You’ve been asked to lead a davening class in your school. Whether you’re new to teaching or a seasoned veteran, leading a group in davening is unlike teaching any other discipline.

Picture a typical school morning: your students file into class and, as the first activity of the day, begin tefillah. Within moments of arriving at school, without any serious thought or preparation, they plop into their seats, find their siddurim, the boys put on their tefillin, and they begin daydreaming or catching up on conversations with friends.

It is my strong belief that morning tefillah can be the best part of a student’s day: the most empowering and inspiring part. I can say with absolute clarity that morning tefillah with my students is something I look forward to every single day. I hope that by the end of this essay, it will become evident how this can come about.

What Are We Trying to Accomplish?

Before any strategy, you must answer a question for yourself: what do you want to accomplish in school tefillah?

Is it teaching students the skills and choreography of davening? Acculturating them to communal prayer so they can walk into any shul and feel at home? Giving them a personally meaningful tefillah experience? Helping them build a relationship with God? Or, more modestly, making sure they don’t leave school hating tefillah?

Each answer will lead you to emphasize different elements. A teacher focused on skills will drill fluency; a teacher focused on relationship will protect quiet and space; a teacher focused on community will invest in group cohesion.

My own answer, refined over four decades: to help each student discover the spark within and begin building their own unique, lasting relationship with their Creator, and, at the very minimum, to do no harm along the way. “Each student is a storehouse of holiness; it is the task of the educator to provide the students with their key” (Introduction to Chovot HaTalmidim).

Your answer may be different from mine, and that is fine. I encourage you to sit with the question honestly before your first day. Even if you land somewhere else, I believe the principles below will still serve you, because they concern how we treat students, not only what we hope they achieve.

A word about context. What follows is a reflective piece, drawn from a career spent largely in schools (SAR Academy & SAR High School) where respect for every member of the community, teacher and student alike, is part of the institution’s DNA. I would like to think such a culture is common in our schools, but I do not take it for granted. The practices below depend on that culture; a teacher working in a different environment may need to begin by cultivating the soil before planting these seeds.

One more word of framing. In my experience, younger children are generally happy to sing the songs and follow the teacher’s lead. But as students approach Bar and Bat Mitzvah age, they begin to question and re-evaluate: What is the point of saying words I don’t understand? Does Hashem really care whether I daven? Does He truly listen? I just don’t relate to these words. These are legitimate questions; in fact, they are exactly the correct questions. A healthy adolescent re-evaluates their choices; that is how identity forms. We cannot force a student to daven, and even if we could, coerced prayer would hardly fit Chazal’s definition of tefillah: Avodah SheBalev, the service of the heart.

Everything I have learned about leading school tefillah comes down to four core principles. Each one, below, is followed by the concrete ways I have translated it into daily practice. Try these, or better, find your own ways of bringing each principle to life in your classroom.

Principle One: Respect Each Student and the Relationship Only They Can Build

This is the foundation on which everything else rests. Students need to create their own relationships with God. Rather than forcing students into a predefined relationship, our task is to support them as they develop their own personal connections; and where we cannot reach a student, our task, at the very least, is to do no harm. The underlying goal is for the student to connect to davening to the extent they can, while ensuring they feel safe and respected above all.

Two stories capture this principle better than any argument.

Early in my career, I had a seventh grader who put on his tefillin each morning and then sat quietly through the entire tefillah, not saying a word. He wasn’t disruptive, but nothing I tried could motivate him to daven. As a young teacher, I consulted my principal, who gave me advice I have carried for forty years: “If he is not disrupting, leave him be.” Twenty years later, I encountered that student again, now married and a father. He welcomed me with a warm embrace and told me I had been his favorite teacher in all of grade school. Why? Because, he said, he remembered always being treated with respect.

Years later, at the end of a school year, I received a letter from a high school student thanking me for not forcing davening on him at a time when he simply wasn’t into it. He had been going through a hard time at home and needed a quiet space where he could be left alone. A decade after that, I met this student again, married and training to become a school psychologist. He greeted me with a warm smile and expressed his gratitude for the space he had been given when he needed it most.

Neither of those students davened much in my classroom. Both of them, decades later, remembered the room as a place of respect.

Respect and space are never wasted; students remember them for the rest of their lives.

One caveat before the practices. My principal’s advice hinged on two words: “not disrupting.” Disruption is a different matter entirely, and I return to it in Principle Four.

Here is how this principle translates into practice:

Aim for enduring connection, not classroom compliance. The ultimate goal is a lasting relationship between the student and tefillah. Encourage voluntary commitment beyond the mandatory school service, laying a foundation for students to continue davening long after they leave your classroom.

Support individuation and identity exploration. Adolescence is a time of identity formation. Allow students to take ownership of their tefillah experience and to explore their emerging identities through prayer.

Check in privately, without judgment. When a student is struggling, have a quiet conversation after davening. I open with a simple line: “Hi, I’m just checking in. Is everything okay?” If the student responds with the standard “Everything’s fine,” you can gently describe what you observed and ask what they struggle with in their tefillah. The conversation is also a chance to express your hopes for the student and to define your own role: to convey the gift of davening and to empower them to build their own relationship with their Creator. Throughout, appeal to the best in the student; speak “up” to them, never down.

And when nothing works, help them find the right fit. You are not going to bat a thousand. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is help a student find the right teacher and the right setting for their tefillah. It is not enough to say, “It’s time for you to move on.” Do not abdicate that responsibility; as their teacher, your job is to help them find the right fit.

Principle Two: Be an Authentically Inspired Model

One can only inspire if one is inspired.

As a tefillah teacher, you must model a genuine appreciation for tefillah in your own daily life: authentic, joyful, and connected to the experience of prayer. Avoid authoritarian practices that emphasize compliance and coercion over spirituality and relationship.

כַּמַּיִם הַפָּנִים לַפָּנִים כֵּן לֵב־הָאָדָם לָאָדָם

“As face answers to face in water, so does one’s heart to another’s” (Proverbs 27:19)

What does this look like day to day?

Daven your own tefillah first. I daven my personal tefillah before I get to school (I understand this may not be a reasonable option for everyone). This allows me to be totally present for my students; there is simply no way I could have a meaningful connection with my own tefillah while trying to teach at the same time. I lead my students in davening by teaching them the words of tefillah — reciting, chanting, and singing the words with them.

Share your discoveries. When I encounter a new insight or meaning in my own tefillot, I share it with my students, and I have found the excitement to be contagious for both me and them. Nothing demonstrates that the siddur is a living text quite like a teacher who is still discovering new depths in it after decades.

Share your struggles, too. I also tell my students when my own personal davening that morning was a struggle, when making it meaningful did not come easily. This conveys two lessons no lecture can: one does not always feel the connection to tefillah, and consistency matters precisely on those days.

Guard your positive attitude.  It is easy to fixate on the students who are not davening. I have found that doing so leads to cynicism, and cynicism is toxic in any teaching environment. Instead, focus on what is working and on the students who are davening, and encourage them, in turn, to draw their friends in.

Give yourself permission to have a bad day. Let’s be honest: some days you simply don’t have the headspace, patience, or emotional bandwidth to take on students who are not complying. That’s okay, and you still have choices. One option is to let it go for now and think about how to address it tomorrow, when you can be more reflective. Another is the private check-in conversation described above. And on the days when the davening simply isn’t working, do not take your frustrations out on the students. Hunker down, keep an even keel, and set a modest goal: do no damage. Sometimes you just have to surrender and say, “Today is not the day.” That’s fine. Just don’t take it out on your students.

Principle Three: Make the Words Come Alive

Students will not connect to words that remain opaque. Deliberate, patient teaching of the structure, meaning, and music of the tefillot themselves is what turns rote recitation into something a student can own.

Start the year with an abridged davening. As the Shulchan Aruch teaches at the very beginning of Hilchot Tefillah: less is more. Especially at the start of the school year, I spend a fair amount of time saying very few tefillot, focusing instead on structure and meaning. With Birchot HaShachar, for instance, we examine the structure and what the words and blessings mean. From there I build upward: a few key ideas in Pesukei D’Zimra, careful work on the Shema and the Shemoneh Esrei, and then filling in more tefillot as the year goes on.

Create “mini shout-outs,” verbal anchors for big ideas. Once we have learned a concept, I don’t repeat the entire explanation; a few words serve as an anchor. In the brachot of Kriat Shema, when we reach Ahava Rabbah, our anchor is: never be embarrassed to keep the Torah.

Years later, a student told me what that shout-out had done for her. Her parents were being honored at a non-Jewish gala, in the days when keeping kosher at such an event meant an “airplane” meal. All around her, guests dined on the finest china and the finest foods, while she sat peeling back the aluminum foil from her tray, mortified. And then, she said, our daily shout-out came back to her: never be embarrassed to keep the Torah. She thought about it for a moment, and the embarrassment simply lifted.

Another example: Wednesday’s shir shel yom is the longest of the week, and keeping students engaged to the very last moment is a challenge. So I asked my students to imagine that every word recited in tefillah is a “spiritual diamond” added to their treasury. Wednesday’s long shir shel yom, then, is not a burden; it is an opportunity to collect double the diamonds. And so Wednesday became “Double Diamond Day.” To this day, it is the phrase former students most often bring up when I meet them years later.

In recent years, during the closing month of school, I take this one step further: I create stickers of the year’s mini shout-outs, and the students place them on their laptops, knapsacks, and phone covers, small anchors that travel with them beyond the classroom.

Say everything out loud, often with a song or a specific tempo. This makes it far easier for students to remember and engage with the text. I demonstrate the point with a simple exercise: I start a sentence with the opening verse of Adon Olam and ask the students to finish it. They have no difficulty completing it. Then I ask them to reflect on that phenomenon: the power of song on the heart and the mind. After all, the introductory prayers are called Pesukei D’Zimra, verses of song.

Principle Four: Build a Community and a Space Worthy of Tefillah

Tefillah in school is communal, and the community itself, with its rhythms and its norms, either lifts students up or drags them down.

Foster belonging.  Create tefillah groups where students feel they belong, encouraging positive emotional support and caring among peers. Emphasize accountability and commitment to the group, the very habits that build responsible, competent adults, and involve the students themselves in defining those commitments.

Years ago, a very bright student joined my davening group. He was not into davening, but he was willing to be open. He stayed for a few months and then decided it was time for him to move on, and I did not stand in his way. A few weeks later, he came back and asked if he could rejoin. I agreed, and from that point on something had switched: he was now buying into the program. He stayed with my group for three years, and eventually he began to lead the davening himself, and to lead his fellow students. After high school, he did not opt for a gap year in Israel but went straight to college. When he came back to visit after his first semester, he told me that he attends davening every day at the Hillel, and that he is even leading it. He had found a group where he belonged, and because the belonging was his own choice, it traveled with him.

Redefine roles thoughtfully. Students may see communal roles and responsibilities differently than school administrators do. Be inclusive, and be thoughtful about age and gender when defining roles in tefillah. Emphasize goals that benefit the larger community; activities that build group cohesiveness also build each student’s positive self-concept.

Be clear about your expectations for the space. Create in the student’s mind the aspiration for a space filled with reverence and meaning, something achievable only as a community. At a minimum, all participants must be respectful of those students who do wish to grow and connect in their personal tefillah, even if the student you are addressing is not ready to sign up for that himself just yet.

This is also where the hardest cases live: the disruptive student, the mocker, the charismatic student whose indifference draws others along. With these students I have learned two things. First, they require enormous patience; growth here is measured in years, not weeks. Second, patience toward the individual only works within firm expectations about the environment, and this is where the authority of the school rightly comes in. The institution does not force any student to daven, but it does provide clear boundaries of behavior that protect the davening atmosphere for everyone else. A student may not yet be ready to pray; he is never free to poison the room. The respectful approach to the individual and the school’s guardianship of communal norms are not in tension. Each depends on the other.

J was a ninth grader who would not stop talking during davening. Not occasionally: daily. And so, daily, he received a smile and a gentle reminder to stay focused. It took the entire year, and it was a push and pull the whole way through, requiring an approach that was firm and gentle at once, often in the same sentence. I will be honest: there were days when I was fatigued and simply did not have the bandwidth for him. On those days I gave myself two honest options. Sometimes I invited him to step out and take a break, protecting the room without turning the moment into a battle. Other times I laid out clear consequences and let him consider them, so that the boundary held even when my patience was thin.

I wish I could report a dramatic turnaround. There wasn’t one. For the remainder of his high school career, J’s talkative personality never fully comported with the decorum of the room. But here is what I can report: he showed up every day. And most importantly for his future growth, he left high school without a negative association with davening. That is not a small thing; it may be the whole thing. We do not change students. We can only inspire them, and above all, do no harm. J walked out the door with the door still open.

Patience, it turns out, is not the absence of boundaries. It is what boundaries make possible.

Enlist the community itself. Some of the most effective interventions never came from me at all. I would quietly turn to students who were davening beautifully and ask them to encourage their friends. And I would approach the talkers themselves, appealing not to rules but to their friendships: “Help your friends daven. Don’t be the reason they can’t.” This reframing matters. The talkative student is no longer the target of discipline; he is being handed a responsibility and trusted with his social influence. The same charisma that can empty a room of kavanah can, redirected, protect it. In my experience, students rise to this far more often than they rise to a rebuke, and it teaches the deeper lesson that a davening space belongs to everyone in it, not to the teacher policing it.

A Closing Word

There is no magic bullet, no single easy solution; many factors are at play. What I have come to value most is a healthy balance of patience and humility, toward myself and toward my students.

Ultimately, you have to decide what your goals are for your students during the time you are together. What are the priorities? Return to the question we began with, and let your answer shape which of these practices you lean on most.

At the end of the day, think about the gift you will be giving your students: how much they will grow in their connection and relationship with their Creator. Consider the merit that will be yours every single day that a student picks up a siddur, opens it, and enters into a meaningful relationship with the sacred words of the siddur and with their Creator.

Teaching tefillah is a holy and sacred charge. It has been decided somewhere in the heavens that the neshamot sitting in your classroom are the ones you have been charged with inspiring. Each of us will one day have to give an accounting to our Creator. And if one cannot inspire, then at the very least, do no harm.

I cannot eat for you, I cannot breathe for you, and I cannot daven for you.

Often I tell my students exactly that. But I will help you, if you want to engage in one of the most ancient practices of the Jewish people, a practice that connects you all the way back to the very beginning, to Avraham and Sarah.

This work is a partnership. Be open, be accepting, and don’t pretend you hold the magic bullet.