Shevy Govrin

Graduate of Cohort 9, Mandel School for Educational Leadership
Founder and Principal of the Ovnayim Institute for the Development of Practical Knowledge in Education

In 2003, when Shevy Govrin graduated from the Mandel School for Educational Leadership, she founded Ovnayim, an organization that develops the practical knowledge of teachers and school principals and disseminates it in the education system. The aim of Ovnayim is to help improve the quality of education and teaching, as well as to promote a professional culture based on sharing and learning from experience. At Ovnayim there are practical learning groups, which engage in research on professional practice, and work together in an attempt to improve these practices. The Institute implements methodologies of professional development and organizational learning, and adapts those methodologies to the Israeli context. The methodologies include: case studies ("teaching stories"), critical friends groups, looking at students' work, video analysis, and lesson studies.

Before she arrived at the Mandel School for Educational Leadership, Ms. Govrin was in charge of the Sector for On-the Job Training and Supervision of Literacy Teachers in the Jerusalem Municipality and the District of Jerusalem. Her interest in teachers' learning processes became the main topic of her research as a fellow at the Mandel School for Educational Leadership, and was the basis for establishing the Ovnayim Institute.

According to Ms. Govrin, there is not enough awareness of the knowledge and expertise that educators – teachers and principals – accumulate in the course of their work. In her view, this unique, important, precious knowledge arises and develops in the course of their work – but it is not documented, so it is lost.
Education professionals lack the time and appropriate settings to learn even from their own experience, and especially not from the experience of their colleagues.  By finding a language for disseminating practical knowledge, Ovnayim strives to bridge the dichotomy between theory and practice in education.

The Mandel Graduate Unit has accompanied the Ovnayim Institute at different junctures. It has provided counseling and training to Ovnayim, and collaborated professionally with the institution.