Search results for: Teacher education

The MOFET Institute's Online Academy has opened registration for the Fall, 2011 semester of online courses whose main objective is to prepare teachers, educators and leaders in Jewish communities in the Diaspora for their mission. The courses, in areas that are suitable for educators and leaders in the Jewish world as well as students in universities and colleges in the fields of the didactics and pedagogy of teaching Jewish subjects in the Diaspora, are taught via the internet, a-synchronously with synchronous components. The course developers and lecturers are all experts in their fields and senior staff members of Israel's top institutes of higher education.

Levenson presents Nehama Leibowitz (1903-1997) as a principal figure in making the Bible a centerpiece of modern Jewish intellectual life. Complementing the already impressive literature on Leibowitz's pedagogical techniques, Levenson emphasizes the interdependence of Leibowitz's historical context, biography, and exegetical stance. Leibowitz's encounter with German intellectual life 1919-1930 gave her a means of synthesizing her early traditional upbringing with her later encounter with modernized culture in Israel. Leibowitz's inclusion of German commentators such as Hirsch, Buber-Rosenzweig, and Jacob mark her as a conscious modernist. The New Literary Criticism's focus on the received text allowed her to deploy heterodox and non-Zionist commentators with whom she was ideologically at odds.

World ORT's operational arm in Israel, Kadima Mada, has joined forces with specialists at the NCJW Research Institute for Innovation in Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to design and deliver an on-line course to train English teachers how to adjust their pedagogical techniques in order to make full use of the Interactive Whiteboards (IWB) and associated equipment being installed in their schools.

Modern educational scholarship has not substantially investigated the learning practice of havruta, paired study and focused conversation around classical Jewish texts. In this article, the author analyzes videotapes and transcripts of real-life havruta interactions and proposes a theory of havruta learning as composed of three pairs of core practices: listening and articulating; wondering and focusing; and supporting and challenging. Through a close analysis of one particular havruta session, the author illustrates and probes the havruta practices and the ways in which they can give rise to generative, textually grounded interpretive discussions of classical Jewish texts. This theory may also be a helpful lens for both studying and elucidating text-based discussions of other kinds of texts in small and large group settings.