Section archive - Teacher Education

The Pardes Day School Educators Program – training outstanding Jewish studies teachers for day schools since 2000 – is a vibrant and innovative two-year program in Jerusalem that combines intensive text study at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies with a Master of Jewish Education from Hebrew College. This program is highly selective, seeking outstanding applicants for whom day school teaching is their calling.

Teacher educators have three main paths for career development: teaching, research and institutional leadership. These may be mutually supportive, but also, sources of tension. Recent national and institutional policies encourage teacher educators to increase their research activities. This study aims to describe Israeli teacher educators’ perceptions of the three paths, and their interrelationships, as influenced by their work contexts. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 experienced, research-orientated teacher educators who work in various teacher education colleges in Israel.

The current study examined the case of religious students who opted to study in a secular teacher-training college despite the fact that there are religious colleges that would have suited their needs. This phenomenon is unusual because the education system in Israel is segregated and each educational sector has its own teacher-training colleges. Findings of this qualitative study indicate that the majority of participants did not wish to depart from the religious framework, but rather sought to forge reciprocal relations with the secular society and carve a space for themselves where they could express their identity, which does not entirely conform to the demands of the religious society.

Lesson study is a form of professional development where a group of teachers identifies a problem of practice on which they would like to make progress in their teaching. Over an extended period of time, the teachers study the topic and plan a lesson together. One member then teaches the lesson while the others observe; the group reflects afterwards on student learning. The cycle repeats, building teachers’ professional knowledge and their shared views of pedagogy over time. In this article, we argue that lesson study is a collaborative form of practitioner research and we show how this is so by sharing an example of a lesson study cycle conducted in a synagogue school.