I love being able to come home from a conference feeling full from having learned so much! Sunday and Monday I was joined by Daniella Greenspan (President of the Board) and Orly Rachamim (VP and Director of Educational Technology) at the Tikvah Foundation’s Jewish Schools and Technology Summit. Over 50 schools and 200 lay and…
Category: Leadership
Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High Performing Teams – David Burkus
I must admit that the title Best Team Ever, by David Burkus, sounds more like a book for middle school kids than professionals. Once you add the subtitle, The Surprising Science of High Performing Teams, it does work a bit better. That said, it’s quite a good guide for how teams can maximize their work…
Courage to Be Moral
It seems we are living at a moment where much of our society’s moral compass has been turned upside down, or at the very least, has ceased to operate. The moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel; the lack of response in the university world to the Hamas atrocities, when a micro-aggression in such institutions will…
Rally in Washington – A Reflection
There are times when one plus one plus one (etc.) adds up to much more than the total sum being counted. Today on the Washington Mall I stood with tens, and likely hundreds of thousands of people (mostly Jews), for Israel, for the hostages, and against anti-semitism. It was empowering to feel surrounded by a…
Metaphors at Work
I’ve often heard school leaders, and even teachers, talk about their school’s as ‘one big family’. For a long time I thought this was such a beautiful way for someone to feel about the places they worked, and maybe also felt like something was missing when this wasn’t the case in my places of work….
Praise for Educators
Last year a senior member of the UJA asked me, “If you had a magic wand, what would you change to help day schools?”. I said that it wouldn’t be money (though that would be a big plus, and the one that comes up most frequently). Rather, it would be that the community truly valued…
My Charge to the Netivot Graduates
Over the last few months I’ve been part of a working group that’s trying to address the shortage of Jewish Day School teachers across North America. During one of the sessions, a person in school leadership shared that he was inspired to go into professional Jewish education because at his graduation, his principal made a…
Patrick Lencionni – Silos, Politics and Turf Wars (and how it connects to our work at Netivot)
I struggled to decide which of the two books I’d recently read should be shared as my ‘last’ book of the 2022-2023 school year. I came down on the side of Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, by the management consultant Patrick Lencionni, and I’ll explain why below. I’ve written about Lencionni’s books before, which I…
Why Mission Matters
Schools talk a lot about the importance of mission and vision, though understanding the ways in which this matters in practice is more subtle, and frankly, took me quite a while to appreciate. Many schools I’ve seen can function pretty well without a clear mission or vision. Sometimes it’s because they have a legacy culture…
John D’Auria – Ten Lessons in Leadership and Learning
I was at a planning meeting for the Day School Leadership Training Institute, a program for upcoming or new Heads of Jewish Day Schools, where I am a mentor. We were doing some ‘get to know you’ questions, and one of them was, “What book have you read more than once?”. The person who chose…