In October 2018, aChord Center for Psychology of Social Change launched the municipal pilot of the Tav Tikva Israelit (Standard for Israeli Hope) initiative with the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality. This partnership has the potential to dramatically broaden the initiative's reach to the Israeli education system. aChord Center was honored to host teachers and administrators from schools in Tel Aviv-Yafo, along with representatives from the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, at a kick-off event featuring a lecture by Professor Eran Halperin at the IDC-Herzliya.
The Standard for Israeli Hope program is a systematic effort designed to provide schools with a professional, research-based framework for education that promotes partnership between groups in Israeli society. Already, the program is in its second year of a national pilot with the Ministry of Education and is operating within a cross-section of the Israeli education system, including Secular, State-Religious, Haredi/Independent, and Arab high-schools. It is part of the national Israeli Hope in Education program, which is being spearheaded by the President’s House in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and the Lautman Forum. Geared toward “Education for Partnership,” Israeli Hope in Education seeks to promote values of shared society across the educational system.
In Tel Aviv-Yafo, the Applied Center is expanding the Standard for Israeli Hope program to the municipal level. The education team from the Applied Center will provide a socio-psychological diagnosis for each school in the pilot, including a detailed assessment of its teachers and students, formulate specific goals, and design a tailored plan that includes teacher training, ongoing consulting for school staff, and monitoring, measurement, and evaluation. In Tel Aviv-Yafo specifically, there is a municipal Joint Advisory Team (JAT) for the process, which makes connections to city-wide programing on the issue of shared society, and a roundtable on elementary school curriculum.
Participants agreed that Prof. Halperin’s lecture was an interesting and informative way to commence the partnership, and several teachers said they were highly motivated to evaluate their students’ perceptions in light of the findings he presented.