Jewish Portal of
Teacher Education
The online resource of pedagogical and academic content on teaching and Jewish education
Section archive - Formal Education
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378 items
21
The simple truth is that we don’t know when we will return to school. We are hopeful that the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year will take place in our classrooms. We know that at some point in the future that we will return. But as Heidi Hayes Jacobs recently said, “We have to start thinking about how we don’t go back to school, but how we go forward to school.” This extraordinary moment we are living, teaching and learning through will eventually end, but it would be a huge mistake to go back to school as it was when we have an opportunity to go forward to school as it ought to be. Here are four ways we should begin thinking about going forward to school.
Published: 2020
Updated: Jul. 13, 2020
22
This article examines state religious school teachers’ attitudes regarding the inclusion of students with special needs and factors affecting their perceptions. A representative sample of 579 teachers from primary, junior high and high schools filled in a questionnaire regarding attitudes toward inclusion and related factors such as professional support, commitment to inclusion, adaptability of the curriculum, extent of inclusion, existence of technical aids, parental involvement and the influence of the inclusion on students without special needs.
Published: 2020
Updated: Jun. 10, 2020
23
This qualitative research aims to explore the experiences of teachers in the implementation of prayer services in religious high schools for girls in Israel. Twenty teachers from three different schools were interviewed as part of this qualitative research study. Interviews were conducted during 2017–2018. The research focused on what teachers felt were the goals of prayer services in schools and the challenges they faced in their implementation. The research points to reasons why, from teachers' perspectives, these services are not maximizing their impact on the religious development of many students.
Published: 2020
Updated: Apr. 30, 2020
24
What do Jewish day school students believe constitutes good understanding and worthwhile learning in the context of their encounter with rabbinic texts in the classroom? This article shares findings from an interview study of Jewish day school students in grades 9 through 12 regarding their attitudes toward the study of Talmud. I argue that high school students’ estimations of the value of Talmud study are shaped, not only by individually held tastes, talents, and commitments, but also by a set of shared intellectual values. These values, related to their beliefs about the purposes of learning and what good learning should accomplish for the learner, develop in the context of their schools and communities and frame how students set goals for and assess their own understanding of Talmud.
Published: 2020
Updated: Mar. 04, 2020
25
The development of non-Orthodox Jewish day schools in Los Angeles in the 1970s to 1990s can be attributed to a combination of factors, including the city’s geography, the deterioration of public education, court-ordered busing that began in the 1970s, and strong rabbinic personalities. Yet, as elementary day schools proliferated throughout the city, educators struggled to keep secondary day schools afloat. Contributing factors to the challenges secondary schools faced included sprawling city geography, lack of communal support, and parental desire to send children to established high schools with proven track records for college preparation and admission.
Published: 2020
Updated: Mar. 04, 2020
26
More than 6,600 students were learning Hebrew in a public-school or charter-school setting in 2018 in the US, according to a report issued by CASJE, the Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education, and George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
Published: 2020
Updated: Feb. 12, 2020
27
In the course of my current Mandel Center-sponsored research project, Hasidic Learning, I have observed an assessment technique that takes the benefits of frequent low-stakes assessment and adds to it the benefits of cognitive clinical interviews. The clinical interview is a technique used by researchers to investigate what students understand about a given topic. It is typically semi-structured; that is, it has some anchor questions that are used in all interviews, but no fixed formula throughout. This lack of rigid structure is a powerful tool in the researcher’s arsenal, allowing him or her to get into the nitty-gritty of student knowledge.
Published: 2020
Updated: Jan. 28, 2020
28
On a recent Monday morning on the Upper West Side, a group of about 20 men and women sat in pairs, hunched over enormous Jewish legal tomes and dissecting their contents in animated conversation. It was a typical scene at Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva that has run full-time study programs for young adults in New York City since 2007. Less typical was the mundane topic of their study: whether it is permissible to use a dishwasher for both meat and milk dishes in successive cycles. It’s the kind of question typically asked of synagogue rabbis.
Published: 2019
Updated: Jan. 13, 2020
29
A long-standing assumption at the heart of synagogue Hebrew education is that if our children learned to read English, it should not be that hard for them to learn to read Hebrew fluently. Yet, even with four years or more of “Hebrew school,” young learners struggle with prayers and blessings. The culprit is often identified as lessened days/hours of learning time or competing family priorities. But, consistent and well-replicated reading research offers us another possibility – countless studies conclude that reading fluency is “… a by-product of having instant access to most or all of the words on the page.”
Published: 2019
Updated: Jan. 08, 2020
30
NETA/Bishvil Ha-Ivrit was initiated in 1999 at the urging of AVI CHAI Foundation Trustee Dr. Ruth Wisse, with early implementation by Senior Program Officer Rachel Mohl Abrahams. It created a comprehensive Hebrew language curriculum and offered ongoing professional development for Jewish day school teachers in grades 7-12. Founding Director Hilla Kobliner came with a stellar reputation as a consummate Hebrew language expert and master pedagogue. An expert and dedicated staff was stationed at NETA/Bishvil Ha-Ivrit’s North American home at Hebrew College in Boston. The staff has planted and nurtured the seeds that have made the program flourish and bloom in the years since.
Published: 2019
Updated: Dec. 11, 2019