Section archive - Teacher Education

In September, the London School of Jewish Studies is introducing a new programme combining leadership skills and Jewish studies. The Teach to Lead programme, based on the Teach First model, will develop high-calibre Jewish studies teachers across primary and secondary schools. The new cohort will be tasked with re-envisioning Jewish education for the 21st century to ensure we don’t only replicate old methods and approaches but bring new perspectives and solutions. They will have the opportunities to learn from practitioners around the Jewish world. They must be able to think creatively about what our young people need today to respond to Jewish ideas and how to nurture thinking Jews who are strong in their identity, knowledgeable about their heritage and passionate about their Jewish faith.

The paper will first describe the challenges that the Israeli teacher education colleges faced during the Coronavirus outbreak. It will then present an initiative launched by the Israeli Ministry of Education (MoE) to open an alternative route of an initial teacher education programme geared towards academics who lost their jobs as a result of the epidemic and are interested in re-training themselves to become teachers. The final part will discuss the main conclusions and reflections on the situation which can be drawn at this point in time.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted education, forcing teachers and teacher educators into emergency, remote instruction. While there were noted challenges, there also were global success stories of innovation in preparing current and future teachers. This AACE and SITE-published, open access eBook contains 133 chapters with over 850 pages documenting best practices, strategies, and efforts by teacher educators, professional developers, researchers, and practitioners.

Hospital teachers work in a unique educational milieu that serves hospitalized children. In order to meet these children’s educational needs, teachers are expected to display high emotional abilities that will allow them to be creative, flexible and innovative, and able to work in distressing situations. For this reason a 30-hour Emotional Intelligence academic course for hospital teachers was developed and conducted, based on the revised theoretical framework of Mayer, Caruso & Salovey (2016). This mixed methods research study examined 50 hospital teachers who participated in this 10-week course, using a pre- and post-questionnaire, focus groups, semi-structured interviews and a final paper with a reflective summary. All training materials and examples were geared towards working with hospitalized children.