The Visions Unit (VU) was established with the inception of the Mandel Leadership Institute (MLI) in 1990 to provide support for its efforts in the development of educational leadership.  The rationale for the unit is linked to MLI’s fundamental understanding that effective educational leaders are people with vision and that such vision can be cultivated through training.  VU’s mandate is to develop materials and methods appropriate for such training, to infuse them into MLI’s programs and to make them available to MLI graduates and to the community of educational leadership at large.

VU’s work is unique in the landscape of leadership development programs in that it is based on a clear and rigorous definition of the role of vision in the practice of education.  This definition reaches beyond conventional perceptions of vision that emphasize a leader’s charisma and power of inspiration or his or her proficiency in long term strategic planning and organizational management.  According to VU’s definition, a leader’s vision flows from a profound philosophical understanding of the educational purposes the community he or she aspires to attain and from his or her capacity to develop and implement the means that are appropriate for their attainment. 

Seeing as leaders training at the MLI are based in Israel and Jewish communities around the world, the initial focus of VU’s activity was on developing alternative conceptions of the purposes and means of contemporary Israeli and Jewish education.  These activities included collaboration with prominent Israeli and Jewish thinkers in formulating such conceptions and with leading educators in constructing field demonstrations.  Alongside this development work, VU engaged in experimental activities in the training of educational leaders on the basis of its unique definition of vision.  The aim of these activities was to develop effective training methods and curricula for the cultivation of vision among educational leaders.

Currently, the emphasis of VU’s activity is upon infusing the insights and products of its work over the last two decades into MLI programs and disseminating them among the larger constituency of educational leaders and leadership trainers.  Activities include working with MLI fellows, staff and graduates in their various programs and activities as well as active distribution of VU products through presentations and publications. 

---  Visions of Jewish education
---  Visions of Israeli education

---  Training methods for cultivating vision

---  VU staff and associates

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