Pre-schools seek to make ethics a take-home project for parents

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

Shabbat celebrations and arts and crafts are one thing, but getting parents of pre-school students to participate in learning a classic Jewish text with their children is something else altogether.

That’s according to some of the 50 JCC preschool teachers who gathered at the Lautenberg Family JCC in Whippany on January 10 and 11 for discussion, networking, workshops, and lectures. The educators — some from as far away as Vancouver and Salt Lake City — were participants in the second national conference on a JCC values-based curriculum known as “An Ethical Start: Peer K Explorer.”

The new curriculum was hailed as a revolutionary tool when it was introduced into the preschool and kindergarten classrooms of 18 JCC’s across the country in the fall of 2001, including four classrooms at JCC MetroWest that were added in 2002. Peer K uses 10 mishnayot — paragraphs of rabbinic wisdom — found in the collection known as Pirkei Avot, or Wisdom of the Ancestors. The goal is to teach small children basic human values like dignity and respect. The curriculum was designed to be open-ended, so that teachers stamp it with their own methods.

The pilot phase of the project has ended; the program is now in 32 cities, including 10 classrooms at JCC MetroWest both in West Orange and Whippany. Many of the teachers and preschool directors acknowledged that they spent the first couple of years of the project getting comfortable with it, and now they are trying to do even more with it.

“There’s so much excitement in response to the project, and everyone wants more out of it, so we are going deeper to meet the needs of parents, who also want more,” said Ruth Pinkenson Feldman, who developed the project. Feldman is director of early childhood services for the JCCA.

In 2004 , the JCCA received a $1 million grant from the Marcus Foundation to enable the JCCA to not only expand into new JCCs but also to develop new materials that answer the question of how to bring this curriculum into the children’s homes.

“This is, fundamentally, about deepening the relationship between the teachers and the parents,” said Feldman.

The Whippany location was selected because the MetroWest implementation of the Peer K curriculum is considered a national model. As part of the conference, teachers visited the Peer K classrooms in Whippany and West Orange.

While there was plenty of time for support and networking, the focus of the conference was involving parents. The keynote speaker, Rima Shore, chair of the Weismann Center for Educational Leadership at Bank Street Graduate School of Education, addressed this issue in a series of workshops.

In one session, teachers described obstacles in involving parents, from busy schedules to varying priorities to the simple inability to get many to read the notices that go home with their children. One key issue that emerged is that text study is foreign to many JCC parents.

“Parents have a tremendous amount of insecurity and guilt, but also a tremendous amount of hope. A lot of the time when parents say ‘I’m too busy’ or ‘I don’t know how to interact with these texts, but I’m counting on you to do it,’ that’s an expression of insecurity, fear, and discomfort. It is our job to figure out how to connect,” suggested Shore.

Teachers also acknowledged that the less comfortable they themselves felt with the texts, the harder it was to send the message to the parents. Nina Rosenberg, a 4s teacher in Whippany, added that there ought to be more branding around Peer K so that parents internalize its importance. “It’s not clear that people are making the connection between the JCC and this curriculum. When people ask why is your child at the JCC, the answer should be, ‘because they teach Pirkei Avot.’ We should be known for that.”

Different materials, like a Peer K game, are in the works that would bring the curriculum into homes; in addition, the developers of Peer K are planning conferences or family retreats that would bring the parents in, according to Feldman.

But so far, the main issue is that getting parents involved hasn’t been a focus of implementation. “This program is successful without parent involvement,” according to Dolores Greenfield, director of the Center for Children and families at JCC MetroWest, who said the first two years of the program was devoted to helping the teachers effectively transmit the material to the children. “As with any new effort it takes time and creativity to help make it accessible to parents. My conversations with parents have led me to believe that values education is something parents want. It has become increasingly clear that we reach parents through a multitude of ways — through classroom projects, classroom discussions, newsletters, bulletin board displays, parent meetings, and programs…We need to continually expand the opportunities.”

Shore revealed that while there has been a great amount of research and study regarding how children learn, parents are another story. “The science of influencing parents and parent education is relatively primitive…Researchers have found that if we give parents new information, they may grapple with it and take it in and give the right answers. But in stressful situations, they will fall back on their old behaviors.”

Teachers, working in teams, came up with their own strategies and shared them with the group.

For Greenfield, the conference provided additional strategies for reaching parents and a greater understanding of the tools JCCA is providing. “By meeting with other schools engaged in the process we were able to come away with renewed excitement about what we are doing.”

In the meantime, Feldman offered an example of how one child brought the curriculum into the home. “The child heard his parents having a heated discussion. The child walked into the room and said, ‘Hillel says, “Love peace and pursue peace.” The mother said, ‘What do you mean?’ The child answered, ‘It means not to argue.’”

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.