Introduction

“I have a whole new perspective on what is important in [visiting] Israel. We may not get to see as much as past trips, but we will nurture mental health.”

The above quote from a Jewish educator illustrates how professional development can have meaningful and multi-layered impacts, even if these impacts are not immediately demonstrated through programmatic or organizational change. This educator’s shift in perspective grew out of her experience in the BaMidbar MESH-EE (Mental, Emotional, and Social Health through Experiential Education) Fellowship. Supported by a Covenant Foundation Signature Grant, BaMidbar’s MESH-EE provides Jewish experiential educators with knowledge and skills to promote teen and young adult mental health and wellness, recognize mental health challenges in the youth they work with and intervene when necessary, practicing self-care, and create an overall organizational culture that facilitates and supports mental well-being. In addition, MESH-EE offers tools and resources for integrating Jewish ritual and tradition into educational programming that bolsters social, emotional, and spiritual health. While BaMidbar’s MESH-EE training certainly encourages participants to implement specific mental health best practices into their educational work and settings, equally, if not more, important is that participants leave with new awareness and understanding of the critical need to center mental health and wellness within Jewish education. As BaMidbar leadership explained in their initial project proposal, “Mental illness, trauma, and addiction are as common in the Jewish community as in the rest of society. Educators are oftentimes the first line of defense for their students and are uniquely situated to create positive environments where not only learning, but also mental health, can flourish.”

Evaluating “Success” in Professional Development

The evaluation of professional development programs often focuses on what participants do with their learning experience and how these actions create visible changes within their organizations. Whether knowingly or not, such assessment frameworks draw upon a classic model developed in 1959 by Donald Kirkpatrick, a professor at the University of Wisconsin. The Kirkpatrick Model, as it has come to be known, identifies four levels of impact achieved by professional training (as he called it). The first level is “reaction,” defined as “the degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging, and relevant to their jobs.” The second level is “learning,” or “the degree to which participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills, attitude, confidence, and commitment based on their participation in the training.” Third is “behavior,” or “the degree to which participants apply what they learned during training when they are back on the job.” And the final and highest level is “results,” or “the degree to which targeted organizational outcomes occur as a result of the training initiative and subsequent support and accountability package.” (Kirkpatrick, 1959). While it is natural that professional development program providers and participants would wish to see program-inspired “results” within the participants’ organizations, the danger of this hierarchical model is that it suggests that the levels below “results” are only valuable as steps towards a more advanced goal. In particular, it defines the complex and rich experience of professional “learning” – and the process of internal cognitive, social, and emotional growth it requires – as subordinate to “results,” and therefore insufficient as evidence that the professional development has been effective or successful.

This article will argue precisely the opposite, using the experiences of BaMidbar’s MESH-EE participants as testimony. Although at the time of data collection (which took place during the year following each program cohort) most MESH-EE participants had not yet created new organizational programs or demonstrated their learning in tangible ways, they overwhelmingly valued the experience and described meaningful shifts in awareness, perspectives, and professional goals regarding supporting mental health and wellness for Jewish learners. They expressed their desire and intention to integrate their learnings from MESH-EE into the ongoing practice and culture of their organizations, with many noting that they were already sharing learnings with colleagues and students. All of these are significant effects of professional development that reflect current and likely future impacts for individual participants and those they interact with, the organizations they work within, and the learners who will benefit from their new understandings of what is possible within Jewish education.

The data used in this article were drawn from the research conducted as part of the evaluation of the BaMidbar MESH-EE Covenant Grant. Data-gathering activities included: interviews with MESH-EE personnel and review of MESH-EE materials; surveys fielded to the 2021, 2022, and 2023 MESH-EE cohorts; and interviews with sixteen members of MESH-EE cohorts that captured participants’ reflections concerning experiences with MESH-EE, learning outcomes, and corresponding shifts in practices or attitudes in their work.

What do BaMidbar’s MESH-EE Participants Learn?

Expanded (or reinforced) knowledge and skills

As intended by BaMidbar, MESH-EE participants gained knowledge and tools to help them better understand and recognize mental health challenges and promote healthy social-emotional development for the teens and young adults they work with. This included:

details about how the brain works and is impacted by stress; strategies and protocols for responding to and supporting young people as well as other professionals who support young people; and the importance of self-care for themselves and their charges, as well as tools for putting self-care into practice. They were also introduced to new vocabulary for discussing difficult issues and subject matter, such as depression and suicide. MESH-EE normalized the feelings and experiences of people who struggle with mental health by presenting them through scientific frameworks and emphasizing the broader social contexts that lead to individuals flourishing or languishing. Even though many participants had familiarity with some or much of the MESH-EE content, and/or found it to be fairly intuitive, they still appreciated the reinforcement it offered. In the words of one, it “solidified things to be thinking about, how to put events together, why we do what we do, what teens need, and how to be aware of their changing needs.”

Deepened understanding of and empathy for learners and colleagues

In designing the MESH-EE experience, BaMidbar is intentional in not just what participants learn, but how they learn. Even in its early years when the program had to move online due to Covid, it was still able to model effective experiential and immersive education. Participants learned and explored through games and activities including building paper airplanes to better understand resilience factors, building together as a group with wood planks, and creating their own stress responses by holding active mouse traps. As one participant explained, this pedagogy helped them to “think like the learner” in the moment and to reflect afterwards on “what might education look and feel like for the learner?” Another noted that this approach facilitated “being vulnerable with my youth so that they feel safer being vulnerable with me.” A third highlighted that the learning provided “tools to be a better listener and deepen my ability to be empathetic.” The experiential nature of the learning deepened participants’ connections to the material, to each other, and to colleagues and learners in their organizations. One described how after MESH-EE she was able to advise an educator she supervised who was struggling with a student’s behavior by putting themselves in the mindset of both parties. She reported asking her supervisee, “Have you checked in with [the student]? Have they always behaved this way? Is this new behavior? … Maybe, just sit down with them privately in a safe and nonthreatening place, and maybe that’ll help you figure out why they are acting up.” After the conversation, the colleague reported that the conversation “changed the tenor of the interaction with the student going forward.”  

New perspectives regarding the goals and possibilities of Jewish Education

As illustrated by this article’s opening quote, many participants leave their MESH-EE experience not only with an expanded knowledge base and toolkit, but with new visions for how they might center mental health within the goals of Jewish education and how their organization can work to enact those goals. The Israel educator who now seeks to “nurture mental health” on Israel trips is planning what that might look like practically, “We need to do a ‘soft landing’ in Israel for the first 48 hours. We also need our mindfulness to be at a time in the day – not first thing in the morning! – when the teens can appreciate it and see the value.” Campus-based professionals similarly reflected on how MESH-EE had helped them see that supporting mental health as a deliberate strategy would both serve students in need and enhance their overall organizational mission. One Hillel professional shared, “I will be using these learnings to help train my staff and student interns on how they can maximize their one-on-ones with students to identify how students are flourishing or languishing and markers where Hillel might be able to assist with any bit of their overall wellness.” Another hopes “to think about ways to integrate wellness into overall strategy of engagement and programming, as opposed to stand-alone programs.”

Congregational School educators also shared how they sought to apply their MESH-EE learning more broadly within their educational settings. In the words of one, “I want everything we do [to be] framed within the context of wellness.” Another intends to “work with teachers to focus on asking on how they are as a whole rather than just ‘how are you feeling.’” Summer camp staff especially valued the learning they gained from MESH-EE given their uniquely immersive educational roles and settings. As one explained, “living together over the summer is an intimate environment where social dynamics and a change of environment may exacerbate poor mental health. My role as counselor is to keep the campers safe, which includes recognizing and healing from mental health struggles.”

For all these Jewish educators across a variety of settings and roles, their learning and experience in BaMidbar’s MESH-EE enabled them to see their professional workplace as an evolving learning community and themselves as advocates for a different approach to work that is both more professional and more human. Far from being mutually exclusive – as they are sometimes framed – the experiences and testimonies of MESH-EE participants suggest that these two qualities are deeply intertwined.

Implications for the Field

The multi-faceted learning experiences of MESH-EE participants, and the ways in which they are able to envision and articulate how this learning will shape their work and goals moving forward, highlight the importance of not moving too quickly through Kirkpatrick’s hierarchy of assessment, lest these meaningful impacts be overlooked. Rather than simply focusing on behavior- and results-oriented questions as the sole measures of success for professional development, evaluators and researchers should also explore changes in how participants think about the goals of Jewish education, the missions of their organizations, and the alignment of the organizations’ practices with these missions. Effective professional learning and development also has internal impacts for individuals that may be even harder to measure, but are critical to try to surface: changes in how they perceive their own professional self-identity and goals, and these new perceptions affect their relationship to their career paths, organizations, professional communities, and overall health and wellbeing (which as the field has learned, cannot be separated from professional efficacy). 

Given the sense of need and urgency that propels so many Jewish education programs and organizations, it is understandable that leaders, organizations, and funders (including The Covenant Foundation) are eager to see investments translated into tangible and measurable “results” – new programs, growing enrollments, more engaged learners, etc. However, we must also remember that such systemic impacts emanate from the minds, hearts, and souls of individual educators who devote themselves to creating change for their communities. If this pathway to change at times seems too time-consuming or meandering, proceeding as it does through the lives and experiences of each individual, we can remember words attributed to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, founder of the Musar (Jewish ethics) movement in 19^th Century Lithuania:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town, so, as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize that the only thing I can change is myself. And suddenly I realized that if, long ago, I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family could have made an impact on our town. The town's impact could have changed the nation, and I could indeed have changed the world.                

Dr. Meredith Woocher

Meredith Woocher, PhD is the Director of Learning at The Covenant Foundation

Joshua Krug

Dr. Joshua Krug inquires into contemporary Jewish Education and Society and teaches Jewish Studies to diverse audiences. He seeks to empower people to experience Jewish texts and contexts as powerful resources as he strives to build sacred community. Joshua is the Sommerfreund Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg, Germany. Joshua facilitated teen and adult learning and meaning-making in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, and Jerusalem. He has served as a school leader with Kehillah, a board member with NRJE, a Jewish Studies teacher with Milken Community High School, a Madrich with KIVUNIM, a retreat planner with Moishe House, an educator with Kevah, a researcher with Yale, and a facilitator with Opening Doors.

Sources:

Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1959). Techniques for Evaluating Training Programs. Journal of the American Society of Trainings Directors, 13, 21-26.