Section archive - Formal Education

For millions of American Jews, the words “Jewish education” most likely conjure images of days spent in synagogue classrooms decoding Hebrew, reciting prayers, learning holiday customs, and reading about biblical figures. This is the past, but not the future of congregational education. This form of part-time, mostly afterschool and/or weekend Jewish learning has been the most popular single setting for the Jewish education of Jewish children for many decades. More than 2,000 supplementary schools (most, though not all, of which are part of synagogues) are the main source of Jewish education for more than 230,000 Jewish children in North America making them the largest 'network' operating in the arena of Jewish education. Despite its popularity, supplementary education has long been subject to often biting criticism as ineffectual or worse. In recent years, these critiques have sparked renewed efforts to improve and even transform congregational education. The breadth and scope of these efforts, encompassing hundreds of synagogues and dozens of communities, have made it more urgent that we understand the dynamics of congregational educational change: how it works and how to make it work better. This article draws on a large body of evaluation research conducted in the main by the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA) research team across many settings. Turning to this corpus, the authors tease out some general principles for what it would take to transform congregational education, something that they believe is desirable, difficult, but doable.

In this article, Shira Kaufman discusses Daniel Pink's six right-brain intelligences - play, design, story, symphony, empathy and meaning, which must be developed in order to prepare students to be successful in our changing world and offers suggestions to help the teacher facilitate their development in the Tanach classroom.

Currently, there are no Hebrew (L2) reading assessments that have been tested to obtain evidence for reliability and validity on which to base decisions about Hebrew instruction. The authors developed a Hebrew benchmark assessment tool for first grade students modeled after Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, a standardized test of accuracy and fluency used to identify at-risk students and to monitor student progress.

Steve Bailey argues for a proactive, formalized approach to ethical reasoning and behavior in Jewish Day school education. In this article, he proposes the Kohlberg Just Community model for Jewish Day schools as a gateway to graduating students who, after leaving the school environment, have been educated to become effective representatives of Jewish values in the community at large – on campuses, on school boards, in Jewish communal institutions and as advocates for Israel.