Section archive - Formal Education

This article presents original qualitative research applying paired text study, havruta learning, to the secular college classroom. I adapted this method to a first-year seminar in a public university and found that students perceived that havruta improved their abilities to verbalize their understandings through reading text aloud and debating one another, opened their eyes to new perspectives, engaged them in argumentation, and empowered them to take charge of learning.

The history of Jewish day schools in Los Angeles can provide lessons that are widely applicable to the future of Jewish education. The number and variety of non-Orthodox day schools in the city surged in the late 1970s through the 1990s, creating the contemporary landscape of day schools. However, it is the first few schools, established before the number of day schools exploded due to court-ordered busing and other factors, that illustrate an important lesson for the future of day schools in Los Angeles and across the country.

In Jewish schools, where we’re concerned with students’ spiritual growth and want our children developing in emotionally and socially successfully ways, an emphasis on grades can run counter to these religious and psychological goals. After all, is there some tally for how a child has deepened religious practice or grown spiritually? Should there be? And what about the progress a child has made in becoming more organized, collaborating successfully on a project, or learning to manage time and emotions well? The latter skills translate into a productive adulthood, but we don’t often stop to teach them, much less measure them in some quantifiable way. So, these are the limitations of grades: they measure some very precise things that some kids can do very well, but they leave us without information about important types of competencies that students may or may not be developing, because grades generally don’t address religious, social, and emotional growth.

Inquiry-oriented pedagogy is a difficult pedagogy to enact in the classroom. By placing students’ questions and textual ideas at the center, the teacher opens the door to unanticipated and sometimes off-the-wall comments in text discussion. And yet, research has shown that it is exactly this type of pedagogy that leads to increased engagement and comprehension. This study examines two elementary school Hebrew Bible teachers’ enactment of inquiry-oriented pedagogy. It explores how one pedagogy can look very different in different contexts and the contrasting motivations teachers hold.