What's Next
This four-year intensive change process, supported by a consortium of funders headed by Rose Community Foundation, will have granted close to $950,000 through January, 2008. Its goal is to improve and enhance Jewish ECE in Colorado in by:
- hiring of a full-time ECE specialist based in Colorado Agency for Jewish Education’s Center for Teaching and Learning
- implementing many of the recommendations of the final report generated through community task forces and focus groups that convened from September 2006 through December 2007
- forming an even deeper partnership between the national organization JECEI (Jewish Early Childhood Education Initiative), Colorado’s CAJE, the Early Childhood Educators Council (directors of all local Jewish ECE centers and programs) and our community
- facilitating Jewish early childhood centers through this process with the goal of our community offering unsurpassed Jewish education and communal experience to families.
Colorado CAJE’s and JECEI’s work in the community is two-tiered:
- All interested centers will work with Colorado CAJE and JECEI from 2008 to 2012 to improve their schools and build community capacity. The Center for Teaching and Learning's ECE specialist will work with all ECE centers and will help the community implement the report’s recommendations. In partnership with JECEI coaches, the specialist will help the community and the ECE centers by offering workshops for parents and ECE leaders, and will work intensively creating a community of practice among the Early Childhood Educators’ Council.
- JECEI will work deeply and intensively with three or four ECE centers for four school years, each center guided by its leadership team consisting of the director, a second-tier school leader, the director’s supervisor and/or professional leadership from the institution (clergy, educational director, executive director), and board and education committee representatives.
JECEI has engaged a group of international experts to serve as coaches and consultants in the ECE centers. Each center will be assigned a coach and a consultant to work in areas that include:
- the school’s vision and identity based on a Jewish way of viewing the world
- teacher education, adult Jewish learning, and leadership development
- the philosophy and practices of constructivist education
- organizational development
- research and evaluation
The coaches will visit each school six times a year for three days each, and the consultants six times a year for two days each. In between visits, schools will engage in phone calls and emails in addition to working with the Colorado Agency for Jewish Education Early Childhood Specialist. Directors and a second-tier leader will come together often to meet with other directors locally and three times a year with their counterparts at JECEI schools undergoing similar processes in other cities. There is no cost to the participating centers because the $180,000 cost per school is generously funded through grants. In addition to receiving coaching support and other benefits, centers will receive a $10,000 grant for the first three years, designed to help them free up and compensate teachers for time spent collaborating with other teachers on learning, documenting and planning for teaching. JECEI staff will conduct regular visits to participating schools to support and assess the progress of the change process, and conduct regular assessment of each school’s progress in reaching the agreed-upon outcomes along with gathering data to be shared with JECEI national partners and the local community.
Selection Process
Leadership teams from all nine of the Coalition's Jewish ECE Centers attended the introductory meeting on January 30, 2008. Next, each interested team will work together over the next three weeks to complete a reflective questionnaire distributed January 30; this questionnaire will be critical to a school’s selection as one of the three or four centers to work in depth with Colorado CAJE and JECEI on this four-year change process. All paperwork will be due to JECEI February 22, 2008 so each Leadership Team may want to reserve time to meet several times after the 30th of January to complete the questions and consider their responses. Key to being chosen as one of the three to four centers is a willingness to engage in a period of self-reflection and commitment to change, director-readiness for change and growth (along with an ability to think systemically and act as a visionary role model), and a host institution that is willing to embrace the difficult nature of the change process. Additional factors might also include geography, diversity and overall school functioning. The selection of three to four centers will be made by JECEI and the 4-year initiate will begin in spring, 2008.
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