There’s something deliciously magical about a new school year, especially with a combination of new and returning learners. Like any ongoing community, Makom invites care as we welcome new and returning kiddos and families, as well as thoughtfulness about how we can better live up to our own ideals in this new year.
We are starting out the school year in the Hebrew month of Elul, which primes us for introspection and preparation for a new year beginning in just a month! A new school year is a fresh start for students and educators new to our community, and a reset button for returning learners and educators who will be greeted with love and appreciation exactly as they show up in this new year. As a Learning Lab (our new title for Lab School), we’re opening the year focusing our action research on building capacity in our teachers and learners to shape our interactions with each other in response to the text we’ve studied. We’re wondering, “How might an educator plan for connections between text learning and interpersonal relationship building regularly in their classrooms?” We know how valuable beginning of the school year relationship building is between teachers and students, as well as among peers. In addition to an array of social-emotional learning skills and tools, we are playing with how our daily engagement with Jewish wisdom can further this important relational period, too. By Chanukah, we’ll have insights to share about what made connecting our daily TEXTploration to how we interact with each other most effective and consistent to share with our partners across North America.
As returning kiddos welcome new friends, these relationship building moments are crucial for ongoing community building. Some of their expertise is in singing a specific Tefilah (prayer) tune, where to find a fidget they love, or understanding the schedule of an afternoon. How do we facilitate these introspective, personal moments? It starts with self-confidence. This ideal of self-confidence is a key ideal of our pedagogy of Jewish Placemaking.
For our youth learners, self-confidence looks like hearing a piece of text and being invited to notice and wonder about it. They experience daily that those questions are central to our learning and are welcomed. That confidence is also in knowing that classrooms will be set up in new and different ways than they remembered. They will soon be invited to give input into what the next arrangement will look like. Based on that decision, they will learn what is, and what is not, working about the setup in their space. Thereby learning about how the Jewish wisdom we encounter every day informs how we interact with each other and our communal space.
For our educators, our main facilitators, that looks like thoughtful onboarding over the summer and time to prepare. We know our educators have immersed themselves in Jewish Placemaking already. They are grounded in the text, the frameworks, and the learning goals for our first unit, and are ready to bring them through consistently to our learners. This includes modeling, diving deep, and reflecting on the theory behind our pedagogy.
For our parents, we’ll all get to have Shabbat dinner together. Parents will catch up over a dinner they did not have to cook, meet all our incredible educators, and enter this new year together and supported by Makom Community. This year, we’ll host a series of parent groups where parents can read How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and engage with related Jewish texts, growing together as parents and their own community. In a hard world, parents finding a community is an important aspect of our work.
You will notice we will start talking, writing, and posting about #MakomMagic more this year. In our world, finding these moments of community and confidence in our shared tradition feels magical. Thank you for being there for another year of learning, play, joy, and connection!