Section archive - Teacher Education

This certificate program prepares participants to serve as effective leaders of informal educational institutions and programs. Designed for youth directors, synagogue program directors, Jewish camp leaders, Israel program leaders and trip leaders, the curriculum focuses on the content, methodology and leadership skills that Jewish educators need to maximize the 'teachable moment' that is the essence of experiential education. While emphasizing informal education for adolescents, the certificate applies to experiential programming for students of all ages and complements the field of Jewish family education.

The MOFET Institute's Online Academy is running its first semester and has opened registration for the winter semester of online courses whose 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.

This article takes as its starting point the conviction that high quality Jewish education depends heavily on high quality teaching. Grounded in this idea and in a multileveled exploration—one indebted to recent Jewish thought—of the nature of excellence in teaching and its defining characteristics, the article proceeds to try to understand policy implications that might flow from possible and actual conclusions concerning these characteristics. Along the way, the policy implications that would flow from an inability to identify a core of characteristics shared by excellent teachers are also explored. The article concludes by highlighting the indispensable role of communities in fostering excellence in teaching in Jewish education: In explaining this role, it seeks to identify some of the key qualities of communities that succeed in this challenge.

The Jim Joseph Foundation (JJF) today announced that it has awarded nearly $12 million in grants to The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC), and Yeshiva University (YU). The initial grants, to be administered over a five-year period, will be used as financial aid for students pursuing education degrees or certification in programs that prepare them to work with Jewish youth and young adults, and to assist each institution in planning new and enhanced programs that will attract more educators to the field.