Search results for: Woocher Jonathan S.

Since the end of the summer, I’ve had the opportunity to participate in two day-long meetings dealing with Hebrew in day schools and other parts of our Jewish educational system. Both meetings, though forward-looking in their focus, reflected what seemed to be a shared sense among participants that Hebrew language learning and teaching—despite some notable bright spots—generally faces an uphill struggle in our schools. The problem is not one of lack of good curricula or pedagogic knowledge, though there certainly are concerns about finding and preparing an adequate supply of capable teachers. Rather, again and again, participants in the conversations pointed to a “crisis of confidence and commitment”: the lack of a clear sense of purpose and growing questioning from parents, students and even school leadership as to whether the time and energy devoted to teaching Hebrew could be better spent elsewhere.

Jonathan Woocher examines what constitutes success for today's day schools and what should constitute success to for our students as 21st century learners and as 21st century Jews. He indicates that what is needed is a far-reaching reconception of the nature of school, one less aligned with the strictures of American success and more aligned with Jewish culture and values and a larger vision of educational excellence.

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.

Redesigning Jewish Education for the 21st Century, the initial Working Paper of the Lippman Kanfer Institute, lays out the case for change in how we do and deliver Jewish education in order to keep it relevant and effective in the 21st century. The Paper describes three core 'design principles' for the Jewish education we need: that it be learner-centered, relationship-infused, and life-focused. The Working Paper imagines what an educational system based on these principles might look like and discusses a variety of strategies for making the changes needed.