers!" For it is said, "And a stranger you shall not wrong, nor shall you oppress him" (Exodus 22:20).

I’m looking forward to the discussion that this topic will generate, but I have a new project for my students that I’m hoping will add to our discussions. I’m planning on challenging my students to find images that they connect with our text and email me links to those images (plus a short explanation why). Since I’m just a little concerned about internet safety and since Pinterest's user terms limit it to age 13 and above (as do most social media sites), I’ll do the actual pinning for now. My hope is to create a visual collage that could be part of our end of unit assessment.

I’ve gotten started with a few images here already. You’ll notice that I’ve included some text, too. You can do this by using a tool from PinAQuote that turns text into images.

I’m not sure that Pinterest is the best tool for this task, but I’m going to give it a shot.  In a post,Twyla Felty suggests that Stixty might be a more student friendly tool. I’m thinking about giving it a try, too.

I’ll report back in a few weeks how this experiment works out. And, if you find images that connect to this topic, pass them along.

A Vanished Leader

It is usually an honor to be asked to deliver a d’var torah at a meeting, so when asked recently to give one for a committee meeting I naturally accepted. Feeling somewhat flattered (the committee is filled with rabbis and others who have more Jewish knowledge than I), I sat down to read the weekly Torah portion and figure out what I was going to say.

It was at this point that I realized that I should have looked before I leaped. This past Shabbat’s parshah seemed to be completely lacking in anything that I could use to deliver a short d’var torah. There was no fascinating narrative to unwrap and no confusing laws to clarify. Instead, Tetzaveh with its descriptions of the interior of the Tabernacle seemed better suited by HGTV than being part of the Torah.

My “ah hah” moment arrived after reading a commentary that shared what was missing from the text, rather than trying to explain what was in it. Moses is a pretty popular guy during the last four books of the Torah. His name appears in every single parshah at least once, except for this one.

The focus in Tetzaveh is on instructions for preparing Aaron and his sons to become priests and Moses was not going to be a priest. However, the text does not even include the line "And God said to Moses" which usually comes before sets of instructions to the people.

Is this absence a mere coincidence or does it signal something deeper? Some commentators felt that Moses was being a nice guy and letting his brother have the spotlight for a change. Others see an interesting combination of events. Tetzaveh is always read during the week which the 7th of Adar falls (next Friday) which is traditionally held to be the date of Moses' death. Is this just a coincidence that Moses is absent from the parshah during the week of his death's anniversary? Some commentators respond that this is part of the active effort to avoid creating a cult around Moses which is the same reason why his name found only once in the Haggadah.

To me, there seems to be another message present. Moses is a critical figure in the establishment of the Israelites as a nation. He is the conduit through which laws are established and provides them with guidance throughout their journey in the wilderness. Yet, his absence here indicates that things can go on without Moses and that there are elements of Israelite life that he is not significant in. Perhaps, most importantly, this text foreshadows that the Israelites can go on without Moses.

This made me wonder about the projects that so many of us undertake and feel that we are such a critical element that they could not go on without us. But, could they? Do we truly bring something so unique that the project would crumble without us?

While our egos may feel good about being the keystone for some many things in our organizations, we may be failing as leaders. Perhaps the true sign of a good leader is that we can make things work without being a critical cog in the wheel. If we establish strong processes that support those that we work with, then life (or a project) can go on when we step back. Maybe this is the lesson that Moses was trying to teach by vanishing from Tetzaveh.