Search results for: Innovation

The Mayberg Family Foundation has announced the third year of the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC), a grant initiative designed to stimulate and reward innovation in Jewish middle and high school education in North America. During the past two years JEIC has funded and researched four new models for Jewish education created by talented educators, enabling them to field test paradigm shifting programs in Jewish day schools. JEIC provides $50,000, along with research and consulting services to give grantees optimal chances for success and to glean lessons for other innovators to build upon.

The Kohelet Foundation announces the creation of the Yeshiva Lab School (YLS). Rooted in a constructivist model of education, YLS hopes to advance the Jewish day school field by employing replicable, empirically supported and developmentally appropriate methods of pedagogy. To meet the needs of the growing Orthodox community, this school will also be the first philosophically Modern Orthodox elementary school in the Philadelphia area.

This article provides an overview and analysis of a relatively new phenomenon: congregational schools that have altered the conventional grammar of schooling, either through their structural arrangements or through their curricular approaches. Five pre-bar/bat mitzvah models are discussed: family schools, schools as communities, informal / experiential programs, afterschool/day care programs, and those that deconstruct and reconstruct the conventional model. In addition, three curricular innovations are examined: project based learning, learning organized around the interests and abilities of the students, and Hebrew Through Movement. Also considered are the factors that are necessary to the survival and proliferation of these new structures and curricular arrangements.

Chana German, the founding director of the Lookstein Virtual Jewish Academy, presents theoretical underpinnings of online education along with a practical guide for day school teachers and school leaders, providing some basic knowledge for educators and administrators considering adopting online Jewish education into their schools.