Search results for: Spiritual education

What if we had an “Ahava Yomit” project? Promoting and recognizing daily acts of love. Celebrating acts of giving, chesed, and generous loving. Courses, programs, and projects in our schools focusing on acts of love. YouTubes and workshops dedicated to daily acts of love.

Outcomes in the inter- and intra-personal realms are central to the goals of Jewish education, yet educators often struggle to address them in a meaningful way. In this article, we describe what we learned from facilitating an online community of practice for congregational school leaders and day school educators seeking to enhance their work in promoting social, emotional, and spiritual growth.

In Jewish schools, where we’re concerned with students’ spiritual growth and want our children developing in emotionally and socially successfully ways, an emphasis on grades can run counter to these religious and psychological goals. After all, is there some tally for how a child has deepened religious practice or grown spiritually? Should there be? And what about the progress a child has made in becoming more organized, collaborating successfully on a project, or learning to manage time and emotions well? The latter skills translate into a productive adulthood, but we don’t often stop to teach them, much less measure them in some quantifiable way. So, these are the limitations of grades: they measure some very precise things that some kids can do very well, but they leave us without information about important types of competencies that students may or may not be developing, because grades generally don’t address religious, social, and emotional growth.

How do teachers explain God at all? How do they do so in a Jewish school? The authors in this Passover issue of HAYIDION wrestle with these and other issues, in articles that are sometimes deeply personal and always professionally relevant. We can see clearly how the thought leaders and teachers and heads of school who are featured in these pages have spent many hours pondering, examining, questioning and debating the hows and whys of teaching about God in the classroom. The authors in this issue approach the Big Questions from a wide variety of perspectives and thinkers, but they are united in their concern to bring the God Issue within the classrooms and halls of Jewish day schools.