For years, I have trained teachers and school leaders in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an approach to teaching that emphasizes the importance of creating educational environments and facilitating learning experiences that support students in becoming expert learners. This does not preclude the need to teach specific skills and content knowledge, but sees the ultimate goal as developing learners who are “purposeful and motivated, resourceful and knowledgeable, strategic and goal-directed” (UDL Guidelines). During workshops, I ask participants to list the dispositions of expert learners, and I get a range of substantive responses, such as “they are self-reflective”, “persist through challenges”, and “utilize strategies”. We discuss how this perspective shifts the focus from teachers as subject matter experts, to teachers as learning experts. We then drill down to the actual classroom practices teachers can implement to facilitate their students’ development as expert learners. In some cases, these practices are new to teachers; such things as involving students in monitoring progress toward their goals. In other cases, teachers are reframing practices they’ve implemented for years, such as explicitly labeling classroom materials as resources that students can use to support their own learning. Ultimately, students emerge from an educational environment designed through a UDL lens with an understanding of themselves as learners, and what they need to do to learn successfully in any setting.
In Jewish day schools, our goal of facilitating students’ religious and spiritual growth adds another dimension to this paradigm. Certainly, we want students to understand themselves as learners in the Judaic Studies classroom as well, but this does not capture the full scope of what schools and Jewish educators are aiming for. Our ultimate purpose is to help facilitate the religious and spiritual dispositions that will keep students authentically connected to Judaism, well beyond their school years. We want to develop expert connectors. Malcolm Gladwell coined the term connectors in his book, The Tipping Point, to mean individuals who know an impressive number of people across groups, and are therefore able to spread ideas and effect change. In the context of religious and spiritual growth, being an expert connector does not refer to a quantity of relationships, but to the quality of just one – the individual to their Judaism. That attachment is impressively multifaceted to include a personal connection to God, religious practice, Jewish text, Jewish community, and the Jewish people. The impact is not in disseminating ideas that influence society, but in generating a level of commitment that results in Jewish continuity.
To approach religious and spiritual growth from this perspective, schools can begin with a conversation centered around these questions:
What are the dispositions of expert connectors and how can we facilitate the development of those qualities in our children?
How can we shift the focus from Judaic Studies teachers as subject matter experts, to Judaic Studies teachers as connection experts?
What new approaches might we need to implement, if developing expert connectors is our goal?
Where do we need to reframe what we are already doing, to make the association between our practices and their intended purpose more explicit for students?
UDL emphasizes that children can only develop into expert learners when they have expert teachers, and where both students and teachers are embedded within expert systems. Schools need to define what that means with regard to religious and spiritual development. However, any conversation about developing expert connectors needs to extend beyond the classroom. In this context, parents are teachers too. For some parents, our own connections have stagnated to the point where they cannot give what they do not have. For others, the connections feel deeply personal and hard to articulate, but are they so private as to appear nonexistent to the children? Then there are the community systems – synagogues, youth groups, and camps – that also play a pivotal role in our children’s growth. Perhaps some of their work lends itself to a focus on religious and spiritual dispositions, and helping children make connections between what they are experiencing in these settings and their long term relationship to Judaism.
From the standpoint of UDL, the term expert does not mean mastery of a skill set or knowledge base, but rather the ongoing development of proficiency in the process of learning. The development of expertise in this case is not a destination one ever reaches, but a journey that is entirely unique to each person. Becoming an expert connector is a similarly individualized process, evolving throughout one’s lifetime. Our goal should be to give children the foundational tools they need to understand themselves as Jews, and know what they need to do to stay connected in any setting.
Dr. Debra Drang is the Director of Special Education at Sulam in Rockville, MD.