Dear Beit Rabban Community,
It was wonderful to see so many of you yesterday at our annual Curriculum Night. Thank you to all who made the time to attend, and thank you to the many who shared their feedback with us
via this survey
.
We fully understand that surveys are annoying, so it means a lot to us that you actually do complete them when we ask. We deeply value our community’s thinking because it helps us design programs that best meet your needs. In turn, we are best able to serve your children. So, thank you again!
Anyone who has ever attended a back to school night is no doubt familiar with the ubiquitous “hopes and dreams for the year” troupe. Our children’s hopes and dreams are ambitious, funny, reflective and, at times, simply bizarre. Our hopes and dreams for our children are emotionally charged, intense, optimistic, anxiety ridden and so much more. Somehow, this beginning of year ritual never gets old for me. I laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously, when I read the hopes and dreams that our students articulate for themselves.
Jewish day schools have the good fortune of launching each school year during the month of Elul when our communal vibe is all about hopes and dreams, repentance and resolutions. During this period of time, we communally affirm each person’s right to start fresh with a clean slate. What a beautiful context in which to start a new school year.
In preparation for each Jewish new year, and accompanying new school year, I spend summers working with my colleagues to identify whole-school priorities, these are our hopes and dreams for the school as a whole. We reflect on a variety of inputs: all the parent evaluations we have received; the results of teacher satisfaction surveys that we administer at the end of the school year; and the data from “mid-year in review” and “full year in review” feedback sessions we conduct with our whole staff. We asses our progress on the priorities we identified the past year, and we identify areas for growth for the coming year. Through this process, we have chosen three whole school priorities for 5780; two areas for exploration and prototyping; and a focus for teachers’ professional growth. All these were shared and work-shopped with teachers at our pre-school teacher in-service. I share them with you now in the spirit of articulating hopes and dreams as the new year approaches and because one of the most important reasons we do all this work (outline these goals, specify measurable outcomes under each goal, select particular strategies to achieve these outcomes, and clarify how we will evaluate our performance) is that this transparency helps us remain focused and feel accountable. So, here they are…
School-Wide Goals for 5780:
- Kinder interactions among students: Our social-emotional curriculum this year will focus on kindness on a one-to-one basis. We will use our Positive Discipline methodology and our community meetings to recognize each others acts of kindness, to learn how to choose kindness during moments of conflict, and to form the habit of committing random acts of kindness, what we call Ahavat Chinam.
- Improved teacher access to resources: Our administration will assess teacher’s technological, material, and curricular needs and engage in a design process to ensure that our teachers encounter fewer technical difficulties on a day to day basis, allowing them more time and mind-space to focus on the most important part of their work - the students.
- Successful Middle School launch: After many years of communal design and investment, the Beit Rabban Middle School known as the Chativah is finally a reality, and we want to ensure that this new program is properly nurtured. We are committed to making Middle School student learning and growth widely visible to the students, their parents and the larger Beit Rabban community. We are supporting our new Chativah teachers so they can teach their classes, mentor students, build Middle School programming, and collaborate on curriculum and assessments in a way that is highly generative and sustainable. And, finally, we are investing in strong home-school communication and partnership to ensure that parent input continues to inform our growing school.
Priorities for Research and Exploration in 5780:
- Our Ivrit team is exploring how to more fully integrate spoken and written Hebrew throughout the schedule of the school day, throughout our facilities, and throughout all our programs in order to expand students’ opportunities to engage with Hebrew in authentic and practical ways.
- A staff working group is collaborating to determine how best to refine our educational practices so we approach LGBTQ and gender with intentionality and strategy that is more consistently aligned with our values.
Finally, professional development for our teachers this year is heavily geared toward understanding the science behind learning. Gan teachers are engaged in a year-long graduate level course on the science of language acquisition with a focus on how children develop pre-literacy skills. Teachers in our older grades are taking a two year-long graduate level course on the science of reading, with the goal of evaluating our curricula to ensure that they are based on the most current research and best practices. Finally, our Ivrit teachers are studying the Orton Gillingham multi-sensory approach to teaching literacy, a methodology based in scientific evidence about how individuals learn to read and write. This approach, which particularly helps people for whom reading, writing and spelling does not come easy, has rarely been applied to the teaching of Hebrew. We are thrilled to have our teachers participate in pioneering its expansion so we can better serve more children.
These are our articulated hopes and dreams for the new school year at Beit Rabban. More importantly, however, we do not lose sight of the fact that these detailed hopes and dreams are all in the service of something much bigger and much more important… helping your children achieve their own hopes and dreams.
Wishing all a restful and rejuvenating Shabbat,
Stephanie
|
|
Please take a couple of minutes to complete this
West Campus Parents Pop In
POSTPONED
Monday & Tuesday
09/30/19 & 10/01/19
Rosh Hashanah -
SCHOOL CLOSED
Tuesday & Wednesday
10/08/19 & 10/09/19
Yom Kippur -
SCHOOL CLOSED
|
|
|
MAZEL TOV...
Maytal Exler-Kaunfer
(Prachim) on reading Torah this week at Shabbat B'Yachad
NEED YOUR PRAYERS...
Sue Wood
, mother of Brandy Wood and grandmother of Lexi and Maddy (Alim) who is recovering from a broken hip.
Michael ben Chaya
, father of Yaron Schwartz and grandfather of Shane (Alim).
David Uri ben Aviva
, father of Gan student.
Tziviya Devorah bat Zelda Zichlah
, mother of Gan student.
TODAH RABAH...
Beit Rabban Parents Association
for a delicious dinner for teachers at Curriculum Night!
Steven Weiss
(parent of Alex in Shtillim and Ethan in Nitzanim) for the beautiful photographs distributed at Curriculum Night.
If you have anything to include in our Community section please email
[email protected]
|
|
- While discussing an article that contained the line, "the definition of a fact waffles between truth and proof..." Prachim (6th Grade) Student: "What's a fact waffle?" Addendum: The Sixth grade students have since chosen the Fact Waffle as their class mascot.
- During a math lesson involving writing numbers in standard, word, and expanded form, the teacher says the number 99, and then continues "99 bottles of root beer on the wall!" Student A: "I think you mean '99 bottles of Milk'." Student B: “No she means 99 bottles of wine or is it beer?”
- Nitzanim (5th Grade) Teacher: "What are some things we’d like to learn about early humans?" Student 1: "How they knew how to make babies!" Student 2: "I know how to make babies. Well, sort of...[shudders, then lowers voice]...I don’t want to know the details".
- Conversation between (old) administrator and Gan Kachol student: Teacher, "I am 25 year old." Student: "Wow, my mommy is older than you." Long pause while student whispers numbers to himself. Student: "She's a different number."
- Nitzanim (5th grade) Student: "I wish Stephanie ran the middle school - we would have unicorns as Class pets!" Addendum: Stephanie has called a unicorn breeder in Upstate New York.
- Principal pops head in whole class is getting ready to finish up a lesson on unique facts about themselves, and they ask Ingrid for a unique fact about herself. Principal: "I was born in Germany, but I am not German." Student A: "I know your parents were on vacation in Germany when your mom went into labor!" Student B: "Your parents were running away from the people that didn’t like the Jews in Germany and you and left quickly!" Student C: "You were born in WWII and had to leave right away." Principal: "In fact My father was in the army and I was born on an army base."
- From parent evaluation of Curriculum Night: "If you are going to use George Harrison songs in the slide show, please also consider providing tissues."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
