Keystones: Using UDL to Create Connectors with Debra Drang

Debra Drang, Director, Educational Excellence, Prizmah

Sharon Freundel:

I’m Sharon Freundel, Managing Director of the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC). Welcome to JEIC’s Keystones Podcast Series. The keystone is the central stone at the summit of an arch, locking the whole together. We believe that a strong Jewish Day School education is what holds the Jewish people together as we look towards the next generation.

In today’s episode, we will hear from Debra Drang from Sulam in Silver Spring, MD on using Universal Design for Learning to create expert learners who know what they need in order to be successful.

Debra Drang:

For many years, I've trained teachers and school leaders, Universal Design for Learning, or UDL as it's more commonly referred to, and the goal of UDL is to create students who are what we call “expert learners.” That means they don't just learn skills or content knowledge, but they learn about themselves as learners. And they have the tools that they need to go into any environment and learn successfully because they know what they need to be successful learners.

For a long time, I've been thinking about how this idea can apply to the religious and spiritual development of children. Certainly, we want our students to be expert learners in the Judaic studies classroom, but a broader goal, where we want our students to connect deeply to their Judaism, be it a personal relationship with God, Jewish text, Jewish community, Jewish practice, the Jewish people. So I've been thinking about this idea that our goal is to create students who are expert connectors.

This can shift the conversation from the Judaic studies teacher’s role as, you know, teaching Torah, teaching skills, teaching knowledge to the Judaic Studies teacher’s role as a connection expert, and what would that mean, if we looked at the Judaic Studies teacher as a connection expert? Being an expert connector and having the qualities of an expert connector means that you know this lifelong trajectory to connect to Judaism and that your connection may ebb and flow over the course of a lifetime, but that's okay. You know, and you can seek out resources and support to help you with your connection.

So I would really want to, I'd love to develop a tool where we could possibly survey students, but I guess I'm more into the idea of focus groups with students talking about how their religious connection feels to them, even as a baseline, before we kind of implement some of the practices that might grow out of the conversation like this. And then to follow up with focus group conversations, where we can see, based on their own reports, do they feel they've developed objectives, that they feel they've developed that can help them to connection. And certainly some of it relates to stuff we're doing already, like some of it is the work Judaic studies teachers are doing in the classroom already. But again, this might add another element to it, and it might help teachers reframe some things.

Again, it's very preliminary; it's just something that's been swirling around in my mind for a long time. Every time I teach Jewish Day School teachers about this idea of developing expert learners, I have this nagging voice in the back of my head – but what does this mean for our bottom line, which is to facilitate religious and spiritual connection in our students? Like we have a bottom line that goes beyond learning, because learning is something our students could access a lot of different places, right, we have a different bottom line. And so I’ve thought a long time about how can this concept, this paradigm of expert learners, be applied to religious and spiritual development? So it really is just a call to conversation with leaders and with thought leaders and with Judaic studies teachers about what this could mean, and how this might shift their paradigm.

I think that learning in the Judaic studies classroom is very often focused on skills, building skills and building knowledge, which is certainly important. We want our students to be able to access text; it’s one of the ways they can connect. So it doesn't, focusing on this idea of developing expertise from a UDL perspective, it doesn't preclude the need to focus on skills and content knowledge. It just makes the conversation bigger than that. I think that a lot of times I'm seeing the focus on what skills are we building? What content knowledge are we building? But I don't know if that's necessarily getting children all the tools that they need to be able to connect in any setting that they find themselves in.

I think it's part of the answer, but I think when you expand the paradigm beyond skills and content knowledge into “Yes,” it's yes, and. It's like, “Yes, that's important. And we need to be focused on helping them develop dispositions in practice of prayer and reflection, whether it's thinking very intentionally and explicitly about their faith and how they connect, of having those conversations with them.” Those are the things that I think will broaden the paradigm and help us think about Judaic Studies educators as being more than just people who teach the skills and teach them the content knowledge.

I think teachers needed the space to unpack and think about this. I think that teachers would need partnership with parents. I think that, in this context, parents are teachers too. And I think it's really important for parents to think about their own connection and how they are helping their children understand who they are as Jews. I think that partnership between school and home would be a really important component of this because I don't think either one or the other is solely responsible for a child's religious connection. I think it's a partnership, where the parents, of course, have a significant influence, and so does the school.

I remember when I first learned about Universal Design for Learning over 15 years ago, and when the person who trained me presented this idea of, you know, it's about more than just teaching knowledge and skills, it's about developing expert learners, it's about giving our students the dispositions they need to be motivated and goal directed and persistent, these skills they could take into any learning setting and be successful as a learner, it was like a light bulb went off for me. It was really powerful. So I think for me, what I would hope for is that we could have a little bit of a paradigm shifting conversation about what we're doing in Jewish Day Schools, right, that ultimately we want to give our students the tools they need, the dispositions they need, to remain Jewishly connected, in whatever setting you're in. And it doesn't mean giving up on what we're doing. I think it just means sometimes reframing, enhancing, and building on what we're doing, but I think, I hope, that it could have that same impact that it had on me when I first learned about expert learners many years ago.

Just to reiterate that this is a very new idea that's been swirling around my head, and I kind of took a leap here and just presented something that isn't concrete and developed just because I would love to engage with people who also want to have this conversation.

Sharon Freundel:

To find out more about this topic and other ways to catalyze radical improvement in Jewish Day Schools, please visit our website at JewishChallenge.org.