Bridging Practice, Academe, and Cultures as a School Psychologist in Israel

Abstract

This chapter describes Maital’s career as an American-born, Israeli school psychologist over more than 40 years. Starting from a multicultural and bilingual upbringing in the United States, she immigrated to Israel 53 years ago. She has zig-zagged along different paths and learned to juggle and combine roles as practitioner, academic, mother, and spouse. Living and working in Israel created challenges, especially combining work as a school psychology practitioner with academic interests. Over the years, the balance shifted toward greater involvement in leadership as a practitioner and supervisor of younger school psychologists, while continuing with some teaching. Her interests over the years have been diverse, ranging from crisis intervention, multicultural work with Ethiopian immigrant children, consultation and systems intervention, policy, developmental research focused on cross-cultural studies of parenting and childcare, cultural aspects of children’s play, and psychology and economic behavior. One of her most satisfying career accomplishments has been the publication in 2018 of a two-volume, edited book: Issues in School Psychology: From Theory to Practice, after many years of delay. Being a school psychologist over all these years required patience and perseverance but has also been a source of great satisfaction.

• Birthdate: August 26, 1947

• Place of birth : New York, NY

• Education

  B.A.	Tel Aviv University, Psychology and Sociology-Anthropology
  M.A.	Tel Aviv University, Clinical-Educational Psychology
  Ph.D.	Temple University, School Psychology

• Education History

• I attended schools in the United States through high school. I began in a local public school in Trenton, NJ, but by third grade I transitioned to the community Hebrew day school and went on to Akiba Hebrew Academy High School (currently Barak Hebrew Academy) in Philadelphia, with a brief interim period in a public junior high school. I began my higher education in the United States at Douglas College, Rutgers University, and then transferred to Tel Aviv University in Israel, where I completed my undergraduate studies (double major in psychology and sociology–anthropology), and master’s studies in educational–child clinical psychology (1977).

• My M.A. thesis: An analysis of delay of gratification as a two-part process.

• In 1980, I returned to the United States where I completed a Ph.D. in school psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia.

• My Ph.D. Dissertation: Examination of American & Israeli Mothers’ Attitudes toward Pre-school Entry (1983).

• My school psychology internship was completed in the Haifa Municipal School Psychology Services, Israel (1982). I was a clinical intern in the United States in the New Jersey Department of Human Services program during 1978–1979.

• In addition to my formal education in school psychology, I have participated in numerous postgraduate in-service courses that gave me further training in learning disabilities, early childhood intervention, crisis intervention, and CBT, to mention the predominant long-term trainings.

• Employment

  Date: From to To	Institute	Title
  From 2017 to 2019	Netanya and Petah Tikvah Educational Psychology Services	Supervision of educational psychologists working with Ethiopian immigrant children and families
  2012 to 2018	Jezreel Valley Academic College	Adjunct lecturer, graduate program in Educational Psychology and Department of Behavioral Sciences
  2000 to 2014 2015 (Spring Semester) 2016 to 2017 (Fall semester)	University of Haifa	Adjunct lecturer, Department of Counseling and Human Development
  From September 2016 to 2020	Nazareth Illit Educational Psychology Services	Supervisor of Educational Psychologists and In-service training
  2006 to 2014	Israel Ministry of Education	Deputy Regional Head of Educational Psychology Services (SHEFI), Northern Region
  2000 to 2012	Megiddo Regional Council, Israel	Director and Supervisor, Educational Psychology Services

My Personal Story

As is evident from my educational background, I grew up in several cultures. I am the older of two girls. I was born shortly after WWII and just before the establishment of the State of Israel, to a family that was both American (my parents were born in New York City), but also proudly Jewish. My parents and much of the extended family strongly believed in Israel as our homeland and dreamed of going there. My grandparents were Chasidic Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York as young adults, but parts of the family had left Europe to settle in Israel even before WWII and the Holocaust. Sadly, some of my grandfather’s siblings who stayed in Europe were lost in the Holocaust, but most of the family (seven of my grandfather’s siblings) survived, and I grew up knowing a rather large, extended family. All this meant that from an early age I was exposed to several languages and cultural contexts. From the earliest time I can remember, my parents spoke to me and my sister in Hebrew as well as English at home. They wanted us to know spoken Hebrew so that we would be prepared to move to Israel. There were also many books in both languages, and our house was “home” for many emissaries visiting from Israel over the years. Although I never learned to speak Yiddish, there are many familiar phrases from my grandparents who spoke Yiddish, often using it with our parents when they didn’t want us to understand the conversation. While I was growing up my parents kept a traditional Jewish home, but not as strictly Orthodox or Chassidic as my grandparents’ home and the homes of some other parts of the family. I believe this early exposure to different cultures within my family sparked my keen ongoing interest in multicultural issues both personally and professionally.

Both my parents were Jewish educators. My father, Mordecai Levow, studied social work, but went on to graduate studies in Jewish education, and served as the principal of several afternoon Congregational Hebrew schools. My mother taught Hebrew and Jewish studies to children from kindergarten through high school. Growing up, as “daughter of the principal,” in small, somewhat closed Jewish communities in Central and Southern NJ, and Eastern Pennsylvania, it was hard to live up to the high expectations that I be a model child and student. Fortunately, I did not actually attend my father’s school, but all my social activities were synagogue based, and often directed by my father, mother, or their close colleagues. We also moved from one community to another every 4 years or so. At the time, I didn’t understand all the reasons for moving and probably did not really care. I was much too concerned with how moving had made it even more difficult for me to become involved in the local social scene. One of my conclusions that I recall was that I surely did not want to work in schools as my parents did! But with time, I realized that there were many aspects of being raised in a family of educators that I have internalized, and which brought me full circle back to loving my work in schools—in the professional role of school psychologist. In retrospect, my family had a strong influence on my love of learning, high expectations for achievement, discipline in studying, raising my appreciation of the importance and complexity of education, as well as my inclination toward activism and fighting for social causes.

I now understand that our family moved from one community to another in part because my father would take a principled stance on various issues, often differing from the view advocated by key community leaders. One incident I recall vividly was when we lived in Levittown, PA in the late 1950s. The community was abuzz with the news that the first Black family was moving to the neighborhood. Many were very upset and wanted to protest. But my father, together with the rabbi of our congregation, made a strong statement about welcoming the new family. My mother gathered my sister and me to the kitchen as she often did, to cook or bake with her. This time, we were preparing a basket full of food that we then helped deliver to the new neighbors. Later, in high school, I was active in Civil Rights protests and involved in advocating for the release of Russian Jewry from the former Soviet Union. Helping and doing for others, cooking, baking, taking care of new families, hosting visitors, and considerations of social justice were themes that were part of my daily life growing up. It is an approach to life and work that has remained with me in my career as a school psychologist and in my personal life.

When I reached Akiba Academy high school, I was finally in an environment where I could be more myself. I commuted and then boarded at a school outside our small community. Akiba was a private, bilingual, English, and Hebrew school that embraced both American and liberal Jewish cultures. It was there that I could be a strong student, and I graduated with honors as class valedictorian. I was in a school community in which academic achievement was also socially accepted. Akiba also encouraged us to become involved in civic issues and to think and ask questions. I was greatly influenced by several high school teachers and the school’s approach to learning. It was quite unusual at the time to have a Black person from Jamaica with a Ph.D. who taught us French for 4 years (yet another cross-cultural influence), and, of course, a number of Israeli teachers who taught Hebrew and also immersed us in Israeli culture including classic Hebrew literature, music, and current Hebrew newspapers. It is hard to remember that this was well before the days of the Internet, and Israeli newspapers and Hebrew literature were shipped to us by boat, and usually arrived several weeks late. Few schools went to such trouble.

The truth is that, when I completed Akiba, I was not sure what I wanted to study. I sensed that I wanted to learn more about human behavior and development. I had worked during my high school years as babysitter and mothers’ helper to younger cousins when they were infants and toddlers; I helped my parents, and taught the Sunday preschool class at our synagogue for a while, and even took an after-school college course to gain training in pedagogy and Hebrew teaching as a high school senior. I loved working with younger children even though I was still determined to do something other than “just” teach as my parents did.

Upon graduating Akiba, I knew that I wanted to go to Israel, preferably to stay. My grandparents, great aunts, and other aunts and uncles had gone for visits and sabbaticals and loved the country. My dream was fulfilled when I went to Israel with my family during the summer of 1965, after graduating high school, and before entering Douglas College. What a summer! I gained a whole new extended family—all the cousins whose families had emigrated from Europe. The ones my age had grown up in Israel, and many were preparing for their army service. Seventeen and 18-year-old youth are given a lot of independence in Israel, and I reveled in that freedom, going out socially, hiking and touring the country. My cousins and I had long conversations in Hebrew in which we explored all sorts of questions about identity and our dreams for the future. Some believed in joining socialist kibbutz settlements; others were city kids, some were religiously observant, and others were secular. By the end of the summer, it was clear to me that I had found my “home” country. I was prepared to stay and go to the army. But even though my parents had also dreamt of living in Israel all through the years, they insisted I return to the United States as planned and begin college there. If I still wanted to immigrate after the year, they promised not to stop me from joining my maternal grandparents, who had just bought an apartment in Jerusalem and planned to move there in 1966 when they retired.

Thus, I returned to the United States, started college, and shortly after, sent out applications to the major universities in Israel: Hebrew University, Bar Ilan University, and the relatively new (at the time) Tel Aviv University. At Douglas, as a liberal arts student, I enrolled in a variety of social science courses. Fortunately, after less than a full semester of general psychology and developmental psychology, I knew that this was an area where I wanted to specialize. I say fortunately, because, in applying to Israeli universities, I had to declare a major from the start of the 3-year undergraduate program. As my second major (most psychology programs required double majors at the time), I decided to try sociology–anthropology, staying with areas related to human behavior, culture, and social issues. I was admitted to all the universities, but instead of beginning after a year at Douglas College, I deferred for a year. Early second semester, contrary to all my best plans and expectations, chance led me to fall in love with Shlomo, the man who would become my husband the following year and remain with me over the last 53 years and counting. He was a Ph.D. student from Canada, studying at nearby Princeton University, and working hard to complete his degree so that he could leave to live in Israel. Being in love, it was not very hard to decide to wait until the end of the following year. We married in June 1967, overlooking the ocean in Atlantic City, NJ, and immediately after our wedding, we left the United States to fulfill our dreams together in Israel. Shlomo had been recruited to the newly established economics department at Tel Aviv University, which had just gained independence from the Hebrew University. Thus, my choice of Tel Aviv University was more pragmatic than for any other reason.

As an undergraduate student in Israel, I was a bit younger than many of the others who had already served in the army for several years. Many also worked before starting university as well as while they were studying. I remember having the advantage of knowing English, so it was easy to read the assignments, but the disadvantage of not having preexisting “work groups” based on long-standing friendships that are so common in Israeli society. In the end, writing many of my papers on my own served me well. I was particularly influenced by my courses in social psychology, and fondly recall the research seminar paper I wrote considering the tensions between Jewish and Israeli identities within Israeli society. Other courses that greatly influenced me were a course in sociology of education, and further studies in specific aspects of child development, particularly cognitive development, and a course on play and social development with the late Professor Sarah Smilansky. Upon completing my B.A., I realized I wanted to continue studying, and understood that I needed a graduate degree to work in the field. There was fierce competition for admission to the clinical psychology M.A. programs, but, despite the prestige factor, I was not at all sure that I even wanted to be a clinical psychologist. I was much more interested in children and their social contexts and in prevention rather than adult psychopathology, which was the clinical program’s emphasis. I suppose I was also influenced by the fact that I had become a mother of our first child, a daughter born just after completing my B.A. It was Professor Sarah Smilansky who suggested I consider the fledgling program in educational psychology (as school psychology is called in Israel) that she was involved in establishing. She easily convinced me that this was a field in which I could realize my interest in children and in the environments in which they develop, as well as my desire to help individuals having difficulties, and to advocate for their well-being.

The following year, I began my graduate studies with Smilansky, who remained a model and mentor throughout my years at the University and in my early professional life. The Israeli graduate program in educational psychology was modeled after the clinical program in many ways, and included both school and clinical practicum courses, as well as intensive academic work that included an original research thesis. In fact, during the period when I was studying, the program name changed from “Educational Psychology” to Child clinical–Educational Psychology. We were required to complete both clinical and school practicum placements, study a variety of assessment and psychotherapy techniques, as well as advanced courses in child development. I truly loved my studies and became devoted to the work of applying psychology in educational settings.

From the time I finished my undergraduate studies, and throughout my career, my work life has been intertwined with my personal life. I graduated in 1970, a time when the influence of the Women’s Liberation movement made pursuit of a career an attractive goal. At the same time, coming from a traditional Jewish family, and loving children as my husband and I did, I also wanted a big family. We often joked in the family that there is one child for each degree, and then our fourth, who was born as a delicious “dessert”; this resulted in a total of one girl and three boys. Today, our children are all happily married and have given us 16 grandchildren, so far. Thus, even as a retired person, I continue to enjoy being surrounded by young children.

Combining Career and Family: Becoming a Juggler

How did work and family fit together over my career? I should preface the rest of my story with some background about school psychology in Israel, which was rapidly developing as I entered the master’s program at Tel Aviv University and began to work in the field. As documented in the article I recently coauthored with Reuvena Shalehevet-Kaniel (2018), school psychology practice began in Israel in the late 1930s in Tel Aviv and spread sporadically to other cities during the following decade or two. Most school psychologists at the time were trained in clinical psychology, and some had European training before coming to Israel. The primary focus in the early services was on assessment for vocational streaming and special education placements. In the 1960s and into the early 1970s, all social, medical, and educational services were being formally institutionalized under the umbrella of centralized government agencies. Thus, the Ministry of Education (MOE) initially established a national department for school psychology and vocational counseling and, in 1971, the department was divided into a school psychology division and a counseling division. Official licensure requirements were only just then being established as I was studying for my M.A. The school psychology division of the MOE grew rapidly and began to focus more on working at the kindergarten and elementary levels and was influenced by models from American and British school psychology, as well as Gerald Caplan’s ideas about Mental Health Consultation which he had developed largely based on work in Israel. School psychology services were set up as a locally administered service by each municipality, but largely funded, with professional oversight at the national level by the MOE. All these changes greatly influenced our M.A. study program, and the increased demand for services meant that many of us were recruited to school psychology jobs as soon as (and even before) we completed our course work. Like most of my classmates, I began working as a school psychologist even before finishing my thesis, which meant that, for many of us, including me, final completion of the thesis and my degree took extra time. In my case, I worked 2 days a week in the local schools during my last year of course work as a practicum student, and then took a year off when our family went to Canada on sabbatical, just after our son, our second child was born. The time in Canada gave me the opportunity for intensive study of applied behavior modification at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario; this included practicum work. Until then, in Israel, the predominant approaches to intervention were humanistic and psychodynamically oriented, and at times, I felt frustrated by the feeling that these approaches did not always fit the needs of the students, their teachers, and conditions in the schools. I was very pleased that I could add serious training in behavioral approaches.

Upon returning from our sabbatical, I expected to quickly finish my master’s thesis, when the Yom Kippur War began (1973). There were many implications: Personally, I had to learn to manage on my own with two small children, while my husband (and most of the other men in the country) was called up for extended periods of reserve duty. I was fortunate. At the time, my grandparents were still an active older couple, and they came from Jerusalem to support me and help with the children. It was not easy, but it reinforced my sense of the importance and value of family and community in times of crisis. Professionally, the Yom Kippur War was the beginning of what became an ongoing involvement in crisis intervention. My mentor, Sarah Smilansky had done work on children’s concept of death, among other things. Soon after the war began, she gathered all the female M.A. students from the first few years of the program who were not drafted to the army. She told us that she was drafting us because there was a shortage of professionals to visit and work with bereaved families, especially families with children. Given the realities of living in Israel, in some ways this was an auspicious beginning of my professional career and provided invaluable experience for my ongoing involvement in crisis intervention over the entire course of my career. Smilansky organized one of the first brief training workshops to prepare us to provide crisis intervention, and we were sent off to the field. Before I had much time to begin my work with families under this program, a very close friend, also a young school psychologist, lost her husband in a war-related accident, and I devoted my energies to helping her and her family, all the while hoping to get back to my thesis research.

I had chosen a topic and formulated a proposal for studying delay of gratification in children as a two-part process, following the work of Walter Mischel. My interest in the topic was twofold. I had become interested in social learning theories and viewed this approach as highly relevant to applied work with children in schools. At the same time, my husband and I realized that there was a common thread in our fields. Some of the ideas about delay of gratification were highly relevant to a more “behavioral” explanation of the economic concepts he was exploring. My husband became an active source of support, with a keen interest in my research. However, because my thesis research required collecting data in the schools, I had to wait for the following year for life to return to a more normal pace before I could even begin to collect data. By then I had also started to work (in 1974) as a staff psychologist in the school psychological services of the local Ramat Hasharon council where we lived, and I started my journey toward becoming a fully trained and certified practitioner. Regardless of our other obligations, as young graduates, we were encouraged to participate in further clinical training along with our work. And so I juggled working part time, our young family, support for an ailing mother who had come to live near us in Israel, and grandparents who were growing older, and becoming frail. At the same time, I attended postgraduate training at a hospital-based children’s outpatient unit, a supervision course with the psychiatrist responsible for psychotherapy at an inpatient psychiatric children’s unit. I recall that, while I was being well trained in psychodynamic approaches to play therapy and could come up with appropriate interpretations, I loved to surreptitiously slip in some of the more applied behavior analysis techniques I had learned in Canada in order to get “faster” (and I believed more effective) results. I would summarize this early part of my career as the period of gaining basic proficiency as a practitioner and learning to be patient and persistent if I was going to be able to fulfill all my ambitions! Fortunately, I had the support of my husband, who has been a lifelong helpmate. In fact, some time after my M.A. thesis as well as my Ph.D., we collaborated on several articles and a book, Economic Games People Play (1984), combining insights from psychology and economics just as the movement toward behavioral economics was beginning, and I was thinking about academic directions as well as being a practitioner.

As I was finishing my masters’ thesis, I was also recruited as a teaching assistant to Professor Amiram Raviv, a young faculty member who was involved in establishing school psychology practices at the national level. His course on the work of the psychologist in the schools which accompanied our second-year practicum had been a highlight of my masters’ studies. I loved consultation with teachers, and becoming his teaching assistant was very special. It also provided me with an ongoing connection with the University, and, as I was finishing my thesis, I was encouraged by my professors Raviv and especially Smilansky to aspire to pursuing a doctorate. Sarah Smilansky was more than just a mentor; as a woman involved in practice and academe who was also happily married to an academic and had several children, she served as a role model. She represented the feasibility of combining multiple roles, and was a counterpoint to voices, especially from my mother and other extended family members, who feared I was too ambitious, and that it would jeopardize my marriage and family. I remained in touch with Smilansky for many years, later participating with her in a conference on early childhood education and play research at Wheelock College in Boston during one of our later Sabbatical visits to the United States, and also collaborating on work with families of Israeli diplomats and their children in the local Jewish Hebrew day school in Washington DC, during the Gulf War in 1991. Years later, I found myself teaching courses on the development of play using her work, particularly the scales she developed for measuring play. Smilansky passed away in 2006, but clearly was an early influence. Amiram Raviv remains a colleague and friend even now, continuing to teach and write beyond retirement. He was an important resource for my article on the development of school psychology in Israel, and we are now considering ideas for archiving some of the materials he has collected.

Before I get ahead of myself, I should tell how I came to do a Ph.D. in school psychology at Temple University. In many ways, I view this the start of a second stage in my career development, a period of broadening horizons and developing a scientist–practitioner approach to my work. The early part of 1977 was a difficult one for me. It was a year of transitions. In the spring of that year, just before the Passover holiday, my mother died. She was only in her 50s, and it was a hard loss for me, as well as for our two children. Even though she had been very ill, and there were times when we disagreed, she was a significant loving grandmother and, together with my husband and grandparents, was an important source of support in parenting and maintaining our household. All through the year of 1976–1977, my husband had thoughts about going to the United States with our family for a sabbatical, now that I had completed my M.A. I debated what I should do next, career-wise and in terms of family–work balance. On the one hand, a sabbatical in the United States presented an opportunity to fulfill my ambitions to continue studying, but I also wanted further clinical training. At the same time, it was difficult to make any decision about applying to programs, knowing my mother was so ill and debating whether we could even leave her for a year. I did apply to one or two programs where we thought my husband might have a sabbatical position, but the universities did not have school psychology programs, so I applied to counseling and clinical psychology programs. In the end, it did not matter because, quite late in the academic year, my husband was invited to Princeton for the following year, and it was too late to apply for the fall of 1977.

When we first arrived in Princeton, my children began school and I did not want to sit at home! What left me feeling at loose ends opened the door for some significant opportunities. We lived in campus housing, and I recall walking over to the Psychology department one morning to see if there were any job notices or people I could talk to, perhaps talks I could attend. By chance I met Marc H. Bornstein, a young faculty member, in the hall. I introduced myself and asked if he knew of any possibilities of working or joining courses. He immediately invited me to join two graduate seminars, one a social and cognitive development seminar, and the other, a seminar on Vision and perceptual development. He also invited me to work with him and a Ph.D. candidate on research studying the development of color perception in young children. I knew little about the specifics of color perception, but my experience in testing and working with young children meant that I was able to assist them in designing suitable measures and also administer the experiment with children. This work led to one of my early joint academic publications, “Perceptual categorization of color: A life-span study.” Psychological Research, 1983. I loved my courses at Princeton, and it whetted my appetite for continuing academic and research pursuits. However, I also missed the clinical contact I had when working in the schools or in the clinical practicums I had completed. I continued to seek work opportunities, and found the New Jersey State Department of Human Services, clinical internship program. I applied to begin immediately and, in January 1978, I began working as an intern at Johnstone Training and Research Center for half a year. There I was introduced to a broad range of assessment tools and psychotherapeutic techniques suited for working with a population of retarded and adolescent and young adults, some of whom were in a restricted section of the facility due to criminal convictions. In addition to learning new techniques, I was able to apply my school psychology skills in consulting with staff and developing a social skills group. My second placement was at Riverview Hospital’s psychiatric department.

During this time, I also happened to meet Professor Irwin Hyman, who lived in Princeton and was teaching school psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. He encouraged me to apply to the Ph.D. program for the fall of 1978 and offered to carpool! I was torn, as I wanted to complete the clinical internship program, which was giving me so much valuable training, but I knew we were limited in the time we could stay abroad in the United States. I was also aware of the constraints there would be on my completing a degree during a relatively short time span. When I was accepted to the Temple University School Psychology program, I decided to curtail my clinical training. While working in the psychiatric department at Riverview, I realized that I was much more interested in working with children, their families, and school staff. My training in diagnostics primarily provided reinforcement for skills I had already acquired in my master’s program at Tel Aviv and over the short course of work experience I had already completed. The psychotherapy training was more significant. There were daylong seminars with well -known leaders in the field such as Albert Ellis, Arnold Lazarus, Donald Michenbaum, Pietrowsky (on Rorschach and diagnosis of suicidal tendencies), Joseph Wolpe, and Cyril Franks. From these seminars, I gained a strong grounding in psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral theory which has served me throughout my career. From a practice perspective, I recall working with a young adult, hospitalized following an attempted suicide. While my supervisors focused primarily on this young woman as an individual with depressive symptoms, I saw her behavior in her family context. It took some persuasion, but I eventually convinced my supervisors that we needed to see the patient together with her parents (something I had already learned to do routinely in school psychology practice in Israel). The staff was concerned about a joint meeting because the parents were involved in quarrelsome divorce proceedings. However, when we did have the meeting, I was able to confirm my hypothesis about systemic family influences. It became clear that this young girl had taken a desperate manipulative step in order to keep her parents in communication with one another. This insight changed the subsequent course of my short-term therapeutic work with her. The goal became to help her accept the parents’ situation without self-blame, while also arranging for the parents to get help so they could adopt co-parenting skills within the framework of their divorce.

From the start of my Ph.D. in school psychology in the fall of 1978, I happily immersed myself in my studies. I had already gotten to know the late Professor Irwin Hyman, who became a mentor, colleague, and friend. He quickly recruited me to some of his projects on the prevention of corporal punishment and violence in schools and family. He put me on the team that wrote a National Institute of Education report and several papers together. By 1979, the team, led by Hyman, published the paper, “Discipline in American Education: An overview and analysis,” in the Journal of Education. The following year, he invited me to coauthor a paper that I still consider one of my most interesting publications. He encouraged me to think of the distant future and fantasize about where the newest technologies would lead. Together we wrote the paper, “Children and their schools at the quadcentennial,” for the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology in 1980. In the article we presented what we thought at the time were distant future implications of recent technological advances, especially the newest introduction of personal computers. We fantasized about students communicating using new technologies and suggested these might lead to distance learning from home. This was before the personal computers and Internet were everyday tools for communication, and we were envisioning a much longer time horizon for such developments. It still amazes me to think how much sooner some of our “fantastical” ideas became a reality, and how relevant some of the issues related to children and schooling are today, particularly the increasing importance of schools as a context for learning social skills.

My doctoral studies were intense, but moved along quickly. I was grateful that the school psychology department at Temple gave me credit for all the masters-level courses I had taken in Israel, including the fact that I had already done a research thesis. By taking a few more courses than usual each semester, and studying during the summers, I was able to finish my residency requirements and necessary course work in 2 years. I even managed to get NJ certification in school psychology in early 1980. Thus, I was able to work doing criterion-based assessment with Head Start for several months (another one of Irwin Hyman’s projects), and to work in the NJ public schools for the last 6 months of my second year. Before going back to Israel in the summer of 1980, I took my comprehensive exams and received final approval for my dissertation proposal. I even managed to collect data on the U.S. mothers I would be studying for my dissertation comparing U.S. and Israeli mothers’ attitudes toward early preschool entry. (At the time, sending 2 to 3-year-old toddlers to educational programs was quite controversial in the United States, but a common practice in Israel.) I arrived in Israel in time to attend what would become the first of many International School Psychology Conferences I’ve attended. It was being held in Jerusalem that summer.

My doctoral studies were a race, but it gave me great satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment that I could do it. I gained invaluable experience during these years, and became close with professors who became colleagues and who greatly influenced the rest of my career in school psychology. My work with Irwin Hyman at Temple furthered my interest in being an activist and advocate around issues affecting children in schools. Hyman also introduced me to professional organizations, and encouraged me to go to my first meetings of the American Psychological Association and the relatively new International School Psychology Association (ISPA) . In addition to my close association with Irwin, who was also one of my thesis advisors, I was especially influenced by Joel Meyers who “hooked” me on consultation as a core competency for school psychology. For many years, his book, which had just been published, was the basis for consultation courses that I taught. We continue to share our interest in consultation, and cross paths at conferences, especially ISPA, in different parts of the world.

At the end of 3 years in the United States, we reached the maximum time my husband could extend his leave of absence following the sabbatical from Tel Aviv University. It was time to return home. But rather than return to Tel Aviv, my husband decided to accept an offer from the Technion Institute of Technology in the city of Haifa. Thus, I returned to Israel in 1980 and began working again as a school psychologist at what had become the well-established, school psychology services of Haifa. Since the director, Dr. Nechama Naor, was a U.S.-trained Ph.D., the Temple school psychology program approved completion of my doctoral internship in Haifa. Working in Haifa, I was quickly given the responsibilities of an experienced professional, working in several schools, participating in and leading peer supervision groups. I was especially pleased that I could use my consultation skills extensively. In addition, I was invited to join the team that supervised University of Haifa M.A. educational psychology practicum students. It was a time for reestablishing my presence in Israel. I was happily engaged in my work and able to devote time to completing my dissertation. This time, I was determined to finish my research as quickly as possible. I still had a dream of combining school psychology practice and academic work at the University. I went back to the United States for each of the summers in 1981 and 1982, first, to meet with my advisors and finalize the analyses of the data I had collected in both Israel and the United States. Then, in the summer of 1982, I was back at Temple to defend my thesis while I could still travel before our third child (my second son) was born at the end of 1982.

By this time, I was happy to be able to take advantage of the long maternity leave provided by Israeli law. Part of it was spent on a half-year sabbatical in the Boston area. There, I enjoyed attending seminars at the Murray Institute at Radcliff, as well as attending a semester of postgraduate courses in family and parent therapy at the Wheelock College Graduate program for parenting studies. It was there that Smilansky and I crossed paths again, this time as her junior colleague at a conference on play development. She had just published her Play Assessment Scales, which would subsequently figure in my future work with Ethiopian immigrant children. I also enjoyed time to write with my husband, which led to the book mentioned earlier, as well as several articles on psychology and economics that were published in the following years.

When we returned to Haifa in the fall of 1983, along with getting back to work in the schools, I was back to juggling my work–family balancing act again. I combined working in the schools with starting to teach child development as an adjunct lecturer in the new, occupational therapy department at the University of Haifa. I had settled into a comfortable routine, until December when a 14-year-old student, Danny Katz, went missing. He was found several days later after extensive searches, including those by classmates. He had been abused and murdered in what was discovered to be a terrorist attack. The boy himself was not from the school where I worked, but I was responsible for the elementary school and preschool classes that served the families from his neighborhood, including his brothers and sisters. My oldest daughter also attended the same junior high school where he had been a student. Our school psychology services had to organize to provide support from a community wide perspective. We met with teachers and students in all the local schools and preschools, as well as parents, youth group counselors, and the youth themselves. Again, my training in crisis intervention was put to the test. This time, I found myself seeking further support. It was then that I learned how important it was to work together in a community-based team of professionals, dividing the work and debriefing one another at the end of each day. I was responsible for the neighborhood preschools and the elementary school, as well as helping with the youth group participants. Again, Smilansky’s work had a presence in mine. She had written several important books in Hebrew on the development of young children’s concept of death, suggesting they had a much earlier understanding of death than many believed. I also came to appreciate the influence of spiritual support. The young rabbi of the police forces who had been involved in the searches turned out to be a significant and inspiring figure in helping the youth in answering the big “why” questions they asked.

When we were able to return to “normal,” I focused primarily on combining my work as school psychology practitioner half time, teaching as an adjunct, and raising my family. I was quite busy, but “on the side” I had also become involved in our synagogue and issues pertaining to women’s rights (the activist in me, again!). In that capacity I became aware of the plight of the Ethiopian Jews and efforts to help them immigrate to Israel. I became an active volunteer devoted to raising awareness of their needs and helping in their absorption, particularly following the mass immigration known as “Operation Moses” in which about 8000 families were secretly airlifted out of Sudan over a short period. Although a volunteer, my professional training was most helpful, but it also required that I learn about another, completely different, culture. I also was introduced to the plight of refugees who had suffered starvation and other life-threatening situations. It was hard for me, as someone who grew up in comfortable circumstances both in the United States and Israel, to even imagine the lives of the children we visited in the hospital who were there because of malnutrition. The young children I visited did not know what to do with such Western foods as a slice of bread or an apple. We were also warned that, initially, they could be given only very small quantities of any food. It was both heartbreaking but exhilarating to think that these children and their families had been saved. Over several years, I became head of a volunteer, municipal steering committee working toward successful absorption of the Ethiopian immigrants living in the Haifa area.

While I was busy with all these things, I also became the mother of another son, our fourth child, in 1987. Soon after that, I began to consider schooling options for our middle son. Together with several other families, we sought schooling that was neither part of the Orthodox, religious school stream nor part of the completely agnostic, secular system that we have in Israel. There were already some Jewish Enrichment Schools that had been set up elsewhere, but not in Haifa. So, the activist in me arose, and I took on the leadership of the committee that petitioned the city to provide the program for our children. As a school psychologist, I was familiar with the education provisions in the law that supported our right as parents to make such demands. At times, it was difficult, and I had to learn how to deal with political opposition, but we prevailed, and, in 1988, the Jewish enrichment stream had become a reality. This was also my introduction to working with educational administrators and advocating for change at a systems level. I learned practical lessons that served me when I later took on the role of director of school psychology services in another district and later became the deputy regional director of school psychological services in the North of Israel.

Along with my work as a school psychology practitioner, I also wanted to maintain some connection with academe and research. After teaching child development in the occupational therapy department for several years, there was a short break before I received a note from Marc Bornstein, my Princeton professor who had taken me under his wing when we arrived there before my Ph.D. studies. Bornstein had left Princeton to head the Child and Family Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and he was developing a large-scale, cross-cultural study of parenting behavior. We had stayed in touch, and he knew of my dissertation comparing U.S. and Israeli mothers. He invited me to join his team to collect longitudinal data on Israeli mother–infant dyads in Israeli cities and Kibbutz settlements. Thus, in 1988 I began to combine work as a field researcher, filming mother–infant and later, mother–toddler, interactions and assessing language development in naturally occurring settings. In the kibbutz settlements, we also observed the children with their caregivers in the “children’s houses,” the typical daycare setting of those communities.

In 1990, the “stream” of my routine work, again, was interrupted by a sabbatical. This time, we went to the Washington, DC area for 2 years, where my husband had a position at the Brookings Institute, and I had been invited to be a research associate in Bornstein’s lab at NICHD. This gave me the opportunity to analyze data and to begin writing about the work I had been doing in the cross-cultural study of mothers. I spent 2 years working at the lab, and with Bornstein’s persistent encouragement, we started writing several papers together and with others on the research team. During this time, I missed working in the field, but enjoyed being able to immerse myself in reading and studying about multiculturalism, the ecology of child development, and parenting. Much of what I learned served as the basis for courses that I would teach after returning to Israel. Again, though, I was “called to duty” as a practitioner at a time of crisis. In January 1991, the Gulf War erupted. We were living in a Washington suburb, and our children were in Jewish Community Day schools. One of the schools was also attended by many children of the Israeli diplomatic community and there were many Israeli teachers. It was a worrisome time since we, like the other Israeli parents, had family back in Israel, including children in the army. On contacting the school counselor, I learned of their need for help with crisis intervention. Some of the parents in the diplomatic core had to work around the clock, which meant little time to be with their worried children. Taking some time off from my research, together with the school staff, we organized a special meeting for all the Israeli parents and teachers. It was then that I learned from the school that Smilansky was visiting at University of Maryland, and what would I think of our leading the meeting together. Of course, I was thrilled and immediately contacted Smilansky to plan the meeting and consult with her about the activities with the children in the school that I would lead. This time, I really felt like I had become her colleague, and it gave me a great sense of accomplishment. Following the parents’ meeting which focused on how to talk to the children about the war and their worries, I continued work with groups of children and consultations with some of the teachers. At the lab, it was hard for me to focus on the Israeli mothers in our study without concern for their well-being during the war. Together with Bornstein, we very quickly developed a questionnaire that enabled us to evaluate the mothers’ stress levels and, on a short visit back to Israel, to see that all was okay with our older children, I distributed the questionnaire. Thus, we added another piece to our study, and published a Hebrew article on stress responses of mothers in city and kibbutz communities.

I had left the Haifa Municipal School Psychology Services in 1990 on a leave of absence. The director at the time, Dr. Naor, had communicated that she would be pleased for me to return and take on a leadership role within the services, possibly responsibility for work in the preschools. She had recommended that I receive certification as a school psychology supervisor just before I left. However, when I returned in 1992, she had just retired. The director who took her place, who had corresponded reiterating Naor’s proposed role, confronted me with the fact that he decided not to await my return, and had appointed others to the leadership roles within the service. I was rather disappointed and upset, but as often happens, when one door closes, another opens. I quickly found work in the adjacent Hof Carmel regional school district. They especially needed someone who would be responsible for work with the preschools, including several at the temporary housing projects set up for new immigrants, some from Russia and most from Ethiopia.

I began to work just after the next large wave of Ethiopian immigrants arrived in a dramatic airlift of 14,000 people in 1991. Over the course of the year in 1992, the “absorption trailer community” as it was called, grew, and I went from working with 7 preschool and first-grade classes to 15 classes. Most of the Ethiopian immigrant children had no language skills and, in many cases, there were no birth records. The children’s ages were guesses! I loved the challenge of working in that setting. I had to seek alternative tools for assessment, and my explorations led me to the international conference on cognitive education and mediated learning held in Israel the following summer. I believe it was there that I met Carol Lidz, a school psychologist who supported use of dynamic assessment, particularly with immigrant or minority children. The work she shared on applying dynamic assessment in early childhood settings was extremely helpful at a time when most Israeli school psychologists were skeptical about mediated learning approaches proposed by Feuerstein. Over the years, Lidz and I have stayed in contact and her work has influenced mine, not only with respect to assessment of immigrant children, but also in consultation with teachers and helping them work with diverse students. In working with the Ethiopian children, I also had to find ways to communicate with parents, working with cultural liaisons to gain their trust. I learned to be a careful observer and to let others take the lead. My work refined many of my insights into multicultural sensitivity. Much of what I learned was from the families and teachers working with the children. For example, an incident I clearly recall was with an unusually sensitive preschool teacher who was able to get close to the children’s families even without language. She invited mothers to “teach” her and the children how to make the Ethiopian flat bread. The children were the ones who interpreted for their mothers to the teacher. This same teacher relied on the cultural storytelling tradition and had fathers tell stories to the children in Amharic. Again, the children used their developing language skills to tell the story to the teacher. Following my work with teachers like this, which contrasted with many others who were very reserved in forming relationships with the Ethiopian immigrant children, I wrote about the “reciprocal distancing” process I had observed. The conceptualization of the experiences of the teachers helped focus my consultation with them and led to significant changes in their approach to teaching culturally different children. The changes in the approach of the teachers were recognized by an award the following year from the national MOE. I was thrilled to have been included at the award ceremony, and that they recognized the contribution of a school psychologist!

Throughout the period of working with the preschool and kindergarten classes for the Ethiopian children, I was also supervising the field work of junior school psychologists. I felt quite competent in my field work, and was gaining recognition as a senior practitioner. However, I continued to dream of combining my role as a practitioner with my academic interests in research and teaching. This was a major goal during much of the second decade of my career in school psychology, and it turned out to be quite a challenge. While working with Bornstein, I was introduced to Professor Avi Sagi, head of the Laboratory for the Study of Child Development at Haifa University in Israel. When I returned to Haifa from the United States in 1992, I received an appointment as a research associate at Sagi’s lab, where Bornstein had arranged for me to continue collecting longitudinal data for the ongoing cross-cultural study of parenting. At the same time, I began to teach at the Oranim School of Education of the Kibbutz movement. I found it hard to teach undergraduates with poor study skills, but I learned a lot about the kibbutz educational system and its philosophy that contributed to my understanding of the context for my research with Bornstein. I had published several papers by then, and hoped I could join the faculty of the psychology department at the University and teach in their educational psychology program. However, at the time, Israeli Universities were highly research oriented, and clearly differentiated scientist and practitioner roles that I had sought to integrate, following my training at Temple University in the United States. I recall being stung and hurt by the very strong assertion of the department chair who interviewed me and told me that I could not “sit on the fence.” “Who are you and who do you want to be?” he asked harshly, “A scientist, or a practitioner? You can’t be both!” As hard as I tried, there was no convincing this person of the value of combining knowledge from the field with academic interests. In hindsight, after having taught in the Education Faculty of Haifa University for many years and after gaining a better perspective on department politics, I realized that, at the time, the psychology department had maintained a split between practitioners who taught applied courses from a strict, psychodynamic perspective as adjunct faculty, and the academic, tenure-track faculty who focused on research and theory. I was a poor fit, neither psychodynamically oriented nor willing to focus only on research.

I did, however, find a welcoming home in the Education Faculty where I began teaching in 1993 and continued in different capacities until 3 years ago when I retired in 2016. After a year as an adjunct lecturer, I was given a tenure-track position. I enjoyed the university, but teaching undergraduate education students remained a challenge. I was more successful with the school counseling and early childhood Masters’ students, and loved the one-on-one work of directing masters’ research by students or seminar papers. During this period, I took over a course in multicultural counseling, a longtime interest that was becoming a focus of much of my applied work as well as my research. I recall the encouragement of Professor Paul Pedersen who visited the University and shared his expertise in multicultural counseling both in faculty seminar and private conversations. He kindly gave me several of his books that are still useful references, and more than that, he reinforced my conviction that comparative cross-cultural research, such as my work with Bornstein, differed from a multiculturally sensitive approach. My field experiences and work with Ethiopian preschoolers encouraged the latter. It was in this area that I was able to get some funding to collect data that led to articles and presentations such as my 2000 article in School Psychology Review, “Reciprocal distancing: A systems model of interpersonal processes in cross-cultural consultation,” and a Hebrew journal article, “How do they play? Evaluating representational skills of young immigrant children” published in 1999.

While focused on my university career, I tried hard to get grants, beyond what I had from Bornstein and the NICHD lab, but the field was extremely competitive. I did receive several small research grants for continuing work with Bornstein and with Professor Esther Dromi, an early language expert from Tel Aviv University, and for collecting data and writing about play development and my work with the Ethiopian preschool children and their teachers. The work with Dromi involved the development of a Hebrew version of the McCarthy Toddler Language Scale. It was initiated in Bornstein’s lab at NICHD, but carried out and completed with the support of Sagi’s lab and a wonderful collaboration with Dromi. This led to first authorship of a major paper, “The Hebrew Communicative Development Index: Language specific properties and cross-linguistic generalizations” published in the Journal of Child Language (2000) which is often cited. Sometimes, I regret that I didn’t continue my work with Dromi, but, as before, when I did not fit the “mold” for the psychology department, I had difficulty investing in research in directions foisted upon me that tried to substantiate child care influences using sophisticated statistics. I much preferred more qualitative and clinical approaches associated with my school psychology practice that I continued part time.

I had publications that were coming out based on the cross-cultural work on parenting I did with Bornstein. In all, there were eight papers we wrote together and with other colleagues, in conjunction with the cross-cultural maternal behavior research, as well as various conference presentations. I also collaborated with my husband, writing about delay of gratification, development of economic behavior, and applications of game theoretical models to understanding of family and dyadic interactions. I gained much pleasure collaborating and writing with others, especially with my husband. Delving into understanding dyadic relations and family interactions served us well and also provided insights for our family life, raising 4 children at very different stages of development.

Only later did I realize that my comfort writing as a collaborator may have been a source of my difficulties in achieving the goal of academic tenure. Too often, people judging our work from the psychology and education side, thought the work was mainly my husband’s, and from the perspective of his economically oriented, management department, they thought the work was really mine, that of a psychologist. The other collaborative work I had done was also not considered enough because there were too few papers where I was lead author or a single author. I also had not connected sufficiently with fellow faculty members to collaborate with them. I was different from many of my colleagues, juggling my teaching and research with family, and not letting go of the school psychology practitioner side of me. Gaining tenure in Israel was (and still is) highly competitive, and I was expected to have several single authored articles in high-impact journals for each year of my appointment! Rather than give up on a university position, I was offered a chance for a tenured clinical faculty position. As we prepared to leave Israel for our next Sabbatical in 1998, I had high hopes. I had several papers submitted and accepted for publication, and my appointment had been approved at the department and faculty levels. I was quite devastated when at the last minute, I was turned down by a higher level university-wide appointments committee. I was never able to learn the real reason why I did not get tenure. The process was not transparent, but there was behind the scenes talk that I was “too old” (at age 50 and a woman), my interests were too diverse, and also that the funding for my position was needed to recruit a very prestigious professor expected to immigrate to Israel from the United States.

When we left for the United States for the Boston, MA area, I was again confronted with a fork in the road, and had to consider which direction I wanted to take. I started out alternating directions. Bornstein had connected me with Professors Charles Super and his wife, Sara Harkness, at University of Connecticut. They were both involved in the study of culture and its influence on child development. They kindly offered me a visiting position in the Family Studies Department. It was not an easy commute (over an hour each way), but it gave me a “home” for holding on to my academic aspirations and allowed me to delve into the influences of the developmental niche and children’s ecosystems. Their ideas about the importance of cultural, developmental niches became an important influence in my ongoing academic work, my teaching, and my practice. I also had the opportunity to study systems dynamics that year with Professor Jim Hines at MIT. It was an applied course for management students in which I enrolled together with my husband. I have always been fascinated by systems theories, and this was an opportunity to learn how it could be applied to consultation in organizational contexts. While it was not directly related to school psychology, I learned a methodology that was very applicable to consulting in schools and management. In fact, my project for the course involved helping a private school understand the issues and develop a plan for becoming more culturally diverse. The course gave me the opportunity to combine my practical knowledge in school psychology with a sophisticated method for analyzing and writing about systems assessment and intervention. I quickly realized I could apply the systems dynamic methodology to analyzing changes in the kibbutz childcare system, work I had started with Bornstein that had become stagnant for lack of a method to describe the complex, mutual influences of multiple factors. Later, I have gone on to apply and teach this method as a basis for organizationally oriented school psychology consultation, especially when faced with multiple interacting factors.

While I was quite busy from the start of our sabbatical, it was also important for me to maintain my connection with other school psychology practitioners and work in the field. Fortunately, I had corresponded with Professor Emanuel Mason who headed the school psychology program at Northeastern University. He invited me to teach some of their graduate summer courses. I fully enjoyed this opportunity to teach applied courses on family systems intervention and consultation. However, the most significant contribution of my association with Northeastern was my introduction to Professor Louis Kruger, who had set up the Global School Psychology Network (GSPN). This was an early model of an Internet-based professional community whose goal was to provide a platform for discussions among professionals to share information, as well as for researching online communities and to develop processes of online communications. I became part of the research team of the GPSN and took the role of online library coordinator. I was particularly excited by the opportunity to be part of a community of colleagues like myself who actively sought to combine science and practice. Together with the team, we published two articles about our work with online communities and their implications for school psychology practice and I later published an article in Hebrew on Internet-based practices. It amazes me to think that the implications of modern computer technology caught my interest from my earliest work with Irwin Hyman as a graduate student, and now I was involved in the topic again.

Another most meaningful and ongoing connection was with Joan Struzziero who was completing her dissertation about online consultation at the time with Kruger. We immediately bonded as colleagues and developed a lasting friendship. In addition to being on the GSPN team together, we had many shared interests in consultation and were both keen on combining practice in the field with academic activities, as well as juggling family life. Struzziero went on to write about supervision, and taught as an adjunct faculty member at the Northeastern and University of Massachusetts school psychology program while she continued to work in the schools. Her career path in the United States and mine in Israel were quite parallel, and we had a keen understanding of one another’s dilemmas. Joan was also active in the state organization of school psychologists and took me along to their activities whenever I was visiting in the area in the years after I returned to Israel. With her encouragement, I went to the International School Psychology conference in New Hampshire in 2000 just before returning to Israel. This was a harbinger of my becoming more involved with and regularly attending ISPA conferences around the world from 2004. Struzziero also invited me to present together with her at the NASP conference in Washington, DC in 2001. In more recent years, on return visits to the area, in addition to simply enjoying time together, she has invited me to speak to her practicum classes about multiculturalism and consultation, especially the developmental, ecosystemic model I had developed.

Over the course of our 2 years in the United States, I began to seek a new direction for my career. On a personal level, my oldest two children had married, and we had young grandchildren. They had busy careers, my daughter as a young doctor and our son as a career officer in the Israeli military. My younger children were in high school and quite independent, but the older ones needed some grandparent support and I wanted to be there for them. I tried to find my new place and a balance by focusing on working in the field. I thought it would be less pressured, and there would be less competition. While I held my tenure-track position at the University, I had maintained ties with colleagues in the field and, through them, learned of open positions. One was for a part-time director of services in a small local authority a short distance from Haifa to which I applied and was hired. It would allow me to have late afternoons and several days a week that I could devote to other activities, including helping with the grandchildren.

Other activities quickly filled the rest of my time! In this third decade of my career and beyond, I was as busy as I had ever been. It became a period when I realized many satisfying accomplishments! The Counseling and Human Development Department at the University of Haifa, that included the Early Childhood program where I had taught before our sabbatical, urged me to stay on as a part-time, senior adjunct lecturer. For their part, they had wanted me as a regular faculty member and welcomed me back, wishing to ignore my lack of formal status as much as possible. My colleague, Professor Anat Scher, was especially encouraging. There were some courses, such as ones on play, that we taught together, and she invited me to direct several masters’ theses. We collaborated in writing the chapter that presented my formulation of an ecosystemic developmental perspective for consultation. Our 2003 publication focused on consultation related to young children, but I subsequently presented the model as a more general approach which resonated with practitioners whom I met at conference workshops and in-service consultation courses. A Hebrew version of the chapter that I recently published (2018) presents the more general application of the model. The model is based on an ecosystemic mapping the context of consultation in a multimodal matrix that considers the functioning and needs of those in a position to influence, interventions focused on the target child (children). It is a model that provides a systematic way of considering the complexities of context as well as interactions among individuals’ behaviors, beliefs, and feelings.

During the early part of my tenure as a director of school psychology services, I was recruited to the leadership team for the Northern Region of Israel. The chief school psychologist for the region, Chaya Raviv, also directed services in an adjacent regional council, and we had many opportunities to collaborate and share professional experiences, such as organizing joint in-service workshops and regional conferences, as well as national directors’ conferences. My work with Chaya introduced me to figures at the national administrative levels of school psychology in Israel. I was invited to attend leadership workshops that sought to chart future directions for school psychology and to represent the Northern Region on national committees, such as the Early Childhood Forum and the Systems Intervention Forum, as well as the group working to establish an institute for advanced graduate studies in school psychology. In 2006, when there was a vacancy for deputy chief school psychologist for the region, I was appointed to the position. Even before that, during the summer of 2006, I recall that I returned to Israel from the ISPA conference in China after 1 day because the Second Lebanese War had broken out. For several weeks, I assisted Raviv with keeping in daily (and sometimes more) contact with each of the 90 directors of school psychology services in the Northern Region. We were all under missile attack, some more than others, and all were involved in crisis interventions at the community level. My main role, together with Raviv, was to provide support, when possible, through site visits, and to direct volunteers to localities where needed so that staff psychologists would not be inundated in any one place. Again, like it or not, crisis intervention work reappeared as an ongoing mission in my professional career. This time, I gained expertise in managing crisis response and helping the helpers who were directly involved, while also having direct responsibility for my own locality where I was directing services. At the local level, it was the start of my interest in maintaining online, Internet-based support for children, their families, and teachers.

My close collaboration with Chaya Raviv continued until I retired from the field in 2014. (MOE has mandatory retirement rules.) In addition to continuing in the regional roles as a deputy chief psychologist, I became part of the national leadership team of the educational psychology division within the MOE. This led to further active involvement in the development and writing of policy positions. Some turned out to be very long-term projects, given the challenges of working with changing government leadership and funding. For example, I led the team charged with recommending updated assessment measures that could be translated and adapted for Israeli use. We recommended development of an Israeli version of the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities that would have both an Arabic and Hebrew version and would be properly normed with consideration for the multicultural nature of Israeli society. Only now, some 10 years later, the task is being completed so that test kits are expected to be available in the coming year. Although I am now retired, and was disappointed with the long delays, it gives me great satisfaction to see such large-scale projects finally being completed. I was also a part of the team that rewrote the 2010 guidelines for providing school psychology services in Israel. They are now being revised, and I am honored to be in the background, helping some of our young psychologists involved. I also was the lead author, with another colleague, Tova Wachtel, of the Best-practice Guide for School Psychologists’ Work with Immigrant Children that was published (online) in 2013, and part of the group from the National Early Childhood forum of the Educational Psychology Division that wrote the booklet, School Psychology Services in Preschools: Theoretical Models and Guidelines for Practice, also published in 2013. I found that I enjoyed writing these materials and writing in Hebrew from within MOE meant that they had a much wider impact than the strictly academic articles I had written in English. I did continue with some of my writing in English, but mainly from a much more applied angle, for example, the chapter I wrote for the International Handbook of Consultation in Educational Settings, edited by Hatzichristou and Rosenfeld (2017), Thinking IN the box: A tool for promoting innovative problem solving in Israeli school psychology services.

One of the highlights of my later career accomplishments has been the recent publication in 2018 of the two-volume handbook, Issues in school psychology: From theory to practice, that I edited with my close colleague and friend, Reuvena Shalhevet-Kaniel. This represented the culmination of a project we first dreamed about at one of the national leadership conferences in the summer of 2006, just before I was appointed deputy chief regional psychologist. It was not always easy to keep our dream alive. It took time to get approval and get started, but we persisted. Along the way, we laughed and complained to one another, as over the years we collected over 30 articles from both academics and practitioners, led a team of reviewers, revised and re-revised the organization of the volumes to meet the demands of colleagues from the educational psychology division and the MOE publications department, added chapters they felt were missing, got permissions for one or two reproduced chapters, and wrote introductions to each section. Throughout, we had to deal with halts to the process. The budget for publishing the book was frozen several times along the way, for various periods due to government changes, and there were problems with translators for the several chapters originally written in English that we wanted to include. We might have given up, but Reuvena and I had great conviction. We gave each other mutual support and were able to persevere. We both felt that the book would fill the needs of school psychologists in the field. We had many shared interests and experiences. We were both involved in supervision and training young school psychologists, had been directors of services over the years, and involved in university teaching—Reuvena at the Hebrew University, and I at Haifa University. We also were both involved with the establishment of the advanced studies institute that provided postgraduate in-service courses nationally. Even before our book initiative, Reuvena had been director of advanced studies, and I was on the steering committee; I chaired the committee to evaluate test materials and Reuvena was part of my group. As friends and colleagues, we had a shared interest in reading and learning about relevant current research while also maintaining family life.

Throughout the years from 2000, and especially from 2004, my involvement in ISPA was another important influence on my career. Attending almost every conference since 2004, the meeting in Exeter, England provided me with opportunities to meet and get to know world leaders in school psychology and to present the applied work I was doing in Israel, especially in consultation. Among those who most influenced me, I should mention the late Tom Oakland, who invited me to present the Israeli perspective at a conference symposium on assessment and diagnostics. He was the one who was instrumental in helping me, when leading the Israeli team seeking test materials. From Oakland I became familiar with the important work of the International Test Commission, and he introduced me to key people from the assessment publishing companies. He always took an interest in our work here in Israel and was very supportive. I was also able to have his Student Temperament Scale translated to Hebrew so that two graduate school psychology students whom I supervised were able to use it for their masters’ theses that researched the relationship between student temperament and teachers’ teaching styles.

There were too many others whom I met and who influenced me through ISPA and other conferences to be able to mention them all. I would just highlight my connection with Professor Ingrid Hylander over the years. We met over our shared interest in school psychological consultation and, in recent years, we have shared the leadership of the consultee-centered consultation interest group in ISPA, leading symposia, roundtable discussions on the topic and presenting workshops. Following my strong base in consultation, starting with my master’s and doctoral studies with Joel Meyers, Hylander and then Professor Sylvia Rosenfeld, a close friend and colleague I initially met through Hylander, have been close associates. When we are together at the ISPA conferences, we’ve spent hours enjoying one another’s company. I have learned so much from sharing experiences and thinking about consultation together with them.

The other influential colleague I would like to mention is Professor Bonnie Nastasi. I had read some of her work before we met at an ISPA conference, and was keenly interested in her approach to multicultural work, especially the model she had developed for participatory work and her use of qualitative research methods. Through learning about her approach, and discussing it with her, I had the basis for some of my most recent work as a member of the steering committee for promoting integration of students of Ethiopian origin in the Israeli schools. Gaining acceptance of the principle of including immigrant families themselves as stakeholders in interventions remains one of the more difficult challenges here in Israel. We are an extremely diverse multicultural society, and there is more recognition of our diversity today compared to my first years in Israel. Yet, especially in educational settings, there appears to be an ongoing core belief in absorption as a process of adapting and becoming part of the predominant Israeli and Jewish society. For some groups, this has happened over the generations, but for the Ethiopians, because of racial differences, it is much harder. The young school psychologists I am working with as a more senior “coach” are at the forefront, advocating such changes and, even if the change is slow, I am proud to be part of the ongoing initiatives.

As I review the many people and circumstances that influenced the course of my career, one person stands out as my lifetime partner, friend, supporter, and also a colleague. My husband, Shlomo Maital, has stood by me over the course of all my juggling, ready to “pick up the balls” I might have dropped, sharing childcare and household responsibilities over the course of our almost 53 years together. We’ve had the great thrill and pleasure of writing together, but also learned that we each needed to develop our own separate professional identities. We were both fully committed to remaining in Israel as our home base and raising our children here. Shlomo’s tenure as an academic was a source of stability in that respect. I was more of a “doer” who needed to be in the field, working directly with people and aspiring to make things better for children, families, and the teachers working with them. The route through my career had various zigzags, following my husband back and forth between the United States and Israel, going in and out of different academic roles. I do not have regrets, even though it was at times hard to move on. My profession as a school psychologist allowed me to be more flexible in taking on jobs. The different professional roles that I fulfilled in the field followed a more logical linear progression from internship years, Israeli certification as expert and then supervisor of school psychology services, directing services for a local council, and finally, deputy chief regional school psychologist and member of the national directorate of school psychology services. Looking back, I was most fulfilled by my professional work as a school psychologist in the field, but I appreciate that my ongoing academic interests contributed significantly to many of my professional activities in the field that have given me the most satisfaction. Each time I moved along my path, even when I thought doors had closed, there were new directions and challenges that excited me. Perhaps, with all my diverse interests, I was meant to move along an ever-changing path, afforded by the multifaceted profession that school psychology is. Some of my young colleagues have described our work using the metaphor of looking through a kaleidoscope. The elements remain the same, but at each turn they are rearranged to form different intriguing patterns. One thing that never changed was my husband’s devotion and support for me as his wife, who entered her career as a school psychologist just as women were becoming more liberated and visible. All along the way, he had the highest regard for my work (although not for the meagre salary provided by work in the public sector) and served as a true colleague, always ready to share ideas, listen and sometimes confront me with hard questions. The other continuing factor in my life as a school psychologist, even after retiring, is my ongoing conviction that it is one of the most varied and exciting career paths I could have chosen for fulfilling my life mission to help others and advocate for their betterment. To this end, even as a retiree, along with delighting in our growing family with grandchildren, I continue to enjoy and gain fulfillment from supervising young school psychologists, remaining involved in the school psychology division of the Israeli Psychological Association, and working as a volunteer to help support those in need. I wonder at times whether the juggling school psychologist in me will ever stop. I have loved what I do and I am not sure I want to stop altogether. I hope I can continue to juggle, just with fewer balls.