A User's Guide to Advocacy Evaluation Planning

This new online publication from the Harvard Family Research Project was developed for advocates, evaluators, and funders who want guidance on how to evaluate advocacy and policy change efforts. This tool takes users through four basic steps that generate the core elements of an advocacy evaluation plan, including what will be measured and how.

Adventures in Literacy Land

The following is intended as a summary of some efforts to promote literacy in classical Hebrew, which were undertaken in 2008-9 at the Yeshiva University Wilf Campus (the undergraduate men’s campus in New York). These efforts have primarily affected Yeshiva College and the Isaac Breuer College of Hebrew Studies (henceforth “IBC”). The summary is intended to present my own experience for the benefit of educators who are seeking to achieve similar goals, and to solicit advice from others. In the words of romance novelist Julia Quinn, “A smart person learns from his own mistakes; a truly smart person learns from the mistakes of others.”

Assessing the Effectiveness of School Leaders: New Directions and New Processes

Research concludes that most assessments of school leaders in use today are not as focused on learning as they should be, nor are they effective in gathering reliable facts about how leaders' behaviors are or are not promoting learning. This Wallace Perspective describes the elements of a possible new direction in leader assessment - what should be assessed, and how. It highlights newly-developed assessment instruments that seek to apply those elements. And it discusses the potential, the challenges and the unknowns of using assessment as a key means of promoting not only better leader performance but also systemwide improvements that benefit children.
Assessing the ...

Bringing Together Educational Standards and Social and Emotional Learning: Making the Case for Educators

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has as its goals to strengthen a person’s ability to understand, manage, and express the social and emotional aspects of life. The authors, all of whom have worked in training teachers in the promotion of students’ social and emotional skills, have found that educators often view efforts at building such skills as standing in opposition to the academic focus of their state curriculum standards. This view hinders many well‐intentioned teachers from implementing SEL in their classrooms. Thus, it is a valuable consultative tool to be able to demonstrate the overlap of SEL, academics, and curriculum standards. The authors set out a rationale for this overlap and provide examples of how they incorporate this overlap into their training and consultation.

Conduct Policy and Behavioral Standards

Sample conduct policy and behavioral standards document for day schools created by The Association of Modern Orthodox Day Schools and Yeshiva High Schools (AMODS).

Contact: The Journal of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life

Contact is the quarterly journal of The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life. Each issue of Contact explores vital issues affecting the American Jewish community and the philanthropic vision of The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life. It is the goal of Contact to stimulate discussion throughout the community on the most effective programs and ideas that will help to revitalize American Jewish life.

Defining Excellence in Early Childhood Jewish Education

The goal of this project was to develop a set of quality indicators, anchored in relevant theory and research, for describing excellence in early childhood Jewish education programs.  The report includes a literature review and a preliminary list of quality indicators.
Defining Excellence in Early Childhood Jewish Education (56.79 kB)

Digest of Education Statistics, 2008

The 44th in a series of publications initiated in 1962, the Digest's primary purpose is to provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field of American education from prekindergarten through graduate school. The Digest contains data on a variety of topics, including the number of schools and colleges, teachers, enrollments, and graduates, in addition to educational attainment, finances, and federal funds for education, libraries, and international comparisons.

Inservice

Inservice is the ASCD community blog-a place for educators to gather and share ideas. We hope it will promote the kind of exchange that happens in inservice meetings, where educators discuss how best to support their students. We want it to be a resource for everyone who cares about and serves education, learning, and teaching. Some topics discussed on Inservice include teacher professional development, No Child Left Behind, assessment of English language learners, and whether or not middle schools really work.

International Journal of Jewish Education Research

An initiative of the School of Education and the Lookstein Center of Bar-Ilan University.

IJJER aims to portray and explore Jewish education as a multifaceted, heuristic and dynamic phenomenon from a variety of disciplinary, geographical, cultural, religious and historical perspectives and contexts.

IJJER aims to provide an interdisciplinary, international and multi-language platform where past and present forms and aspects of Jewish education are examined through research.

JEWISH EDUCATION AND THE ARTS: CURRENT REALITIES, FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

These working papers were prepared for the Lippman Kanfer Institute's Arts in Jewish Education Convening in March 2010. The Convening was co-sponsored by AVODAH Arts and The Foundation for Jewish Culture. 

Arts in Jewish Education: Mapping the Landscape gives an overview of Arts & Jewish Education today, including:

-- Utilization of Existing Cultural Resources

Making Jewish Education Work: Professional Development for Educators