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As I write this, I am heading into my final seminar for the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute (MTEI, 2023). It has been a two-year journey of professional development with Jewish educators from around the world (rabbis, heads of schools, administrators, department heads, and more), all of whom share a passion for growing the capacity of their faculty.

As another school year comes to a close, many of us take stock of which teachers are returning for the following year. As Jewish education leaders, consultants, and coaches, we begin to ask ourselves: How do we retain teachers? How do we recruit teachers?

During a chevrutah study at a virtual MTEI learning session, a colleague posed, “If we aren’t changed by Torah are we doing it ‘right’?” This was an “ah-ha” moment for me, because I assumed we are somehow changed by Torah each time we study it, but until then I hadn’t considered what that idea really means.

At the MTEI (Mandel Teacher Educator Institute) graduate conference on Singer Island, Florida, in December 2022, we were asked to take a pad of sticky notes and jot down each task we accomplished in the previous week at work.

What I appreciate most about MTEI gatherings is that they provide the gift of getting me off the dance floor and into the balcony. What do I mean? I spend (too) much time dealing with the urgent and seemingly important: designing yet another flyer, reminding teachers to submit lesson plans and lesson summaries, and organizing supplies.

Welcoming Shabbat in my professional role looks very different from my previous Friday evening Shabbat practice! Our learners come together Friday afternoons for our Shabbat-based religious school program, and our weekly family Shabbat service is the cornerstone of each session.

Words matter. They shape a child’s mind: opening landscapes while fencing others off, carving streams of ideas and emotional associations while setting up dams elsewhere.

We feel such enormous gratitude to have had the opportunity to learn with Cohort 8 of MTEI. Over the last few years since we graduated, we have continued to look to the MTEI principles to guide us and our work.

This post tells the story of one school’s participation in a special pilot for congregational schools of the Jewish Court of All Time (JCAT) web project, a pilot co-sponsored by MTEI and directed by Jeff Stanzler of the MTEI faculty.

MTEI was, and is, a vocabulary, a language all its own. I learned how to speak differently, how to listen differently, how to think differently.