In this blog article about making change, JEIC managing director Sharon Freundel echos three phases of changemaking and three roles that people play at various times, originally identified by Rabbi Justus Baird of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
“As we consider our major initiatives at JEIC, we realize that this is what we have been doing unconsciously all along,” said Freundel, naming the recent “God Expansion” initiative as just one way that JEIC is making change in Jewish day schools.
Culture change takes times, especially when accompanied by practical systems and structures that need to change. People set emotional and habitual dependencies within patterns of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration which has worked well enough to be considered valid. To wit, our world could not make an instantaneous shift to alternative fuels despite the benefits. Among the many necessary transitions, first on many people’s mind would be to solve “How would all the current gasoline based cars on the road run?” So, too, for schools pursuing change.
When a school considers a new system for reporting student learning in Judaic Studies that does not use traditional grading as the barometer for success, one may see this as the domain of the professionals alone to make. The movement toward an unfamiliar definition of accomplishment, despite the overwhelming benefits, requires not only buy-in, but support from all groups in the Jewish Day School Ecosystem.
