Jewish Portal of
Teacher Education
The online resource of pedagogical and academic content on teaching and Jewish education
Section archive - Formal Education
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378 items
71
Jewish prayer may be conceived as a self-reflective conversation between the supplicant and the Divine, an anchor in moments of challenge or success, and a tool for clarifying values, meaning and purpose. Acquisition of tefilla (prayer) skills is an important goal during adolescence, and psychological and biological changes occurring during adolescence accentuate the relevance of positive tefilla experiences. Appropriate engagement of middle school and high school students by the Yeshiva school community can play a significant role in the development of an adolescent’s Jewish identity and lifelong commitment to prayer. The purpose of this study was to explore factors critical to student engagement in tefilla during adolescence, particularly those that may create a foundation for lifelong tefilla practice.
Published: 2017
Updated: Jun. 28, 2017
72
Nearly one year ago, Mechon Hadar, in partnership with Beit Rabban Day School, released the Standards for Fluency in Jewish Text and Practice, as an attempt to contribute to the answer to this question. This educational resource paints a portrait of fluency for students in nursery through eighth grade – articulating skills to be developed, defining a canon of texts to be mastered, and formulating dispositions to be cultivated so that students can grow into empowered Jewish adults who can carry Torah into the future.
Published: 2017
Updated: Jun. 21, 2017
73
It sounds like a Jewish mother’s nightmare: a preschool class held outdoors in the desert. But parents in this remote Israeli town drop off their children at Gan Keshet every weekday during the school year, setting them free to cook on a campfire, whittle sticks with switchblades and search for scorpions. Class goes on rain (rare) or shine (intense). Gan Keshet, which means “rainbow kindergarten” in Hebrew, is the country’s first “forest kindergarten” – and it’s public. Thanks to local media coverage and word of mouth, parents have lined up to enroll their children and educators across Israel have sought to emulate the model.
Published: 2017
Updated: Jun. 19, 2017
74
Numerous studies have emphasized the relationship between success of policies of inclusion and acceptance and accommodation of students with intellectual disabilities in mainstream settings and teachers’ positive attitudes toward them. Using semi-structured interviews and interpretive and constructivist strategies, the present study qualitatively analyzes the attitudes of 40 inclusive teachers regarding the inclusion of pupils with intellectual disabilities in mainstream elementary school settings in Israel.
Published: 2017
Updated: Jun. 07, 2017
75
This article examines the impact of contact-based educational encounter strategies of shared learning on Jewish–Arab relations in Israel. It analyses a programme of education for shared life that takes place in a mixed (75% Jewish/25% Arab) city at the centre of Israel since 2012. The programme aims to mitigate Jewish–Arab relations in the city amidst tensions resulting from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, unequal power relations and hostilities between the groups. Uniquely, it assimilates shared life education into the generally separate educational system in the city, and uses methods of shared learning – adopted and adjusted in part from an educational approach developed in Northern Ireland.
Published: 2017
Updated: May. 23, 2017
76
As part of a larger study of student understandings of rabbinics—what it is, how it is learned, and what it’s for—it was clear to the research team that it would be important to include the voices of day school educators who teach rabbinics. We interviewed ten educators, including those who teach rabbinics and those who supervise its teaching.
Published: 2017
Updated: May. 03, 2017
77
The effectiveness of a short interactive storybook-reading intervention programme delivered by a kindergarten teacher to develop language and print-concept skills was examined in 30 Hebrew-speaking kindergarten children exhibiting different levels of emergent literacy skills. Post-intervention, the intervention group showed a clear advantage over a control group on most measures, including vocabulary, morphology, phonological awareness and print concepts.
Published: 2017
Updated: Apr. 26, 2017
78
The academic benefits of language immersion have been known for over 50 years and, in the case of Hebrew, for at least the past 25 years, since two Australian professors of linguistics, Tim McNamara and Edina Eisikovits, and I collaborated on a landmark study of Hebrew language immersion in a Jewish day school in Melbourne. The findings on attitudes toward Hebrew language study are more recent: this month, the results of a study of attitudes toward Hebrew language learning in 41 Jewish day schools across North America were published by Professors Alex Pomson and Jack Wertheimer.
Published: 2017
Updated: Apr. 19, 2017
79
A quantitative arts-based study was conducted with high school juniors and seniors at a community Jewish school in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This group represented a diverse mixture of students who populate the school in relation to gender, involvement in school life, and religious denominations. Students were prompted to draw a religious Jew and the images were scored based on five different markers.
Published: 2017
Updated: Apr. 19, 2017
80
This paper argues that American modern Orthodoxy is facing a crisis caused at least in part by problems of student identity formation. A range of ethnographic research conducted over the last decade suggests that modern Orthodox students feel increasingly disengaged from religious studies classes—and that this disconnection is a factor in the movement’s decline. I argue that student disengagement may be a result of these schools’ inability to accommodate students’ own epistemological commitments to religious pluralism and autonomy, as well as the mainly secular American concerns central to their developing personal identities.
Published: 2017
Updated: Apr. 19, 2017