Reshit – Communities of Home Room Teachers

Reshit [beginning or origin] program was initiated by the Lion Family Foundation in partnership with Kol Israel Haverim with the goal of promoting equality of opportunity and values education by strengthening and professionalizing home room teachers. The program creates home room teacher communities that serve as an elevated, safe space that enables sharing and learning, creativity and reflection. As trust is built among the community members, a framework for learning and sharing is built. This framework serves to develop the home room teacher role as a distinct profession. By exploring practices, the members find solutions to challenges they face on a daily basis, while honing excelling practices and examining ways and means to advance equality of opportunity and values education.

The program makes accessible unique experts, inspiring role models¸ trips and workshops that answer needs raised by the communities of home room teachers. The program establishes communities at the school, city and national levels.

The forte of the Reshit program as implemented by Kol Israel Haverim is the strengthening of educational excellence and local leadership in the periphery, while constructing a comprehensive thought system regarding the connections between scholastic achievements and identity processes.

The city-level program, implemented as a pilot in the city of Hadera, harnesses, through home room teachers, the municipality as a whole to the goal of advancing equality of opportunity and values education. The program creates effective and sustainable models of equality of opportunity in the municipal arena based on home room teachers. The program develops communities of home room teachers at the school and city levels while guiding and training the schools and initiating innovative projects to increase equality of opportunity. The program works with all the city's educational leaders and establishes a municipal round table that steers the process while adapting it to the city's unique needs and educational vision.

Reshit program operates in 36 schools throughout the country, 22 of which are part of the Hadera and Kiryat-Yam municipal programs.

Reshit is operated under the initiative of the Lion Family Foundation, and in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Mofet Institute and the Hadera and Kiryat-Yam local authority..