Michal Artzi

The Morasha programmatic year, launched on the theme of Promoting Excellence in Jewish Values, opened in October with flurry of activity with a two-day seminar for program coordinators, held at the Ben Gurion University. 35 Morasha school program coordinators participated in the seminar.
Morasha program coordinators play a crucial role in the success of the program in their schools. They lead the Jewish social values education program with the school principal, seeking to cultivate their students' Jewish identity and community involvement. The seminar's objective was to provide coordinators with additional, meaningful tools to support the promotion of excellence in Jewish social values in their respective schools through both study and action.
"We believe that the Program Coordinators seminar is the mainstay of the Morasha network training program", says Tzippy Eden, in-house training manager at Morasha, "because of the central importance of the coordinators' role in leading educational processes in schools. The seminar is also the first milestone in a process that ultimately leads to the annual Award of Outstanding Achievement in the Morasha end-of-year seminar, and its function is to hone and leverage social activism within schools".
The seminar's first unit, held in a collaboration with the Ben Gurion University's Rothschild Cube Training Center for Effective Social Action, focused on data-based management. During the workshop, coordinators were familiarized with the logical model, a performance evaluation and planning tool, and practiced planning and managing future educational initiatives in student community work at their schools. The essential idea behind the encounter was to provide program coordinators with structured and quantifiable tools for the evaluation of educational programming for social values in their schools, and to thus raise the quality and precision of their work processes.
An additional focal point at the seminar was the field trip to the Yuvalim School in Be'er Sheva. The school is in its ninth year of running the Morasha program and its community provides an exemplary model of Jewish social leadership. The school faculty presented its experimental Chevruta to Havuroth program [from study dyads to study clusters], based on an expansion of the Beit Midrash study principle, designed to include the participation of the entire school community. The experimental program entails the division of the entire student body into groups of eight that function as the main social and educational center for students. The school's staff showed how the experiment led the school to a community experience of solidarity by strengthening inter-personal communication among students and inspiring them to mutual responsibility and solidarity.
Program coordinators indicated that they found the peer study sessions and group training at the Rothschild Cube to be highly meaningful for them, adding that they left the seminar equipped with new tools for the analysis and evaluation of initiatives and projects, having been introduced to ground-breaking models for the advancement of Jewish education to social values in their schools.
Guy Gardi, Morasha's director, explains: "For most people, excellence is not identified with the content of social values and responsibility; therein lie the dangers of mediocrity and of limiting the depth and meaning of these ideals. This year, at Morasha, we placed our emphasis on the centrality of excellence in social values. As part of our focus, we want to provide the educational staff with the tools required to lead processes that promote outstanding achievement through, among other things, the clarification and development of accurate work processes and norms."