Section archive - Education & Administration

In December, Ta’amod: Stand Up! launched its inaugural Train the Trainer program. Ta’amod’s mission is to help Jewish communal institutions develop cultures of safety, respect, and equity. This training equipped a cohort of educators to offer Jewish nonprofits legally compliant harassment prevention training as part of a larger discussion around nurturing respectful workplace culture through a Jewish lens. There is now an emerging national network of professionals certified to deliver training in the Jewish community to nonprofits, foundations, synagogues, and schools.

This paper examines evaluation data use practices of a network of schools implementing an internal, independent, school self-evaluation process for more than a decade. This network currently uses data on its strengths alongside data indicative of its weaknesses, collecting and utilizing both positive and negative data for improvement and accountability purposes. Our findings suggest that identifying strengths is one of the valid goals and outcomes of evaluation, shedding light on its potential to enhance school ethos, and to promote a positive attitude toward evaluation processes and their subsequent effects.

Jewish learning in the context of professional development for Jews working in the “disruptive”, or engagement sector has emerged as a domain into which millions of dollars are invested annually, with very little hard data on how those investments correlate to educational growth. This article considers the Sensibilities Framework, promoted by the Lippman Kanfer Foundation as an initial attempt to theorize this domain, and suggests further avenues for research by theorists of American Jewish education.

This article attempts to test the hypothesis that Jewish wisdom can impact the real-life work challenges of non-profit/philanthropy power dynamics. By examining the narratives of King Aggripas and the sages, I explore an analogue to these power dynamics in rabbinic literature.