The transition from Summer to school is often filled with great expectations and some butterflies. Maybe you are the parent of a first time kindergartner or older student new to MJDS or maybe you are a 5th grader wondering what life in Upper School is all about. Whatever your transition, we’ve been hard at work reflecting on last year and preparing for an incredible 37th year. I’d like to share a little bit about our continuing evolution as an institution focused on providing our students and families and with the best possible academic and social-emotional experience both for today and tomorrow.

To provide some context, I am sharing some of the reading I’ve done over the Summer to broaden and deepen my perspective as a lifelong learner and parent.

• George Couros is an educator who reflects the mindset we embrace at MJDS. In a recent post on his blog, George writes the following:

“Carol Dweck’s work on the “growth mindset” has been something embraced in the field of education and has made a major impact on the learning of so many, educators and students alike.  One of the quotes that has really resonated with me is from Thomas Friedman who states, “The world only cares about what you can do with what you know.”  As educators, who now have access to not only all of the information in the world, but to each other, we have a greater opportunity to come up with new and better way of serving our students.  Shifting our thinking and embracing “the innovator’s mindset“, allows us to create better opportunities and serve learners in powerful ways.  Isolation is the enemy of innovation and we have to be willing to tap into one another to create a better today and tomorrow for our students.” 

• In thinking about this innovator’s mindset, I connected Couros’s thinking to the following comments from IBM’s HR chief, Diane Gherson, in a recent Forbes article that you can read in full here. Gherson forecasts the future of work and the implications for how we need to prepare learners now:

“Work will be highly collaborative, iterative and performed by teams that can assemble and dis-assemble quickly, responding in real time to external and internal signals. So, work will need to be co-located in agile workplaces.”

How should we prepare today’s students?

• Collaboration (not just “group work”)
• Rapid assembling and dis-assembling of teams
• Responding to real-time, unpredictable problems
• Leveraging agile workspaces
• Lead with culture (“It starts with knowing your purpose and who you want to be. Then it’s about every decision, even the small ones, that you make after that.”)
• Foster empowerment and diversity (“Today, effective teaming starts with pulling together a cross-disciplinary group of self-directed and empowered people guided by more of a servant-leader. So, the secret is empowerment and diversity.”)
• Create ample space for reflection (Gherson likes to ask prospective hires, “When you look back at your career so far, what were the high points and the low points? The capacity for retrospection is so important to continuous learning.”)

Our staff returned to MJDS on August 15th and spent most of the next week thinking and learning together focused on many of the ideas summarized above. We defined belief statements, clarifying our core values, that spell out WHY we make each decision at MJDS. These beliefs are the foundation of our school culture and every student, in every grade is now engaging in similar conversations to strengthen how we interact with one another, every day. We dug deep into what innovation could look/sound/feel like in each content area in each grade and created new learning opportunities aligned to these ideas, both in and outside of our amazing Daniel M. Soref Innovation Hub. We worked in content-specific teams (Hebrew and English) to backwards map curriculum and improve how we plan and facilitate learning in K-8 classes. We defined what excellent customer service is and how to be consistent in providing it to our families and the larger community. We did all of this and more so that we meet and exceed our mission.

MJDS is getting stronger in every way and we are so excited to parter together to help your student grow and thrive.