Rabbi Marc Baker is Head of School at the Gann Academy in Waltham, Mass, and is a member of the editorial board of Jewish Educational Leadership.

Marc Baker demonstrates how the Head of School can create a tone for the entire institution and its members by the way conversations are conducted. Make sure to see the accompanying articles by Jacob Pinnolis and David Jaffe, who describe how this approach filters through different areas of the school.

I would like to suggest that the ‘first thing,’ the most important feature of the job description for each of us as educators, is to discover and provide the conditions under which people’s learning curves go off the chart. Sometimes it’s other people’s learning curves: those of students, teachers, parents, administrations. But at all times it is our own learning curve.
-Roland Barth, Learning by Heart, p.11

Life-long learning in a conversational community

One of the reasons I was drawn to teaching was my love of the subject matter I wanted to teach (in my case, Torah, in its broadest sense). After a year of intensive Jewish learning in Israel, I wanted to return to a community that would keep the flames that had been ignited in my head and heart alive. When I first considered teaching and leading in a Jewish high school, I was inspired by its vibrant and intellectually engaged community of teachers, leaders and students. Through modalities such as “great books-style” seminars about platonic dialogues and provocative, community-wide ethics labs with guest academics, rabbis or politicians, the school strove to be what Parker Palmer calls a “community of truth,” defined by a rigorous, interdisciplinary discourse about essential questions and big ideas (Palmer, 1998, Ch. 4).

One defining feature of a learning community is the level of intellectual and spiritual curiosity of the adults in that community, and the ways in which they engage with each other about a wide range of subject matter. When the adults themselves model the kind of intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge that we aspire to for our students, they enliven the culture of the school, turning what can sometimes feel like an “institutional” environment into what feels more like a Beit Midrash. Teachers who are on fire with passion about their subject matter transmit that passion to their students and convey the most essential message about learning anything: What we are learning is alive for me.

Therefore, teachers in a learning community ask themselves both “how am I going to effectively facilitate my students’ learning of this material?” and “in what ways is my relationship with the subject(s) I teach continuing to change and evolve?” Students develop meaningful relationships with adults who are models of life-long learners. And, the implication for hiring teachers and educational leaders is clear: We are not just looking for transmitters of subject matter or even skills. We are looking for life-long learners, who themselves are in process, on journeys, still developing, changing, growing as learners and as people.

A learning community is a conversational community. Teachers who are life-long learners inspire in their students a love of learning for its own sake, and a deep appreciation of the contributions that all of our disciplines – from math and science to arts and the humanities to the great texts of the Jewish intellectual tradition – continue to make what Jonathan Sacks calls “the conversation of mankind” (www.bc.edu/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/texts/center/conferences/soloveitchik/sol_sacks.htm ). For example, when I ask students what they think defines Gann Academy, I so often hear about moments when discussions that begin in the classroom flow out into the hallways, then lunch, then a locker pod; or, when a provocative school-wide discussion sparked by an engaging guest speaker continues afterwards in a history or Tanakh class, the teacher facilitating further conversation with the added perspective of his or her discipline.

The Jewish community needs to acknowledge the verbal-conceptual-textual bias that pervades this concept of “conversational community” that has long-characterized the Jewish intellectual tradition and Jewish learning environments. This can create significant challenges for inclusion, and for effectively and responsibly bringing diverse learners or those who process the world differently into the conversation. We need to create “conversations” that incorporate different modes of discourse in addition to the verbal, and we need to develop pedagogies that effectively empower the maximum number of students to participate in and contribute their voices to the conversations that define our learning communities.

In a Jewish school, Torah, the ever-evolving Jewish intellectual, moral, spiritual tradition, is an essential voice in the communal conversation. Judaism as subject maps onto students’ and teachers’ lives, both deserving and commanding deep and sophisticated exploration. Jewish learning as process encourages more questions than answers, questions that enliven debate, dialogue and ever-deepening conversation about what it means to learn and live Judaism in ways that bring our 3,000 year-old tradition to life, and in ways that strengthen and inspire students’ commitments to their Jewish community and the Jewish People. In a Jewish learning community, Judaism is a language for the communal conversation and a lens through which students and teachers make meaning of the world.

Professional learning communities – growing our craft

These characteristics are necessary but not sufficient features of schools as learning communities. I am embarrassed to admit that, as a young teacher, like, I think, so many in the academic and yeshiva worlds, I believed that all it took to be a great teacher was passion for and knowledge of subject matter, and a natural ability to teach. I had little patience for talking about, let alone studying pedagogy. I remember the first time I read an article about teacher development by Sharon Feiman-Neimser, in which she articulated that the craft of teaching is itself worthy of rigorous intellectual exploration. At the time, for me, this was a hiddush, a new way of thinking about teaching and learning. In fact, great teachers see their teaching and their students learning as sacred texts, themselves worthy of close reading, reflection, analysis, interpretation and collaborative inquiry.

In a learning community, then, a school’s educators are engaged in a vibrant, intellectual discourse about more than subject matter. Teaching and learning are at the center of professional discourse. All stakeholders are intellectually curious about how students learn, how teachers teach, and the sacred relationships between all three points on the instructional triangle: teacher, student, subject matter.

This requires devoting significant time and resources to professional development. Here I am not talking about sending teachers to conferences or even bringing in guest speakers to faculty meetings, though these can be constructive learning opportunities for teachers. I mean building the structures and creating a culture where every teacher understands that to teach in our schools requires both teaching, and learning to teach. Learning communities have a shared vision of great teaching and a shared language for reflecting on and improving teaching practice. Department meetings and meetings between teachers and their direct supervisors are sites for reflection, learning, and growth. Robust cultures of mentoring and inducting new teachers empower teachers as leaders and as shapers of the school’s professional culture.

Professional Learning Communities, such as faculty rounds groups, Critical Friends groups, or Action Research groups, augment teachers’ direct work with students and develop their capacities as reflective practitioners and researchers of teaching and learning in their own school and beyond. Opportunities for teachers to write, share their findings, even publish, build a culture of scholarship about teaching and learning in schools and elevate teaching and learning to a discipline worthy of robust exploration and discourse.

At Gann Academy, we have learned – through successes and failures – that this kind of culture and these kinds of professional learning structures do not develop on their own. The pace and culture of schools often works at odds with sustained reflection and collaboration. A learning community builds these structures into teachers’ schedules and makes this work part of teachers’ core responsibilities. Its weekly schedule incorporates this kind of learning into the rhythm of teachers’ work, and its compensation model celebrates teacher-leaders and administrators who are charged with building and overseeing the work of teaching and learning and professional development with greater focus and sophistication. Both professional and lay leadership are committed to securing and committing significant resources to building the school’s human capacities.

Systems learning and leadership development

We can go beyond even putting the subjects we teach and the craft of teaching at the center of our school discourse. Peter Senge, Michael Fullan, and others write and teach about “learning organizations.” In the world of organizational development, a learning community, or a learning organization is: “a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_organization). A school that is a learning community sees all aspects of the school itself – its culture, learned patterns of behavior, beliefs and assumptions, systems, structures, policies and processes, strengths and successes, and, perhaps most importantly, its weaknesses and failures – as texts to be unpacked and analyzed. It also sees leading and managing, just like teaching, as crafts that need to be examined and honed.

In a learning community, for example, leaders get “on the balcony” of the school, seek honest feedback and data from all stakeholders, and strive to make meaning of that data in constructive ways that leads to improvement and change. They establish proactive, communicative, trusting relationships with parents, whom the school sees as valuable partners and sources of information about how the school can better achieve its mission. Teachers and students, those on the front lines of teaching and learning, needed to be empowered and take shared responsibility for being co-creators and co-improvers of the school.

Learning communities are emotionally intelligent places, where essential habits of mind and heart are cultivated in all stakeholders. Leaders, for example, listen, communicate effectively, and see challenges as opportunities for learning. In many schools, conflict is seen as something negative, something we need to make go away as quickly, quietly and painlessly as possible. This stance toward conflict is a learned belief that needs to be unlearned. In a learning community, stakeholders take a stance of inquiry toward conflict; conflict is yet another text from which we can learn a great deal about ourselves, each other, and our professional practice.

The work of unlearning existing beliefs and habits can be much more challenging than learning new things, and a learning community invests significant time and resources to cultivate and develop the right habits of mind and heart in its stakeholders. Leadership team meetings can become places to build these capacities. Through case studies, dilemmas of practice, strategic visioning and “after action reviews,” leadership team or administrative meetings can shift from places of shared “administrivia” to places where leaders put the school at the center and work together to advance their own and each other’s professional learning and growth.

Learning communities and a changing, 21st century world

In the words of Roland Barth,

…The world is changing. The problem with schools isn’t that they are no longer what they once were; the problem is that they are precisely what they once were. The world around the schoolhouse is changing dramatically. Teaching and leading are not innate for most of us. We teach and lead better when we constantly learn how to teach and lead. I found these words of Eric Hoffer, a San Francisco longshoreman philosopher, on a huge sign at the door of a school in Connecticut: “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists…” (Barth, 2001, p. 28)

If one of the defining features of this century is the unprecedented rate of change, then our students, and our schools, need unprecedented capacities for learning and adaptation. The only way to achieve this is to invest in teachers and leaders who have the capacities, and the desire, to be voracious learners – about the subjects we teach, the world around us, the ways our students learn, and about our schools as ever-evolving (hopefully!) human organizations.

Learning, in every sense of the word, is not only the reason so many of us were called to the work of education in the first place. It is, in fact, the very foundation upon which the long-term strength and sustainability of our schools will be based. Learning will sustain our schools and it will sustain and nourish our teachers and leaders. It will build in us the capacities to change and evolve, and to guide our students as they develop into life-long learners, prepared to change, adapt and thrive in a changing world. Learning stretches the mind and tests the heart. It challenges the learner to push herself beyond what she even knows she is capable, and opens up possibilities for the kind of growth and change that makes life worth living, let alone our sacred work worth doing.

References

Barth, R. (2001). Learning by Heart. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Palmer, P. (1998). The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc.