Section archive - Formal Education

Jewish Educational Leadership invites articles for Spring 2017 Issue focusing on Tefillah. Tefillah is a challenge for adults – witness how many people struggle to make it to their synagogue, struggle to find meaningful moments when they get there, and struggle to pray when not in an organized prayer environment or in deep crisis. No wonder that the Rabbis called tefillah an avodah, a labor. Teaching students to engage in tefillah raises the challenge even further. The next issue of Jewish Educational Leadership is dedicated to addressing the question of how to address tefillah.

Prepositional phrases (PPs) are considered an important feature of mature written expression. However, little is known about the development of PPs during the school years. The study examined the use of PPs in 160 narrative and expository texts, written by Hebrew-users in grades 4, 7, and 11, and adults. PPs were identified, counted, and classified according to their syntactic roles. Statistical analyses were carried out to probe the effects of age and genre on the overall prevalence of PPs, and the prevalence of each role. Results show that PPs become more prevalent and functionally more diversified with age: PP prevalence increased significantly after grade 7 in both genres, and continued to rise after grade 11 in expositories. Grade 4 PPs had a limited set of roles, the majority serving as arguments. In the older age groups the proportion of arguments decreased, concomitantly with an increase in the prevalence of other roles – most markedly verb-adjuncts and noun-modifiers – and the emergence of new PP roles.

Nobel Prize winner, Professor Dan Shechtman, world-renowned for his work in chemistry and material science, says Israel must do more to promote the study of sciences to make sure it keeps its technology edge. Shechtman, who has been running a course on technological entrepreneurship at the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology for the past 30 years, has developed a plan for innovation studies for Ort Israel Sci-Tech Schools, a network of vocational schools. The program is being implemented in eight schools in Israel and the organization hopes to spread it further and globally as well.

CASJE (the Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) today released the second of three literature reviews that explores what recent research about heritage, second and foreign language learning means for the teaching and learning of Hebrew. The newest review, Contributions of Second/Foreign Language Learning Scholarship to Identity Development and Hebrew Education, looks closely at how second/foreign language acquisition relates to learners’ identity development and their relationships with various cultures, groups and communities. New research focused specifically on Hebrew learning would help Jewish educators understand how their learners both relate to and are influenced by Hebrew.