from conflict to change: engaging teachers, shifting curricula

By, Dr. Netta Avineri
Executive Director, Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation
Middlebury College
Just three of the blog's paragraphs are posted here. Download the PDF at the bottom for the full blog, including 8 very distinct and helpful strategies, all with linked resources.

As an education director, you may be interested in shifting the curriculum, Hebrew learning approach, and/or pedagogical methods in your congregation. For example, you might like students in all grades to be exposed to Hebrew vocabulary, language and regular Hebrew worship to build the sounds of Hebrew before learning print (decoding) in fifth grade. Or you may want teachers to focus on decoding prayers using a sound-to-print (S2P) approach.

Though you may share with your staff the research demonstrating the efficacy of these new approaches, offer one-on-one conversations, and schedule meetings to address these changes, it’s still possible that teachers or tutors may resist. For example, they may feel that their expertise is being devalued or that they don’t have enough time for preparation. Perhaps some teachers even leave at the end of the year because of the curricular and programmatic changes. What you may see as programmatic innovation is coming up against teacher experience and perception and/or existing institutional structures.
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In this blog post, I highlight several practical approaches to proactively and responsively address these challenges with an eye towards productive change. The approaches I share here are based on the field and practice of conflict transformation, focused on the productive potential of conflict for meaningful change at any scale (Lederach, 2003). Conflict transformation seeks to move away from addressing episodes (specific conflict-related scenario/situation) at a surface level, and to a deeper understanding of epicenters (histories and experiences that underlie a particular conflict episode).

FOR THE FULL BLOG POST, DOWNLOAD THE PDF BELOW.

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