Amira Soleimani is the Head of the Bible Department at the Frankel Jewish Academy. Amira earned her B.A. at the University of Michigan and received her M.A from Tel Aviv University in Talmud. Rabbi Peter Stein teaches Bible and Rabbinics at the Frankel Jewish Academy in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He holds Rabbinic Ordination and an M.A. in Talmud from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Two teachers reflect on working in a school which is continuously working to creating a culture of ongoing professional development.

Creating a culture of learning in a school begins at the top. If we, as teachers, want to inspire our students to become lifelong learners, we can best accomplish this goal by modeling our own learning for our students. To do this successfully requires an environment that values and supports teacher learning and where we, in turn, are inspired by the ongoing learning of our supervisors and our peers.

Toward this end, we have been fortunate to begin our careers in teaching at the Frankel Jewish Academy of Metropolitan Detroit (FJA). At FJA, lifelong learning is not just a value, it is policy. From the moment we set foot in the school, we were inducted into a culture of New Teacher Study Groups, mentorship opportunities and constant collaboration that has supported and nurtured our growth as teachers every step of the way.

We have seen how this culture of learning has impacted our own development as teachers and its subsequent and direct impact on student learning. We would like to reflect in this article on four aspects of this culture of learning that we have felt most strongly in our work at FJA – non-judgmental culture, risk taking, peer-to-Peer learning, and direct impact on student learning. We will do this be reflecting on our own experiences as teachers in a school which encourages and supports ongoing teacher learning.

Peter’s experience

One result of the learning community created at FJA is that teachers can work and grow in a non-judgmental atmosphere. Since everyone is understood to be engaged in a process of growth, it is culturally acceptable to not know how to handle every situation. Whether facing a difficult classroom management issue or looking for the best way to structure a lesson or even wanting to clarify one’s own understanding of material to be taught, the culture of learning creates a comfortable environment to admit that one needs help and then to seek out other members of the staff who can provide it knowing that that they will do so graciously and without judging you for needing to ask.

As a first year teacher, I found this culture itself to be an extremely important part of the support structure the school offered to new teachers. On a range of issues big and small, I found myself turning frequently to other teachers and administrators for advice on how to handle challenges I was facing. For example, as I was developing the assignment for the first paper of the year in my ninth grade Bible class, it was unclear to me exactly on what basis I would grade students’ work. Was I grading on specific content? On the strength of arguments? What role should good writing play? For help, I turned to several teachers in the English department who gladly shared with me the grading rubric their department uses for all ninth grade papers. I also solicited advice from a number of Jewish studies teachers and used all of the information I learned to develop a rubric that made sense for my class. Asking for help was easy because I knew I was not being judged – the teachers I asked knew I was a rabbi whose training was in Jewish content, not developing grading rubrics. They were happy to help me learn the art of teaching while respecting and valuing the strengths that I was able to contribute to our school.

I enjoyed the same level of comfort and openness from my administrators. On one particularly difficult day, my head of school listened empathetically and offered advice after I explained that I had no idea how to handle a devastatingly disruptive and complex behavior situation in one of my classes. On another day, I sat in his office and asked him to clarify some points of Hebrew grammar I needed to teach from the Biblical grammar textbook he had written. Still later in the year, my dean helped me think out the best way to handle a student whom I caught cheating. While she letme know how she would handle it, she left the final decision up to me, realizing that this experience was part of my own growth and learning as a teacher.

In all of these encounters, I felt comfortable sharing my vulnerability and uncertainty with those responsible for supervising me because I knew that they viewed these as growth opportunities. I was not worried that they would view me as incompetent because I did not know how to handle a situation that was new to me. I did not worry that my job might be on the line if I asked too many questions and exposed my weaknesses. Indeed, I was very open during my interview for the position about my weaknesses, and they, in turn, made clear that my desire to grow and continue my own learning were part of what made me an attractive candidate. With that understanding on the table, our relationship flourished and along with it my confidence and effectiveness as a teacher.

This culture of growth and learning leads in turn to a rich culture of risk taking. As a teacher, when I feel supported rather than judged, I am more likely to experiment with new and innovative approaches in my classroom.

This past year, I had the privilege of teaching a Bible seminar to a small group of eleventh grade students with high-level skills and significant commitment to Jewish life and learning. One of my goals for this class was to help craft a cadre of young Jewish leaders capable of teaching from deep within the tradition. After spending six weeks learning the prophet Amos together as a class, I asked each student to learn one additional minor prophet independently, write a short paper about the prophet’s life and work, and then teach an entire 45 minute class to the rest of the group about their prophet. When I shared this assignment with my dean she commented that it was a very hard and ambitious assignment, but she encouraged me to go ahead with it and agreed to teach a session on pedagogy to my students to help them think about how to approach their day as teacher.

Being thrown into the teacher’s seat at age 17 was perhaps more than my students had bargained for, but the assignment became an opportunity for real growth. Each student was forced to struggle with the challenge of how to meaningfully convey their prophet’s life while holding their peers’ attention for 45 minutes. Each one approached the challenge in a different way, some more successfully and some less. As a formal assessment, this assignment confirmed for me that my students had learned something significant about the minor prophets. But more importantly, my students shared with me that the assignment had opened their eyes to what it really takes to be a teacher. My dean’s support and the culture of risk taking gave me the confidence to push my students past their bounds of comfort, resulting in a broadening of their worldview and a unique opportunity to consider their role in passing on the Jewish tradition.

Amira’s experience

At the Frankel Jewish Academy, collaboration has a profound impact on the teaching culture. Last year, I was invited to join the school’s team of mentors. I was both excited for the opportunity to grow into a new role and nervous. If I was to become a guide by the side for a colleague, did this mean that I had to view my own teaching practice as a completed project from which others could learn? This obviously could not be the case. I still felt that my own growth as a teacher had not yet peaked. When I attended my first mentor meeting, known as the Mentor Study Group, I walked into a room with a dozen of the school’s most accomplished veteran teachers. For them, mentoring was not only an acquired skill set, it was a practice they seemed to have perfected.

Halfway through the agenda, one of the veteran teachers expressed that she was at times envious of her mentee because she too wanted a mentor. She wanted the renewed opportunity to look at her teaching practice with fresh eyes in order to improve her skill. I was both surprised and relieved to hear this sentiment echoed by my other colleagues in the room. Within minutes a plan was devised for all of the mentors to pair up and visit each other’s classrooms. The goal that emerged from this process was twofold. First, there was the immediate aspiration to improve our own teaching practice. Second, we would use our observations to identify signs of higher order thinking that we could share with our mentees and help them integrate these objectives into their lessons. At this moment I understood the essence of our teaching culture. Everyone in our school is a learner – regardless of age, role, or position. By the end of the meeting I felt reassured about my new challenge as a mentor. I was reminded that, regardless of the stage you are at, teaching is a limitless process of growth.

While the personal feeling of professional accomplishment is exhilarating, the greatest beneficiaries of this growth process are undoubtedly our students. The facets where this is evident at my school are endless, however, I wish to describe three encounters I experienced in the last academic year.

During the winter, my department decided to focus one meeting on the task of teaching Torah to on-level students in the original biblical Hebrew. The challenges related to this goal are vast, spanning from the heterogeneous language backgrounds of the students to the classroom time available to scaffold this skill. At this meeting, each of the teachers shared the method(s) implemented in his/her classroom. We discussed a variety of factors and agreed upon the most effective approach. Weeks later, one colleague mentioned that he had adopted the teaching method in his classroom and that the students were able to conquer full verses in Hebrew as a result. This enabled the teacher to extend the conversation surrounding a Rashi commentary further, because the students now saw the same gap in the verse as our revered medieval commentator. Teacher collaboration refines curriculum, strengthening the learning that transpires within the walls of our individual rooms. It enables us to be more responsive to student needs because we are no longer thinking as individuals, but rather as a team.

A second situation arose when I was teaching the final unit of the ninth grade Bible curriculum, Korah’s rebellion in Numbers 16. This year, I felt as though my students understood the content of the story but were not evaluating the chapter’s genealogical rivalries in a way that would help them internalize and assess the unit’s big ideas. Knowing that the ninth grade students study George Orwell’s Animal Farm, I reached out to the English Department for help. I spoke with the English instructors to learn how the book is taught and which particular themes emerge from their discussions. This series of conversations helped me reassess my teaching practice. In the end, I had my class explore the deeper tensions within Korah’s rebellion through the lens of Animal Farm. Not only did students display high levels of understanding on their assessments, they seemed far more invested in our classroom debates.

I wish to frame the final encounter that I will share with the wise words of Bianca Barquin, a facilitator and coach at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Standards and Benchmarks program. She told me that it is not enough to walk the walk and talk the talk; rather, in teaching one must walk the talk. In high school, teenagers spend four years of their lives trying to determine who they are and who they want to become. I believe the greatest impact FJA’s culture has on our students is that for four years students see their role models walking the talk of being lifelong learners. Each and every time a colleague sat in my classroom this year, inevitably a handful of students would inquire with the same perplexed voice: why is our math teacher in our Bible teacher’s classroom? Why did the Hebrew teacher come by to visit during class? I would always respond with the truth, namely, that we want to be better. We want to identify places we can grow as teachers and we want to embrace the feedback we get. I believe that this information sits somewhere deep within my students. They look to us teachers as role models and our genuine passion for learning is not lost on them.

Conclusion

As two teachers in the early stages of our careers, we feel fortunate to work within the learning community at FJA. The support at our school has enabled us to reach out to our colleagues for assistance and inspiration, embrace risks without the fear of being judged, and see our own potential to grow as teachers. Just like the day we applied for our teaching positions at FJA, we still recognize that in the end everything we do is for the benefit of our students. We hope our students will embrace the idea that although a day will come when they will graduate school forever,they will never graduate from being learners.