The opening of the academic year at the Mandel Leadership Institute is an opportunity to discuss once again one of the main questions of concern to educators: How do people learn?
 
In order to understand the learning process in depth, the fellows at the Mandel Leadership Institute took a two-day trip that focused on questions pertaining to learning: How do people learn? What are the various contexts in which learning takes place? What conditions are necessary for learning to take place? And what is the role of professional identity in the learning process?

Before the trip, a day of preparation was held at Mandel, with lectures and panel discussions on aspects of learning, preparatory work in groups, and a screening of the film Entre les murs, moderated by Dr. Daniel Marom, Director of the Mandel Visions Unit.

The main purpose of the trip was to give the fellows a direct encounter with actual learning and training processes, so that they could understand what learning is, where it takes place, and under what conditions it takes place.

To explore these questions, the Mandel fellows observed diverse sites where learning occurs. Each group of fellows observed a different site: the Cellcom training center, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ramat Gan yeshiva, the Center for Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine Education at Ichilov Hospital, the Israeli Institute of Culinary Arts, the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball school, and so on.

A few of the issues that came up during the observations were how one learns a trade; the importance of professional identity in training processes and how various training processes socialize people to a profession; and the distinction between theoretical study and learning while doing and how to bridge the gap between the two. At the end of the day the participants reflected on their experience in groups, summed up the day, and exchanged impressions.

The second day of the trip began at the Midrasha at Oranim with an activity in the secular Jewish Israeli context, after which the participants visited the Meitar open school in Beit Oren and the Fureidis comprehensive school. To have a particularly exhilarating and daring learning experience, the fellows took sailing lessons in Herzliya, during which they sailed boats and discovered for themselves what “learning while doing” is.

Besides the learning that took place during the trip, these two days were an opportunity for Mandel fellows—new and old—and faculty to get to know each other better personally.