Spirited and Spiritual Leadership – Schechter School Leaders Learn Together

by Joanne Palmer

February 2008 – Educators nurture other people.

To do their jobs well, they need a complex mix of skills -- the ability to register and master detail and at the same time to be exquisitely receptive to the mood of the students in their schools, to their parents, and to the surrounding community. They must be able to guide and mentor teachers to teach both rigorously and creatively, to be both structured and flexible, to channel the magic that is true learning.

Sometimes educators need to be nurtured too.

In mid-January more than 60 heads of school, campus rabbis, principals, and Jewish studies directors from Solomon Schechter schools across 19 states gathered in Las Vegas for the Solomon Schechter Day School Association’s biennial conference.

The conference was called “Spirited and Spiritual Leadership: Leading From the Inside Out,” and its goal was to help educators establish a spiritual school environment by paying attention to their own spiritual growth, said Dr. Elaine Cohen, associate director of United Synagogue’s education department and the Schechter Association’s lead professional. “We connected their own self-awareness to the challenge of creating a spiritual school environment that fosters the inner lives of teachers, students, and their families,” she said. To that end, the conference offered guided writing exercises as well as more traditional workshops; one such program was held in the stunningly dramatic Red Rock Canyon.

Conference participants explored tefillah, text study, and how to teach theology to young children, all from a Conservative prspective, and they studied the work of the great Conservative theologian and social activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Merle Feld, a poet who teaches writing as a spiritual practice at several rabbinical schools, was the conference’s writer-in-residence. Among other exercises aimed at helping the educators open their hearts, minds, eyes, and ears, she taught them to link prayer, writing, and spirituality in a way that is both intensely emotional and somehow practical. Self-examination may not be easy, but when educators can feel their own connection to the holiness in daily life, they can use that clarity of vision to lead their schools toward becoming spiritually intentional communities. Educators can go back to their schools even more equipped than they had been before to help guide and mentor teachers, students, parents, and the other groups that make up their school communities.

The conference was held in Las Vegas to show the association’s “support for the newest day school in our network,” Dr. Cohen said. The school, the Solomon Schechter Day School of Las Vegas, goes from kindergarten through fifth grade and draws its students from the city’s rapidly growing Jewish community. A Solomon Schechter day school in a community enriches not just the children who go there and their families but the entire community as it spreads the joy and depth of Jewish learning and Jewish living.

The conference lasted for three days; sessions offered participants the opportunity to learn from master teachers and benefit from each others' experience.

All work and no play make Jack and Jill dull children, even when the work is elevating and the teachers wonderful. The educators ended their three-day stay in Las Vegas with a visit from a mid-period Elvis – an impersonator, needless to say, already wearing white lame but without the later Elvis’s paunch. As the pictures made clear, the educators enjoyed themselves immensely.

Approximately one third of the participants were first-timers at a Schechter conference for professionals. “The opportunity to network with colleagues from across the country in an environment that fostered rich conversations about shared challenges was invaluable,” Dr. Cohen said. “We took some risks this year to provide a different kind of professional experience that was also deeply personal. It's clear that it resonated with the participants.”