New Studies

This just in from Hillel’s Shavua Tov:
Two new studies provide interesting insights about the lives of today’s Jewish teens. The new American Religious Identification Survey found that the number of Jews who define themselves as Jews by religion is going down, while the number who identify as Jews by ethnicity is staying the same.  Meanwhile, [...]

Read Full Post »

William Damon on Character Education

An important interview with William Damon from the Chronicle of Higher Education. An excerpt:
Q: How do you see your work in the context of the school-reform movement?
The message of my work is that schools need to give students a better understanding of why they are in school in the first place — that is, how the [...]

Read Full Post »

Professors as Mentors

Oct. 28
Mentor, Friend — or Both?
TAMPA — The session on mentoring minority doctoral students was proceeding swimmingly enough, as the panelists offered useful tips about how the traditional methods for guiding graduate students work (and don’t) for students of color, earning the kind of head-nodding agreement that is typical at gatherings of like-minded people. That [...]

Read Full Post »

A New Paradigm: AskBigQuestions

(Also posted at www.rabbijosh.com)
This morning’s Daily Northwestern writes about the development of an initiative I founded last year called AskBigQuestions. The article focuses in particular on ABQ’s growth from being exclusively sponsored by Hillel to becoming an independent entity with sponsoring organizations from a variety of religious and scholarly communities.
This piece (see page 67), which [...]

Read Full Post »

Reimagining what happens in the classroom

I recently perused a recent publication called “A New Agenda for 
Higher Education” (http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/ 
productCd-0470257571….) from the Carnegie Foundation for the 
Advancement of Teaching. It was incredibly timely, in that the book 
discusses ways of blending the approaches to knowledge that typically 
characterize liberal arts education on the one hand, and professional 
education on the other, and brings cases and syllabi [...]

Read Full Post »

Marriage and affiliation

Thanks to Scott Aaron for this piece on marriage and affiliation: http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/2008061520080614cohenstu… 
The key graf to me is this one: 
“The biggest behavior changes come with getting married, not with 
having children,” Kelman said. “Neither of us expected that.” 
Why would this be the case? One hypothesis is that the move of 
marriage is a bolder one that it once was. [...]

Read Full Post »

Hillel 1.0 to Hillel 2.0: Notes for the Journey

One of my biggest learnings from the Consultation is that those of us 
in the room–and those of us in this discussion online–have a 
radically different view of Hillel than many of our key stakeholders. 
As my colleague Andrea Jacobs pointed out, there is a significant 
difference between an established institution and a new one: an 
established institution, like Hillel, [...]

Read Full Post »

Developmental differences between under- and upper-classmen

Here’s something we need to talk about: What are the differences between freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors? What are the differences between undergraduate and graduate students? What are the needs and developmental tasks of our young alumni? How might a greater awareness of and sensitivity to the developmental realities of each of these cohorts inform [...]

Read Full Post »