Elevated by ElevatEd!
Posted on 04/25/2025 @ 06:00 AM
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Do you know someone who is in Early Childhood Jewish Education?
Perhaps it is your grandchild who is attending one of over 30 Jewish early childhood education centers here in Miami-Dade County.
Perhaps you are a parent of a child in Jewish Early Childhood Education (ECE), learning about and celebrating Shabbat and holidays along with your child and your new friends who are also parents of children in the ECE.
Perhaps you are a devoted and beloved ECE teacher.
Or perhaps you love children and care about quality education for all children at all ages and stages of development.
If you recognize yourself above, then CAJE wants you to know about ElevatEd - the innovative, groundbreaking national Jewish ECE initiative.
It’s in its second year and creating quite an impact here in Miami and across the country.
"2024 was a *big* year for
ElevatEd – and we’re excited to share our news!"
Check out the 2024 impact report: bit.ly/elevatedimpact2024
ElevatEd is a unique and dynamic partnership with the Union for Reform Judaism, the JCC Association of North America and Jewish Federations of North America, and was developed to respond to three critical needs:
- Recruiting ECE staff
- Retaining ECE staff
- Professionalizing the field of Jewish ECE
So how is Miami benefiting from our participation in ElevatEd?
Staff Recruitment- We are living in a new world in which AI is culling and sorting through resumes before they get to the head of HR and google reviews drive people to specific places and programs.
For most of our ECE directors, these recruitment strategies were not part of their professional learning and degree programs.
Thanks to ElevatEd, our directors are being introduced to current, best-practice recruitment skills, including: how to use artificial intelligence, adding Google reviews to school websites, crafting well-articulated value propositions, and developing more effective onboarding systems.
Retaining Staff - Data shows that the quality of the teachers’ experiences during their first 3 years of teaching determines whether teachers stay in the field long-term.
Our ECE teachers have so much to know and master- child development, social–emotional teaching practices, emergent curriculum, just to name a few- as well as Jewish values, traditions, holidays and Hebrew.
Especially for beginning teachers, being on staff at a Jewish ECE program may be daunting, since it means learning and practicing skills they may have never learned before.
For these teachers to feel confident in the classroom they need to be supported and onboarded with tools that make their teaching experiences rewarding and pleasurable.
Thanks to ElevatEd, we have a track of learning for 27 Emerging Educators - teachers who are in their first 3 years of teaching in Jewish ECEs.
They are learning everything from “Newish and Jewish” to child development and best practice in curriculum development.
These emerging educators are also partnered with Mentors who are teachers with 5 – 10 years of experience.
The mentor teachers are learning best practices in mentoring and taking on leadership roles in observing and guiding their beginning teachers.
Direct feedback from our Emerging Educators report that they are more confident about understanding and teaching the Judaic curriculum and they feel they are being nurtured for success.
Professionalizing the field of ECE- at least 55% of ECE teachers do not have specific credentials in the field of education.
Since we know that brain development happens at an exponential rate from birth to five years, wouldn’t we want our children to have educated and trained teachers guiding them along the way?
ElevatEd offers courses through American Jewish University that count towards teachers’ college degrees in ECE and full funding for our teachers’ attainment of the National Child Development Associate (NCDA) credential, the first of many certificates insuring levels of expertise and competence.
CAJE and the ECJE community are forever grateful to the Greater Miami Jewish Federation for generously funding Miami’s participation in ElevatEd.
May we continue to find ways to elevate our ECJE community of educators and directors, as they are the stewards of Miami’s next generation of leaders in a vibrant and compelling Jewish community.
