Becoming a Soulful Educator , livre ebook

Turner Publishing Company - Rabbi Aryeh Ben David

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104 pages

English

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Wake up, educators! Move beyond conveying information, beyond the classroom, to transforming the soul. Long description: The time has come for a new GPS in education. The goal is no longer to teach a good class, to convey information or even to have the students enjoy the learning. Soulful education is about enabling another—child, adolescent, adult—to discover how to become his or her best self through learning. In this bold revisioning of effective education, renowned educator Rabbi Aryeh Ben David recalibrates the focus of teaching from the acquisition of knowledge to the transformation of the soul. He presents six steps to help educators of all kinds teach to the heart, engage students in knowledge gathering without preaching or controlling, and enable students to authentically and personally integrate Jewish wisdom into their lives. He offers guidance for how teachers can share their own vulnerabilities and yearnings to become a better force of harmony to help students gain new clarity on their own infinite potential for positive change. This is the essential guidebook for everyone from educators and rabbis to parents and grandparents—anyone working in formal or informal education, whether for children, teens, emerging adults, adults or seniors.

Sujets

Rituals

Philosophie et théologie

Judaism

Religion

Practice

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Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	23 juin 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781580238786
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0850€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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This book is dedicated to the soulful educators who changed my life:
Rav Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook
In the education of an individual, and so too with the education of the collective, the nation and all of humanity, we need to pay special attention to spiritual unity.
Parker J. Palmer
The transformation of teaching begins in the transformation of the heart of the teacher.
Contents
Foreword
Who Is This Book For?
Acknowledgments
Introduction
My Crisis as a Teacher
The Old GPS of Jewish Education: Knowledge and Continuity
The New GPS of Jewish Learning: Becoming -A Call to My Future Self
Asking the New Questions
Part 1: Laying the Foundation for Soulful Education
What Does It Mean to Be a Soulful Person?
What Does It Mean to Be a Soulful Teacher?
Creating Soulful Space
The Soulful Education Approach: Loving Our Students
Part 2: The Six Essential Steps of Soulful Education
Bringing Soulfulness into Everything You Teach
Step 1: Transitioning into the Class
Step 2: Introducing the Learning
Step 3: Mindful Engagement
Step 4: Heartful Engagement
Step 5: Summarizing the Learning
Step 6: Transitioning Out of the Class
Conclusion
Appendix: Ayeka-cizing Classes
Chumash
Talmud
Tefilah
Hanukkah
Halachah
Notes

About the Author
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Foreword
Who would not want to become a soulful educator?
We all want to reach people in a deep, immersive way when it comes to the areas of life that matter most. That s why we picked education. But in between classes, many of us worry-I certainly do-that what we are teaching is not entering the hearts and minds of our students. Perhaps it s just intellectual meandering, dry and arid, at times even brittle.
Becoming a Soulful Educator is a guide to turning every teacher into an artist of the spirit and is an important contribution to the bookshelf of any teacher profoundly interested in the world within us and not only in the world outside of us.
A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller. The artist Paul Klee wrote these words, and they describe well what many artists and educators feel as they approach a new canvas or a new day. Sometimes all goes well, and we have moments of professional triumph. We are creative. We are strong. We are able to communicate what moves us with passion and clarity. We feel enlarged by the mission of our work and inspired. We are able to unfold a small sliver of holiness and transcendence. On those days, we cannot imagine doing anything else for a living. At times like this, teaching is not a job. It s not even a career. It s a calling.
But on other days, we find ourselves relating more to Klee s sense of smallness. Humbled by knowledge and learning or by the nagging voice inside that says, Just give up. This isn t for you. No one is paying attention. No one is changing as a result of anything you re teaching. The black cloud parks above us all day, and we wonder why we didn t go to law school or become investment bankers.
Virtually every master educator I know cares about transformative change and sees himself or herself as an educational change agent. Unless you can make people uncomfortable enough to question basic assumptions about self and other but loved enough to take risks, it s hard to help any student make any visible difference. And we need to so that we can push the black clouds away and bask in the radiance of the good days.
Aryeh Ben David is a master educator who knows a great deal about change-in his own life and in the lives of his students-and now hopefully in the lives of teachers who want to become great at what they do by reaching deep inside and bringing that inside out. You won t become a soulful educator just by reading the book. But if you move from the text to life and internalize its lessons, you will be a different kind of educator.
Dr. Erica Brown
Who Is This Book For?
This book is for educators-for anyone working in formal or informal education, whether for children or seniors or anyone in between.
We ask you to take a step back from your teaching, to take a long hard look at the impact you are making-versus the impact you want to make, the impact you became a teacher to make. And if you, like so many of us, find a disconnect between the two, we offer suggestions to help you grow as an educator, to become a soulful educator.
This book came from my own experience, my own personal journey. For my first fifteen years as a teacher, I was a pretty good educator, but not a soulful educator. I taught, my students learned, and we all benefited from the experience.
But my teaching was not making the life impact that I wanted my students to experience. Truth be told, my teaching wasn t making the impact on myself that I wanted it to either. There was something lacking, something unfulfilling about the entire process. My students would have benefited-and I would surely have been a better teacher-if I had had a book like this to guide me at the beginning of my career.
A soulful educator is someone who wants to enable students, whether children, adolescents, or adults, to discover their better selves through learning. We all have souls, we all have infinite potential, and we are all on a never-ending journey to become the best we can be. We re not there yet-actually, we will never be.
So how do we get there? Or more correctly, how do we get nearer there? And as teachers, how do we help our students get there?
Soulful Education, taught by soulful educators, can be one piece of the journey. Soulful educators are the people in our lives who help us reach our potential. We all have had teachers like this at one point or another: that special advisor we remember with so much gratitude, the homeroom or drama teacher who saw us for who we could be, the math or football coach who believed in our deepest capabilities. Unfortunately, most of us can point to only a handful of these teachers in our decades of formal education. But what a difference they made. And where did these precious people learn the skills they used to reach us? For the most part, through intuition and trial and error.
The name of our organization that promotes Soulful Education is Ayeka. Ayeka ( Where are you? ) is the first question of the Torah and echoes eternally. In the Garden of Eden, Adam couldn t answer the question and hid from God. Our better self is always hiding from us, waiting to be discovered. We chose the name also because it was a question. We do not come to provide answers but to help people hide a bit less from themselves, to discover their better self which is always yearning to be known.
So the questions Soulful Education asks is this: the skills that enable educators to reach their students, to connect the material being taught with their students souls, to support their students in envisioning and reaching their potential-can these skills be taught? Are there tools that we can offer to parents, educators, professionals, lay leaders, rabbis-to the myriad people who are positioned to guide, encourage, mold, and motivate-to help them best use their positions of influence? And as Jewish soulful educators, is there a way that we can use the great wisdom of our tradition as it was intended, as a springboard that helps people get in touch with their truest selves and to step boldly forward on a path of lifelong growth?
I am absolutely convinced that the answer is yes. Over the past ten years, Ayeka and I have been experimenting with simple but powerful educational techniques that have completely transformed the atmosphere of scores of classrooms across the United States and in Israel. In parallel, they have transformed my own approach to the educational enterprise, returning to me the sense of mission and fulfillment that brought me to teaching in the first place. I invite you to join us in this journey and to be part of the revolution, the age-old and ever-new practice of Soulful Education.
Acknowledgments
The Talmud states, The air of Israel makes one wise ( Baba Batra 168b). I have been given the privilege to live in the Land of Israel and breathe its air. Though I have no claims to be wise, there is no question that this book was conceived, born, and grew through the gift of the air of Israel. I humbly and gratefully acknowledge the generations of ancestors who, while being scattered throughout the world, remembered Israel and Jerusalem. The prayers of countless individuals of the past are present between the words and lines on every page of this book.
After two thousand years of wandering, the Jewish People returned to their home. This historic miracle has given me and others hope. It is my dream and vision that Ayeka and this book will continue this chain of hope, pushing us all to take steps to make this world a bit closer to being in the image of God. I believe there is no greater gift one can give than hope. We have been blessed to receive it; Ayeka aspires to continue bestowing this gift.
Anyone who has ever engaged in a new project knows that success comes only after many bumps in the road, and Ayeka has been no exception. This is one of the reasons we believe a hidden hand from above has been silently guiding our endeavors.
Words cannot express my appreciation and love for the Ayeka team. Yehoshua Looks s experienced wisdom has guided our start-up to new heights. Leora Niderberg s calming proficiency and artistic crea