While online professional development poses new challenges, “Pedagogy of Partnership” (PoP) harnessed its own relational frameworks to create conditions and tools for social interaction, relationship building, and rich meaning-making in an online context.

For years, day school educators came together to learn about the PoP ― connecting learners and text in a Jewish relationship-based pedagogy. PoP’s approach grows out of extensive research into the traditional Jewish study practice of “hevruta,” which is then applied to student learning, to support rich Jewish learning in K-12 contexts. PoP has impacted thousands of students and hundreds of educators in day schools and supplementary settings. 

Until last March, however, few, if any, had applied it online. 

By March, 2020, PoP faced a new challenge: while schools and educators all over the country were eager to gain or deepen their knowledge of PoP, because of the restrictions intended to prevent the spread of coronavirus, they couldn’t come together in one physical space. The schools and educators understood that these partnership skills would need to transfer to online platforms. 

This past spring, PoP teachers demonstrated that partnership learning could indeed transfer online, deepening learning and relationships via Zoom in place of face-to-face classroom dynamics. 

PoP therefore turned to creating the conditions and tools for social interaction, relationship building, and rich meaning-making in an online context. This meant reimagining PoP training ― adjusting to a shortened time frame, the new pace of online learning, and the broad range of new tools that could enliven and inspire learning. 

Two three-day workshops this summer made clear that while the online world poses challenges, it also offers rich opportunities to teachers and learners alike. Teachers were eager to continue learning, grateful for new strategies, and passionate about reaching learners in many forms. As facilitators explained and demonstrated the philosophy and fundamental concepts of PoP, the participants created a remarkable learning community. 

As occurs every year, teachers appreciated the care and clarity of the skills they needed to teach their students. One teacher commented, “I feel like I have taught pieces of what I learned here but I’ve never been taught a comprehensive approach for building up this kind of classroom. Every year there were elements missing because I’ve been inventing my own wheel. I feel so excited to use this as a guide.” 

What was newer, of course, was the need to do all of this online. Along with teaching about stance and partnership skills, the PoP workshops modeled, in the words of participants, “inspirational” online learning. A gallery walk, previously enacted with texts on chart paper stuck to the walls, turned into a Padlet collection of images and texts on which each participant could comment and easily see everyone else’s thoughts. A paper and pen illustration activity became a Google Slide deck, allowing for the easy upload of pen and paper, the dramatic, creative use of clip art and digital tools, as well as the energy of seeing everyone’s slide take shape in real time. 

The PoP workshops included new materials for every age level so that teachers could use them in person or online. What the organizers didn’t anticipate, however, was the strength and speed of the learning community they could create using their own PoP tools. Participants jumped into the activities, chats, and breakout groups to comment and share thoughts, questions, and resources. 

As one teacher commented, “The culture we created online in this workshop and what we learned is a reminder that as we are thinking about all the school logistics, what matters most is the culture we create in our classrooms and how much that impacts what students will learn and how engaged they will be.”

Though PoP’s tagline, “How we learn is what we learn,” was written for a face-to-face world, this summer’s workshops made clear that the online world is no different. Our world now requires a level of flexibility and nimbleness that we could not have envisioned a year ago. But K-12 students and their teachers still need community, engagement, and meaningful relationships. Pedagogy of Partnership, both in person and offline, continues to provide the skills for learners to build relationships in the context of profound study.