Section archive - Teacher Education

Mark S. Young, Program Coordinator of the Experiential Learning Initiative, at the Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, describes the development of the new graduate program in Jewish Experiential Education at Davidson which just opened its first semester.

Miriam Heller Stern, Dean of the Graduate Center for Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, responds to the recent Jewish education blogosphere discussion of the 'reinvention' of Jewish education. She claims that Jewish education must learn from the last century of attempted American school reform. Such reform was in reality, limited to what teachers actually chose to do, not what thinkers thought about and proposed.

In this article, the author contends that as we contemplate the best ways to teach Hebrew in our schools, we should note that the best learning pedagogy can emerge only when the language educator is adequately equipped. When teachers are knowledgeable about the theories of second-language acquisition, aware of learner variables and responsive to learning conditions and environments, they will be able to reflect on their practices and modify their activities, either during or after the lesson, in order to make the right decisions as they choose or create the most effective pedagogies in support of the language acquisition process.

The MOFET Institute's Online Academy for Jewish Studies will be offering four new online courses for the Fall, 2011 semester. The Academy's main objective is to prepare teachers, educators and leaders in Jewish communities in the Diaspora for their mission. The courses, in areas that are suitable for educators and leaders in the Jewish world as well as students in universities and colleges in the fields of the didactics and pedagogy of teaching Jewish subjects in the Diaspora, are taught via the internet, a-synchronously with synchronous components. The course developers and lecturers are all experts in their fields and senior staff members of Israel's top institutes of higher education.