Over the past 75 years, Jewish day schools in North America have experimented with ways of teaching Jewish identity. The methodologies ranged from heavy textual induction to deep discussion to Israeli dance to computer-based solutions to maker spaces to Project Based Learning. In that time a singular topic remains under-developed: how to teach about the Divine. Most approaches focus on either: trying to create an emotional connection with God through nature, meditation, or experiential learning; or sharing a significant amount of knowledge about the topic of God with the potential for some discussion from students.
What other methods could teachers employ to build a strong, lasting Jewish identity in their students?
Don’t miss the Fall 2019 issue of HaYidion: The Prizmah Journal, which features a compelling article written by JEIC Managing Director Sharon Freundel called “Listening to Day School Dreams.” This piece highlights what we learned from Jewish day school stakeholders about their dreams, visions, and wishes through our Listening Booths Initiative at PrizmahCJDS’s bi-annual conference in March 2019.
Phillip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, a British statesman and man of letters, is purported to have said on March 10, 1746, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”
Nearly 300 years later, those words still ring true and certainly should speak to Jewish educators. Our work is “worth doing” in order to develop in the next generation a healthy Jewish identity and sense of connectedness; given those stakes, it needs to be done in the best way possible.
What might that “best way” entail?
At least in part, it should include collaborative practice. A spiraling scope and sequence―considered best practice for teaching―needs input from all teachers to create seamless boundaries among subjects and from grade to grade. When we present challenges to a community of practice, the discussion generates a more robust list of solutions than when we grapple alone with an issue. There is value in feeling like we are part of something larger than our own classrooms in a profession where one’s primary rewards are gleaned from students’ successes.
Why, then, do most schools create schedules in a way that is penny-wise, but pound-foolish?
Chevy Chase, Md., October 24, 2019 -- Rachel Mohl Abrahams, an AVI CHAI Foundation senior program officer specializing in Jewish education and day school initiatives, will join the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge’s (JEIC) professional team in January 2020 as part of her new role as senior advisor for education grants and programs at the Mayberg Foundation, which incubates JEIC.
As senior advisor, Abrahams will direct her efforts to both the Mayberg Foundation's core grantmaking program and JEIC’s work with day school grantees, innovative Jewish educational initiatives and philanthropic partnerships. Abrahams brings more than two decades of experience in Jewish educational project design, program management, and evaluation.
Abrahams will advance the impact and scope of JEIC’s grantmaking, which supports the scaling and implementation of contemporary, proven educational models designed to reignite students’ passion for Jewish learning and improve the way Jewish values, literacy, practice, and belief are transferred to the next generation. Additionally, she will elevate JEIC’s position as a positive disrupter in the Jewish day school field by conferring with staff and stakeholders on organizational strategy and advocating for change initiatives in Jewish education.
The start of the school year typically presents a challenge with balance. Fall brings us an often-appreciated change of weather, and we shiver a bit from the chilly mornings and sad sight of our slowly shriveling much-loved gardens. Rosh Hashanah’s festive feel includes sweet foods and celebratory meals with family and friends, and it also serves as a time of judgement in determining our fate for the year. And in the same spirit, Simchat Torah represents the culmination of reading the full Torah, and then we find ourselves beginning all over again with the very first word.
This balance between the present and the future, the jovial and the austere, the culmination and beginning might seem contradictory at first, but it is a key part of our annual transition, extending to any time of transition or creation. Similarly, in creating our new Jewish day school, Einstein Academy, we wrestle with making sense of these seemingly-contradictory concepts every day.
Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools highlighted a compelling thought leadership article written by Mayberg Foundation Trustee, Manette Mayberg, about her dream of God-Powered Schools (GPS).
Let’s Follow this Kind of GPS for a Strong Jewish Future illustrates a “directional system for Jewish day schools that guides them by mission and vision, mapping the way forward most effectively. A GPS would provide continuous evaluation of a school’s actions so when a miscalculation or misguidance occurs, the school would be redirected… A GPS is one that is guided by the sum of our holy texts, time-tested over thousands of years. A GPS is informed by the teachings of eternal Jewish wisdom and embodies Jewish values. A GPS steers students to develop a relationship with the Divine—whatever their concepts of God might be—and a strong Jewish identity. A GPS emphasizes Jewish values and relevance as much as text study and skills. It also demands that all systems throughout a school—from policies to content to pedagogy—support students’ journeys of Jewish discovery.”
I have a new hero, and it’s a bit embarrassing.
Embarrassing to admit that I’ve studied and taught this character for decades and always assumed he was the anti-hero, the person we shouldn’t become, the epitome of someone who was impelled by a mistaken zeal to lead a mistaken life.
My anti-hero has become heroic.
I’m talking about Jonah.
During Kol Nidre, which ushers in Yom Kippur each year, the Jewish community does something seemingly odd. We publicly declare all of our vows between a person and God null and void from this Yom Kippur to the next one. Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik points out that we nullify vows based on two premises (explained in Shulchan Aruch Yoreh Deah 228).
1. At the time a promise was made, a person was ignorant of some circumstance that made it too difficult to perform the promise.
2. At the time of the vow, the person was not ignorant, but came to regret the promise as time moved on because of new circumstances. Fulfilling the vow became too difficult.
Kol Nidre makes these assumptions with its grand stroke of remitting a statement that all these vows disappear for the next year. This future thinking makes us more attuned to our future vows, cautioning us against making regrettable promises.
I have a bad habit of assuming that whatever I have loved or enjoyed other people will also love and enjoy. Sometimes this assumption sends me down the wrong path, but in the case of my Jewish literature course for high schoolers, it led to the development of something beautiful and enduring for my students.
Creating this course was a dream of mine since falling in love with a Jewish Literature course in my freshman year of college. I was transformed by the class, and all I could think about throughout that year was: Why didn’t they teach any of these texts to me during my twelve years of Jewish education?
When I began teaching high school English in a Jewish day school bringing Jewish literature into my classes was a priority. The students came from a broad range of backgrounds and many felt detached from Jewish learning through ancient texts. Teaching Jewish literature was an opportunity to broaden their understanding of their religion, culture and what constitutes a Jewish text.
Sharon Freundel, JEIC Managing Drector, and Rabbi Shmuel Feld, JEIC Founding Director, were highlighted as featured presenters at The Rohr Jewish Learning Institute’s (JLI) 2019 National Jewish Retreat in Washington, D.C., August 13-18, 2019, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park.
JEIC facilitated a professional development collaboration with The Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, Ayeka and Pedagogy of Partnership of Hadar to enhance methodologies for teaching Jewish text and discussing Gd. These providers learned from one another and explored new ways of engaging students in substantive, robust, and meaningful text study.
This collaboration was made possible due to the support of the Mayberg Foundation and their two funding partners for this initiative: The AVI CHAI Foundation and Kohelet Foundation.
We thank all our partners, and the National Jewish Retreat, for elevating this landmark collaboration improving Jewish education for day school students..
If you google the words “God loves us,” the first page of hits contains all Christian websites. I don’t think this an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) problem; I think it is a statement that we are not good at reminding ourselves and our students through discussion or text study that God loves us. The sources are plentiful...
Having been involved in Jewish education for many years as both a student and a teacher, I have often felt perturbed by the attempts to professionalize and academize the field. Rubrics, curricula, assessments, and so on were vigorously studied with the hope of full implementation. In a field like Jewish studies, educators, schools, and parents often wonder: what is success? When does a parent or a school know that they have done well with the Jewish education they provide to children? I would strongly argue that academic measures are the last place to look.
Recently, I attended a conference workshop devoted to tefillah teaching in schools. One of the explicated tensions concerned the intersection of learning the Matbeah Tefillah (the structure and words in the siddur), having a deep relationship with God, being fluent in tefillah concepts, and understanding how to accomplish this in a short span on a daily basis. The tension increases when thinking about the way tefillah happens in local synagogues where duration matters and good personal behavior may not manifest well as communal paradigms.
To further complicate teaching tefillah in schools, most teachers lack training and focus on compliance, and, as a result of those two elements, create an environment that feels less like a spiritual process and more like a police action. This often results in tefillah being a negative experience for students that hurts their relationships with teachers, Jewish learning and experience, Jewish communal members and, ultimately, the Divine. Unfortunately, in the Jewish day school world, this story is not new.
Recently we hosted a meeting with a small group of Korean Christian ministers and students. They drove a long distance to meet with us to explore the promise of havruta, specifically for their Korean cultural and religious context. While this group gained helpful insight about havruta, our own gleanings from this encounter were unexpected and even a gift. Explaining the meaning of havruta to people outside the Jewish community required us to share more than just the history or mechanics of studying in pairs. We felt compelled to convey the deep Jewish sensibility that learning in our tradition is often inherently rooted in the personal relationships we build and nurture.
One of my fond grade school memories is of receiving fresh mimeographs right off the machine. We would hold them up to our faces and deeply breathe in the pungent, sweet smell. The purple writing never failed to intrigue us. One more 20th Century function has gone the way of the horse and buggy.
Have you ever experienced an “aha moment” when what seems to be an array of disparate parts all connect and form one cohesive whole?
Let me introduce you to a cornerstone of Montessori educational philosophy called cosmic education. Cosmic education emphasizes the value of imparting to our students a more comprehensive and holistic picture of the world and its manifold facets. It begins with learning about how the universe came to be, and continues with a “zoom-in” on the respective parts of the whole, which include but aren’t limited to history, geography, science, communication, and relationships. Ultimately, it describes the role of education as “to encompass the development of the whole person within the context of the universe.’
Do you remember the song This Magic Moment by Jay and the Americans? Magic moments occur throughout the course of the Jewish year. Sometimes, the magic is overt and apparent and other times, we have a greater hand in creating our own magic.
At either end of the Jewish calendar lives a major week-long festival. In the springtime month of Nissan, we celebrate Pesach. It is a massive undertaking to create a seder with its numerous accouterments, not to mention the weeks of advance preparation for the holiday’s arrival.
On the other side of the year, in autumnal Tishrei, we celebrate Sukkot. This holiday, too, requires a great deal of preparation: erecting a sukkah, securing a lulav and etrog, and eating—if not sleeping— outside no matter the climate.
While the similarities are striking, there is a fundamental difference between the two that can be gleaned from the recounting of their respective biblical sacrifices recited in the Mussaf Amidah (additional holiday service standing prayer).
Visitors to Schechter Manhattan often comment to me about how engaged and happy students appear. They notice how the students are busy at work, focused on the learning activities at hand. Sometimes I am asked, what motivates our students? Why do they choose to do hard things in order to learn?
Motivating students, and people, in general, is a challenge faced by all educators, and Schechter Manhattan is no exception. After all, our students don’t get a choice about whether they come to school, the adults in their lives insist. And, at Schechter Manhattan, like at most schools, we adults have made decisions about what content, concepts, skills, and values to include in the curriculum of study- things we think are really important and expect all students to learn. Add to that our approach to assessment and reporting, which includes lots of feedback but no grades or other such external motivators, and the question becomes even sharper. What motivates students to try?
Mid-March was filled with a great deal of excitement and energy for Jewish day school educators, and I’m not simply talking about the festivities associated with Purim. Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools held its biannual conference in Atlanta, and I attended with my Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC) team and more than 1000 other colleagues in the field. The conference was heartening and inspiring for this diverse population of Jewish educators, funders, and influencers, evidenced by a wide range of blog articles written in the last few days and posts filling our social media feeds.
In the spirit of being a positive disruptor, JEIC conducted an audacious initiative at the conference. Taking the first page out of a design thinking playbook, we created a unique mechanism for connecting directly with Jewish educators and influencers to find out their hopes and needs.
How did we do it?
