Three years ago, as part of the Hakaveret initiative, in which the Mayberg Foundation brought together teams of educators to design innovative models, Michal Smart, Rina Hoffman and I developed The Inquiry Beit Midrash (IBM), a project-based learning model for Judaic Studies. I have had the good fortune to bring this model to life at The Idea School in Tenafly, NJ. The idea behind IBM is to find out what the students are passionate about in their Judaism and to use that passion project as the basis for some of their Judaic learning.

IBM is comprised of four parts: 

● PART ONE: Sparking Inquiry: In the first part of the class, students ask questions about anything they want. In order to get their juices flowing, we offer them different paths to ask questions. Sometimes we might place an object in front of the room and ask the students to generate as many questions as they can about it. Other times, once they’ve settled on a question that’s particularly intriguing to them, we ask them to create mind maps: a web that challenges them to make connections from one question to another. 

●PART TWO: The next phase of IBM consists of engaging with texts, mostly Jewish ones, but also any readings that help a student answer their questions. This year, we had three sections of IBM, and we started by having students generate their own personal questions; then in each class, we settled on a question we wanted to explore together. In one class, the students discussed why some Jews seem to care more about keeping Shabbat and kashrut and less about just being good people. In the second IBM class, the students wanted to explore troubling and disturbing stories in Tanakh/Bible (the rape of Dinah, Lot fleeing Sodom, etc.) In the third IBM class, the students spent a lot of time wondering what questions and interests they had and why they wanted to learn. As they engaged in the act of wondering, they considered what causes wonder in the universe and when they feel awed by God. 

This phase of IBM is challenging, since as teachers we have to create a curriculum as the students generate it, but based on our experience last year, we decided that we would choose familiar texts.

For example, for IBM 1, which asked why some Jews cared more about laws between humans and God and less about laws just between humans, we started with passages from the prophets in which Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos rail at the people for prioritizing their relationships with God above one another. We then compared the prophet to the sage, as per Rav Avraham Kook’s ideas on the topic, and explored what Maimonides thinks are the intellectual, emotional, and physical criteria for a prophet to have. Along the way, students explored different prophecies in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos and tied them to social issues today. Specifically, the sage doesn’t harangue people to improve, but rather issues rules to get them to change their behavior and better their character. To compare a prophet’s role with a sage, the teacher compiled a source sheet on the laws of lashon hara, speaking ill of people. We understand that this class could have looked different in the hands of other teachers, but we were familiar with these specific texts and were excited to use them to answer the students’ question. 

● PART THREE: In this phase of IBM, students make something: This is the product creation portion of the course. The three sections of IBM each created different projects. In the first section of IBM, the teacher decided that all the students would work on the same deliverable: a gear-making project in which the students would use gears to represent an idea from the trimester of learning. Scott Swaaley, who used to teach at the High Tech Schools in San Diego: the school in which our Idea School model is based, came up with this project as a poetry assignment. The project can be found here, and the teacher adapted it to fit our texts.

In the second IBM section, students were tasked with building something that reflected the troubling stories they had learned. Students woodworked, sculpted, and painted, each choosing a medium and subject that they preferred. Here’s one student’s provoking artwork and artist statement (Note: only the first artwork is shown).

Finally, in the third IBM section, students created works that inspired wonder in the audience or chose a project of their own creation. For the former, some students chose to contemplate the vastness of the universe, while others were interested in drawing optical illusions. For the latter, one student who is interested in psychology and mental health designed a puzzle on Adobe Illustrator. He drew pieces with unique interlocking points, and each piece represents a positive character trait that he thinks people need in order to succeed. These traits intersect with each other to create a healthy personality. He also designed three pieces that don’t fit the puzzle, and these are negative traits—social anxiety, procrastination, and negative self-talk—that should be left out of a healthy persona. 

● PART FOUR: The last phase of IBM is reflection, and this is the time when students process what they have absorbed from their learning. This step is crucial for students, so they see what they have achieved and where they still need to grow. It also allows educators to know if we’ve achieved our learning goals, whether they are academic, emotional, or spiritual. In the case of the Inquiry Beit Midrash, I’d say we were after all three. 

We’re in the last phase now and will let you know soon how it turned out. 

Tikvah Wiener is Head of School of The Idea School, the first Jewish interdisciplinary, project-based learning (PBL) high school in America. She is co-Founder and Director of the I.D.E.A. Schools Network, now The Idea School Institute. The Idea School Institute helps Jewish schools implement PBL and educational innovation, and since it was formed in 2014, has trained over 1,100 teachers. Tikvah has worked in Jewish Education for over 20 years.