Section archive - Formal Education

Three Jewish primary schools teaching almost 1,000 children across north London are to link up in a new first-of-its-kind Jewish schools academy to combine learning resources and teaching expertise while making “cost efficiencies”. Moriah Jewish Day School, Sacks Morasha Jewish Primary School and Wolfson Hillel Primary School will together form a Multi Academy Trust (MAT), the trustees of which would be chosen by the Chief Rabbi and other United Synagogue leaders.

Since Chanukah is the Festival of Lights, we wanted to shine a light on some bright spots we are seeing in the Jewish day school field. It is our hope that each day of Chanukah will grow even brighter as you learn about these bright spots and consider your work in a new light. Whereas day school leaders often have access to conferences and peer networks, teachers have less opportunities for outside support and inspiration. One exciting new idea is to break down what at times feel like isolating classroom walls and provide opportunities for teachers to collaborate – within schools and across schools.

Empirical research in Jewish education has found almost exclusive use of transmission pedagogy among Jewish studies teachers. This study hoped to fill out the empirical landscape by studying Jewish studies teachers who prioritize student-driven interpretation. It followed six Jewish studies teachers in four different Jewish elementary schools who all professed a commitment to student-driven textual interpretation. It found that in such classrooms there was a clear pattern of teaching moves. This article offers a detailed portrait of the previously undocumented Jewish studies pedagogy, interpretive facilitation.

While rabbinic texts have long played a central role in the development of contemporary Judaisms and Jewish day school curricula, we don’t know very much about students’ learning. While we have some sense of what teachers and other experts think constitutes an understanding of rabbinics (Levisohn 2010, and Kanarek and Lehman 2016), there is little data about what students actually know about or are able to do with particular texts, or what sense they make of rabbinics as a whole. In the spring of 2017, as part of the Mandel Center’s Students’ Understanding of Rabbinics project, we interviewed twenty students recruited from two Jewish community day high schools about their study of rabbinics.