We Need Your Voice as an Early Childhood Resource

Posted February 1, 2023

Sasha Kopp

ECE Instructor

Sasha Kopp joins the AJU faculty from New York City, where she works at Jewish Education Project as a Community Early Childhood and Family Engagement Consultant. In this role, Sasha supports and connects early childhood educators throughout the New York area through networks and professional development opportunities. She comes to this role after two years as the Assistant Early Childhood Director at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Sasha received two masters degrees at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles in Jewish Education and Jewish Non-Profit Management. During this time, Sasha also participated in the Wexner Graduate Fellowship / Davidson Scholars Program.

Sasha’s passion for early childhood education has brought her to schools are recognized as strong centers of the Reggio Emilia approach from coast to coast. After completing Brandeis University, she was a lead teacher at Temple Beth Shalom Children Center in Needham, MA and then throughout graduate school, she worked as the Administrative Fellow and Judaic Specialist at Temple Israel of Hollywood Nursery School.

In addition to her early childhood experience, Sasha is also a passionate fused glass artist. She leads glass workshops for all ages, from young children to adults, around New York City. Her workshops, like her work in early childhood, seek to bring a bit of creativity and play into everyday life.

As early childhood educators, we learn through many different modalities: classes, assignments, teaching experiences, blogs, books, Instagram, and more. We constantly are learning and growing in ways that inform our teaching practice. The Jewish Education Project is a national organization that inspires and empowers Jewish educators to create transformative Jewish experiences. We offer professional development through network-based learning and webinars, and we seek to be an online resource hub through our new Jewish Educator Portal. The Portal has an average of 8,000 visitors a month. Over 6,000 visitors have created free user accounts.

Our Portal is a democratic space – anyone can add a resource to a growing community of thousands of Jewish educators. We believe elevating Jewish education is the collective work of all Jewish educators. Each of us has something to contribute. Through our journey of collecting resources, we have noticed the lack of resources in the field of Jewish Early Childhood education. There are no national resource partners or one-stop shops to look for resources we might need as early childhood educators. However, there are so many things that we want to learn about from behavior management to how to set up a classroom to integrating Jewish values into your curriculum and much, much more.

We know how much wisdom there is within the American Jewish University community, and we are calling both current students and alumni of the early childhood programs to add to our resource collection and share your knowledge with the national Jewish early childhood community. Through your coursework, you are creating lesson plans, curriculum, podcasts, and blogs. These are resources that teachers around the country could use and benefit from.

The Jewish Educator Portal can help amplify your voice; each educator has a profile where you can learn more about them and the work that they do. Their profile can lead to a website and you can share links to materials or social media. These features are intended to help connect users of the materials to the content creators so that users can ask additional questions about content or just connect with the creator in an authentic way. Hopefully, this can lead to opportunities where the creator of resources is asked to do professional development opportunities and connect with other schools and programs in new ways. Resources you share remain your property and you can remove or add to your contributions whenever you wish.

The Jewish Education Project is excited to amplify the voice of American Jewish University students and alumni to encourage a more connected, more resourced field of Jewish Early Childhood If you want to workshop a resource or if you need guidance for choosing which resource you want to use please do not hesitate to reach out to me at skopp [at] jewishedproject.org (skopp[at]jewishedproject[dot]org).

To view Educator Contributor resources visit the portal here: https://lnkd.in/eaU87mcx. To become an Educator Contributor, reach out to Allison Kapusta at akapusta [at] jewishedproject.org (akapusta[at]jewishedproject[dot]org). Allison will guide you through the process.

by Sasha Kopp

Sasha Kopp

ECE Instructor

Sasha Kopp joins the AJU faculty from New York City, where she works at Jewish Education Project as a Community Early Childhood and Family Engagement Consultant. In this role, Sasha supports and connects early childhood educators throughout the New York area through networks and professional development opportunities. She comes to this role after two years as the Assistant Early Childhood Director at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Sasha received two masters degrees at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles in Jewish Education and Jewish Non-Profit Management. During this time, Sasha also participated in the Wexner Graduate Fellowship / Davidson Scholars Program.

Sasha’s passion for early childhood education has brought her to schools are recognized as strong centers of the Reggio Emilia approach from coast to coast. After completing Brandeis University, she was a lead teacher at Temple Beth Shalom Children Center in Needham, MA and then throughout graduate school, she worked as the Administrative Fellow and Judaic Specialist at Temple Israel of Hollywood Nursery School.

In addition to her early childhood experience, Sasha is also a passionate fused glass artist. She leads glass workshops for all ages, from young children to adults, around New York City. Her workshops, like her work in early childhood, seek to bring a bit of creativity and play into everyday life.

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