Kohelet offers $36K to 6 in Jewish education

The Kohelet Foundation has announced the inaugural year of its Kohelet Prize. An unrestricted $36,000 will be awarded to educators or teams of educators, who currently work in Jewish day schools and whose work skillfully demonstrates a progressive approach to education in the following six categories — Interdisciplinary Integration; Real-World Learning; Learning Environment; Differentiated Instruction; Development of Critical and/or Creative Thinking; Risk Taking and Failure.

“We know there are incredible, creative and highly effective teachers doing this work in the field right now,” said Kohelet Foundation Executive Director Holly Cohen. “We want to inspire them to share what they know about developing the minds and hearts of their students.”

“The first five categories are critical to excellent education,” said Rabbi Dr. Gil Perl, the Kohelet Foundation chief academic officer. “By honing in on these, we hope to surface work that demonstrates the elements that matter most in the classroom.”

In explaining the sixth category, Perl noted, “In schools, failures are too often seen as an endpoint, not as a crucial step toward success. To foster a growth mindset in students, we have to begin by fostering it in our teachers.” Cohen added, “We’re shifting the paradigm from ‘failure is bad’ to responsible risk-taking and failure breed success. That’s a game changer for the field of Jewish education.”

To submit an entry, educators will share their work by uploading it directly to the Kohelet Prize website at www.koheletprize.org, between Sept. 29 and Nov. 29. A panel of judges in the fields of education, psychology and neuroscience will select the winning entries.

To promote an open source culture within the field, the Kohelet Foundation plans to create a searchable database of all entries. The database will be accessible, after the close of submissions, via the Kohelet Prize website.

— Kohelet Foundation