Positive Jewish Education: A Pathway to Thriving in 21st Century Jewish Education

Jewish education has been a core value to the Jewish people throughout history and is essential to carry on Jewish tradition and values. Jewish education influences Jewish identity, engagement, and continuity. A decline in enrollment in non-Orthodox Jewish educational programs poses a real threat to the future of the Jewish community. Many young adults decide to stop participating in Jewish educational experiences after the Bar/Bat Mitzvah experience at age 13 since students often fail to find meaning, positivity, and relevance in their Jewish educational experiences, which can influence their future engagement in Jewish life. Positive psychology and positive education can serve as a pathway to propel Jewish education, enabling students to find new meaning in Jewish values and tradition. Positive education infuses academics with a focus on character strengths and well-being and can lead to academic and personal flourishing. While many secular schools have embraced positive education, the vast majority of Jewish schools have yet to adopt this growing field. A positive Jewish education framework for implementation and recommendations for interventions can strengthen the future of Jewish education and help schools and students thrive in the 21st century

Telling Stories: Enhancing Cultural Literacy in the Primary Classroom

This paper draws on theory and educational policy about creativity and literacy; it includes an analysis of short stories composed orally by boys and girls aged 8-11 years. Data was collected during two small scale exploratory projects conducted in British Primary Schools, one in the North of England and one on a Hebridean island off the coast of Scotland. A consideration of literacy, which relates here to the pupils’ treatment of theme, character, setting and structure, will help to develop an understanding of their ability to access the imagination, express original ideas and compose a coherent, whole text. This discussion will explore how story telling may enhance children’s sense of identity and cultural literacy; it also points to some routes for practical implementation of creative teaching and learning

The Case for Joy in Learning: Teacher and Students\u27 Perceptions of Flow Experiences in Upper Elementary Classrooms

This dissertation focused on intrinsic motivation in elementary schooling, with Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory and the conditions and dimensions leading to optimal learning, serving as the theoretical framework. This qualitative case study investigated: 1.) How do teachers create flow-producing learning experiences for upper elementary students and 2.) How do upper elementary students experience flow in their daily school lives. Fieldwork included observation, collection of work product, and interviews of thirteen students and two exemplary teachers. Students were also asked to take digital photos of artifacts or spaces that related to their learning, and that they were proud of or found exciting. This case study makes a significant contribution to the literature by providing evidence that enjoyable, flow-like learning can be experienced in upper elementary classrooms. Analysis of data indicated that teachers created flow-like conditions by modeling habits of the mind, providing challenges at student readiness levels, offering feedback, and modeling enjoyable learning experiences. Student participants reported enjoyment in the learning process under conditions that allowed them to move freely in the classroom, concentrate, yet have the opportunity to obtain immediate feedback, and become immersed in, with control over, learning tasks. Fueled by intrinsic motivation, flow-producing learning experiences in upper elementary classrooms also have the potential to put students on the path to lifelong learning before middle school. More research on intrinsic motivation in elementary schooling needs to be conducted to maximize learning experiences

Fostering creativity from an emotional perspective: Do teachers recognise and handle students’ emotions?

Emotions have a significant effect on the processes of designing and creative thinking. In an educational context, some emotions may even be detrimental to creativity. To further explore the link between creativity and emotion, a series of interviews were conducted with design and technology (D&T) teachers in Singapore, Hong Kong and Beijing concerning their experiences of working with students on design projects. The intent was to investigate how these teachers understood and managed their students’ emotions while teaching creative design skills. Some teachers indicated that they understood their students’ emotions through observing their behaviour, connecting with them by synchronising emotions or by evaluating student performance. The teachers also reported using various other methods to handle their students’ emotions. This study highlights the importance of equipping D&T teachers with skills for awareness and regulation of emotions so that they can better enable students to cultivate creativity in the design process

Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering

For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields: software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by often-neglected human aspects. Among the skills required for software development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology research, affects-emotions and moods-deeply influence the cognitive processing abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving performance of programmers. This article echoes the call to employ psychological measurements in software engineering research. We report a study with 42 participants to investigate the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers. The results offer support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities. The following contributions are made by this study: (1) providing a better understanding of the impact of affective states on the creativity and analytical problem-solving capacities of developers, (2) introducing and validating psychological measurements, theories, and concepts of affective states, creativity, and analytical-problem-solving skills in empirical software engineering, and (3) raising the need for studying the human factors of software engineering by employing a multidisciplinary viewpoint.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures, published at Peer

Unlocking the Doors to Engagement and Accessibility: A Curriculum Development for Second Grade Learners in Social Studies

The goal of this project is to create a second-grade Social Studies curriculum that increases engagement and provides accessibility to all students. The intent is to pull from the instructional frameworks of Universal Design for Learning developed by CAST, Project-Based Learning by The Buck Institute and differentiation by Carol Ann Tomlinson. The following research question was used to propel forward the goal of this project: How can a second grade Social Studies unit unlock student engagement and universal accessibility by applying three educational frameworks? This question was answered by literature research on the topics of engagement and accessibility followed by the three frameworks mentioned above on UDL, PBL and differentiation. This research was then analyzed for overlapping characteristics that would lead to a curriculum development that was highly engaging and universally accessible for second grade students. Keywords: engagement, accessibility, motivation, project-based, individualistic syste

Something to Say: Success Principles for Afterschool Arts Programs From Urban Youth and Other Experts

Engagement in the arts can help youth in myriad ways: as a vehicle for self expression, acquiring skills, and developing focus and teamwork. Unfortunately, with the develine of arts education in public schools, few urban, low-income young people have high-quality engaging art experiences at school. Alternatives outside of school, such as private lessons or arts camps, are typically limited to children of families with the resources and savvy to get access to them. What narrow arts experiences low-income youth have are often dull arts and crafts projects where they are instructed to follow a prototype, rather than create something from their own imagination. Consequently, many urban, low-income youth grow up without even a cursory understanding of what high-quality arts programs are like, or what benefits may accrue from participation. Even when there is awareness or interest in out-of-school time (OST) arts programs, many young people choose other activities for a variety of reasons. Further, community groups often report a steep drop-off in teen OST engagement and participation. That finding points to the importance of captivating young people's interest prior to the teen years when, as tweens, they are more willing to try new OST experiences. This report attempts to answer the following questions: How can urban, low-income tweens and teens gain equal access to high quality arts experiences? Is there a model of practices that could provide a blueprint for community based organizations to emulate, so that proven approaches could be deployed in more places, more often? Is there a way to approach the analysis of these problems that respects and honors the young people as consumers who make informed choices? and how do the insights of what tweens and teens want align with what other experts say they need

The two-faced leader:The effects of leader emotional inconsistency on follower creative performance

Based on a review of the literatures pertaining to leadership, affect, and creative performance, the studies conducted as part of this thesis aim at testing a research model that examines how and under which conditions leader emotional inconsistency between happiness and anger is related to follower creative performance. For an experimental test of the proposed research model I collected data from 94 followers for whom a leader-follower interaction was simulated using a video manipulation. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that leader emotional inconsistency was positively associated with follower creative performance via increases in creative process engagement, but only for followers with high levels of epistemic motivation, which sheds light on the importance of follower’s information processing capabilities when faced with complex emotional leadership. I replicated the results of the first study in a second experiment where a leader-follower interaction was simulated using a scenario manipulation. Using data collected from 81 followers, moderated mediation analyses showed that leader displays of emotional inconsistency were positively related to creative performance via increases in creative process engagement for followers with high levels of epistemic motivation. Both experimental studies provide evidence towards the directionality of the examined interrelationships across different types of experimental manipulations employed. Finally, I replicated the research model of this thesis in a field setting using a measurement scale of leader emotional inconsistency specifically developed for this study. Week-level data was collected from 60 leader-follower dyads working in two organisations and providing a total of 253 matched weekly leader and follower responses. Multilevel moderated mediation analyses showed that follower weekly creative performance follows from weekly leader displays of emotional inconsistency via increases in weekly creative process engagement for followers with high epistemic motivation. Taken together, the studies conducted provide both internal and external validity to the theoretically derived research model of this thesis

Mapping steps along a pathway to evaluate an experiential transdisciplinary approach to professional learning for ecological researchers

The workshop “Cammino di Feudozzo” is a step of a constant research of constructing new ways “to be a researcher” and communicating Ecology. The path of this experience focused on an experiential approach, fit to reinforce and develop plural, relational systemic perspectives, and on a participative observation good to bring out both a collective vision and personal experience. The workshop has been an opportunity for the participants to face different languages and narrations, ways of dialoguing; to welcome points of view of other people; to practice manifold glances. The workshop holistic approach invested also the participants’ attitudes towards social relationships. New perspectives, critical thoughts and visions about more participative processes were fostered by the exploration of physical and emotional experiences which revealed the limits of “being a scientist”. As a consequence the evaluation pathways and strategies required new objectives and a research approach, owing to the uniqueness of this workshop experiences. The fields of evaluation focused on the participants’ beliefs, posture towards the workshop experiences and mainly on the changes of ideas, attitudes, interests, ways of dialoguing and communicating. This paper refers about some general evaluation elements and comments, but also some remarkable evidences of self-evaluation by the participants. All the evaluation issues offer the chance to meditate about the doubts and perplexity of the “researchers under pressure” and their searching for innovative models, languages and narrations