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Last Month on the PEJE Blog
 Click the links below to read each post, and be sure to leave
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Order the Latest PEJE Publications
 The PEJE Guide to Coaching provides Jewish day school leaders with clear and concise information about how to use coaching to improve their practice. Coaching is a powerful tool that can yield personal and school-wide benefits for administrators, boards, families, and ultimately the children you seek to educate. Based on PEJE's many years of experience with coaching, the Guide's wealth of information will help you become a smarter consumer of coaching. The PEJE Guide to Coaching can be purchased for $15 (includes shipping). Read an excerpt.
 The Leader's Compass: Journeying with Vision, Wisdom & Focus contains the commentaries of influential thinkers and practitioners--from both within and beyond the day school field--to 12 provocative quotations relating to financial sustainability as well as board and professional leadership. Copies are available for purchase with discounted rates for bulk quantities. Read an excerpt.
To purchase the PEJE Guide to Coaching and The Leader's Compass, call Communications Program Associate Matt Brown at 617-367-0001 x137.
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Build Your Own Board: Deadline Approaching
Build Your Own Board (BYOB) is PEJE's signature board leadership development program. A one-day seminar along with 16 hours of subsidized coaching, BYOB prepares participants to fill their board rooms with the right leaders and strengthen their board's ability to govern. Participants will learn how to create a school culture where board members understand and embrace their responsibilities to sustain their school through careful leadership development. Read a full description of the program.
Submit the online application and the BYOB Baseline Questionnaire by February 24. The seminar will take place Sunday, April 18 in Skokie, IL. Schools will be notified of their acceptance in mid-March.
Contact Kathleen Farrell with questions.
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Win an Award at the PEJE Assembly
Building off the success of the 2008 Marketing Awards, we are pleased to announce that the 2010 PEJE Assembly will feature three types of awards: Day School Excellence, Video Marketing, and Community Collaboration.
The applications are posted as pdf files that can be edited; complete and mail them to Matt Brown, 88 Broad St. 6th Floor, Boston, MA 02134. All applications are due April 23. Winners will be announced at the PEJE Assembly for Advancing the Jewish Day School Field, October 24-26 in Baltimore, MD.
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Join a PEJE Community of Practice
 PEJE Communities of Practice (CoPs) connect day school leaders to expertise, resources, and best practice, as well to each other. We invite you to participate in the following calls:
March 9 - Leadership
The Role of the HoS and the Board in Philanthropy: Who is Responsible? And What Strategies Work - Part II
March 18 - Admission
Beyond "Outside the Box": Creative Thinking Techniques for Recruitment Challenges
March 23 - Development
"Help! My Board Won't Raise Money"
CoP Webinar Today!
Do Communities of Practice Yield a GOod Return on Investment? Findings from the 2008-2009 Evaluation of PEJE CoPs
1:00-2:00 pm Eastern
Have
you ever wondered about the impact of a Community of Practice? In this
interactive webinar, we will share the results of the evaluation of the
PEJE CoPs, which documented the way knowledge introduced in a CoP is
transferred to multiple school leaders.
Contact Kirk Ryan to RSVP.
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Day School Voices
Over the summer, PEJE solicited a number of essays from day school alumni who chose to send their own children to day school. They are available on the PEJE website for your school to use in "making the case" for day school education. The Forward also featured them in its special education section last month.
Applied Probability: Day School Plus Mazel
by Rachel Brodie
In 1985, I made a Rupert Holmes type escape from the ghetto known as Manhattan's Upper West Side. I had been deeply immersed in Jewish life, from conception until college, but as a freshman at Brown University I was encouraged to explore, even fetishize, the secular world--to such a degree that I boasted about having graduated without ever setting foot in Hillel or the Judaic Studies department. Yet, in the years that followed, I went on to do everything I swore I would never do: become a "professional Jew"; live outside New York City; have a mortgage, a station wagon; and--the biggest never on my list--send my own kids to Jewish day school.
Read More
Rachel Brodie is the co-founder and executive director of Jewish Milestones.
Elissa Kittner, co-president of the Oakland Hebrew Day School Board of Directors, mentioned Brodie's article to a prospective parent, who responded: "Yes, I read it to my husband--it totally clinched the deal for us!"
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| February 2010 · Adar 5770
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Day School Growth and Excellence: PEJE Recommended Reading
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One of the primary services PEJE provides to the Jewish day
school field is knowledge-delivery through a variety of resources. At
the recent Day School Leadership Conference, we invited attendees to
browse through the "PEJE Bookshelf," consisting of 42
books we recommend to leaders of Jewish day schools. The
topics covered by these books include non-profit management,
philanthropy, leadership, education policy, studies of day schools, and
more. Review the complete list. We asked a few members of the PEJE staff why they felt some of the books were worth a read:
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The Extraordinary Leader by John Zenger and Joseph Folkman
- Good to Great and the Social Sectors by Jim Collins
- From Sanctuary to Board Room by Hal Lewis
- A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
- Visions of Jewish Education edited by Seymour Fox, Israel Scheffler, and Daniel Marom
- Back to School: Jewish Day School in the Lives of Adult Jews by Alex Pomson and Randal F. Schnoor
- Managing the Nonprofit Organization by Peter Drucker
- Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger
- Philanthropy at Independent Schools by Helen A. Colson
What distinguishes The Extraordinary Leader by John Zenger and Joseph Folkman from other books is that rather than being prescriptive, it is based on empirical research about 25,000 leaders
and how 200,000 followers perceive their effectiveness. The authors
speak about a leadership tent, which has five major components to it:
- Leading
organizational change;
- Interpersonal skills;
- Personal
capability;
- Focus on results; and
- The component
that is at the center of it all - character
In this remarkable book, the authors reveal the elements of
leadership performance in each of these five areas. They are very
specific in the delineation of behaviors associated with each of these
areas. The question I would ask leaders is, "What makes character
such a powerful trait, even to the point where it overtakes the other
four?"
--Rabbi Joshua
Elkin, Executive Director
Good to Great and the Social Sectors by Jim Collins is
indispensable to all day school leaders, professional and trustee alike. With Collins's
principles in hand, any organization can diagnose the problems that are
hampering its ability to achieve its mission as efficiently as possible.
What gets
measured gets managed, to paraphrase Peter Drucker. If you think
improvement is hard because your activities are too hard to gauge,
reading Collins' analysis of the Cleveland orchestra
will inspire you. Studying this book as a team will help your
organization zero in on problems and solutions with laser-like focus.
--Stephane Acel, Senior Program Manager for Financial
Sustainability
Hal Lewis' From Sanctuary to Board Room
fuses core
Jewish texts with contemporary thinking on management best
practices. In doing so, Lewis presents leadership and followership
behavior as dynamic and fluid based on the organizational setting and
its presenting issues. Reading this book will inspire you to rethink
what characteristics define an effective Jewish leader. Lewis writes
that leadership behavior inspires and sustains trust from followers.
What do the Jewish day school leaders in your community do to instill
the trust of their followers?
--Adrien Uretsky,
Associate Program Manager for Resource Referral and Leadership Line
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Related Resources
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SMARTBoards
The Legacy Heritage SMARTBoard Project's SMARTBoard Jewish Educational Database offers educators free and unlimited access to hundreds of lessons in both secular and Judaic subjects. To learn more, contact SMARTBoards@lhfl.net.
Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School
Keshet, whose mission is to ensure that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Jews are fully included in all parts of the Jewish community, has released a DVD and companion resource guide Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School, for use with students in grades 7-12. The film centers on one student's fight to establish a gay-straight alliance at her Jewish day school. Learn more about Hineini. Enter the coupon code "PEJE" to receive 20% off before April 1.
Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies
The Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies is now accepting applications for the 2010-11 Pardes Year Program. Visit www.pardes.org.il to apply. Contact Shira Goldberg, North American Director of Recruitment at shira@pardesusa.org or (212) 447-4333 with questions.
Foundation for Jewish Camp
Register now for the Foundation for Jewish Camp Leaders
Assembly, March 14-15. Join with hundreds of people who work at and support
Jewish camps to learn, share, and innovate. Hear digital entrepreneur and
keynote speaker: Mitch Joel.
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Partnership for Excellence
in Jewish Education
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Boston, Massachusetts 02110
617.367.0001 tel · 617.367.0029 fax
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