In my first year of teaching, I taught a student whom we will call Yossi. From the time he started 1^st grade reading groups, Yossi was placed in the lowest track. This pattern persisted through my 11th grade Gemara class. A few weeks into the first semester of 11th grade, Yossi approached me after class to ask me a burning question which he was embarrassed to ask in front of his peers. He asked, “Who is Rabbi Baraita?” I said, “What do you mean?” He responded, “My past teachers kept explaining ‘the Baraita says…’ Who is Rabbi Baraita and why is he referred to as the Baraita?” I unpacked the question, explained that a baraita was a rabbinic teaching not included in the six orders of the Mishna, and encouraged Yossi to ask more questions. Through this disheartening interaction, I realized that Yossi’s question was not rooted in his lack of capacity, but rather in the poor pedagogy of the teachers who introduced him to Gemara study. Twenty-five years later, I merited the opportunity to implement a stronger pedagogy.

We developed a method of inducting students into Talmud learning in a way that helped them to involve themselves in continual reading/interpreting practice, engage deeply with the subject matter, and develop a Jewish belief system that included the importance of ongoing Torah study. More importantly, we shifted the underlying assumptions of the teachers who believed that Talmud needs to be taught the way it has been taught over the past 75 years. Students present different challenges today than the learners who studied in classical 19^th century Lithuanian yeshivot, hence our methods of teaching Talmud need to evolve together with our students. Below is a summary of the new pedagogical model that we successfully tried, with the elements broken down into discrete steps.

We began the year with an overview of the path of Torah SheBe’al Peh from Har Sinai until the writing of the Gemara. Topics included how mesorah was transferred from generation to generation before the Oral Torah was written down, the origin of mahloket, the role the Sanhedrin played and the changes that came with the loss of the Sanhedrin, and the writing down and editing of the Mishna and Gemara. We also had the teachers review core beliefs related to a personal and national relationship with God and the mission of Judaism as laid out by the rabbis. This gave the students a context through which to understand the texts they would be learning, and it introduced topics for students to think about while not necessarily receiving immediate and specific answers to their questions. With a new appreciation for context, students like Yossi might be able to ask a more sophisticated question like: “if Beit Shamai and Beit Hillel argue regarding the required body position for reciting shema, what did people do over the course of the 1300 years between Har Sinai and the moment of that mahloket?”

The students’ study of core beliefs in God at the beginning of the year empowered teachers to incorporate regular reminders of the connection between God and the Torah SheBe’al Peh. Students benefited from studying “inside” the text while simultaneously receiving continuous reminders of the “big beliefs” alongside their study of the Talmud text.

We developed a methodology of giving the students the conclusion alongside the statements of Amoraim–which are usually only a few quotes—in order to provide them with an algorithm for independently figuring out the text of the sugya. When the Gemara digressed onto side topics, the students were unfazed, already knowing where the thread of conversation was going to go. Additionally, the algorithm highlighted the original construction of the Gemara by Ravina and Rav Ashi starting with the statements of Amoraim, differentiated from the later layers of anonymous debate and supporting sources (called the stama deGemara) which were later added by the Savoraim (circa 600). As was to be expected, middle schoolers needed more structure at the beginning to work on the text access skills to understand the overall structure of the Gemara. As they proceeded through the year, they became more independent in accessing and comprehending the text. Conversely, the high schoolers—in order to remain engaged—needed more discussion about the core topics and patterns of arguments, as they had already mastered the text access skills.

We created an electronic graphic organizer for the teachers to imagine, construct, and lay out lesson plans for each class. The organizer included spaces for four categories for each and every class period: content, skill, motivation, and emunah. Content and skill categories reflected typical lesson plans. The motivation category forced the teacher to think of a hook exercise, theme, or embedded idea to bring the class together in an interesting and engaging way. The emunah category, which we defined as not only “belief” but more like “life direction,” filled a certain gap that arises from the fact that the goal of Talmud is not to develop emunah in teenagers, given that the rabbis of the Talmud, made the assumption that emunah was already inculcated into its readers. We make the opposite assumption, intentionally bolstering this area so that our students can approach Talmud learning as a religious experience as well as an intellectually expanding experience.

After the students mastered, each to his own level, decoding, interpreting, comprehending the gestalt of the sugya, and understanding the halakhic and moral messages contained therein, we taught them how to map a page of Gemara and explain the logic flow. While we did this using blank puzzle pieces, this can also be accomplished through mind mapping. We enhanced this process using daily exit tickets that repeated the same questions every day so that the ideas rooted in the questions became ingrained in the students’ thought processes. The exit tickets contained queries such as, “In today’s sugya, pick an important statement and explain why the rabbis included this statement and placed the statement specifically in its location.”

As part of the process of changing the way Talmud was taught and moving away from antiquated methodologies, we needed to change the underlying assumptions of the teachers—that teachers needed to ensure that students could regurgitate their lecture rather than personalize and integrate the learning according to the student’s ability. The previous method worked fine for a small percentage of students whose learning proclivities matched those of the teacher, but the rest of the students did not make much progress in their Talmud study.

When the teachers shifted their core belief to “every student has cognitive modifiability (the ability to intentionally change that person’s brain for better understanding),” a very different and positive result occurred. Failure became feedback. A student measured success based on how far the student traveled, not how far other students traveled at the same time. Helping the teachers shift their underlying assumptions involved assisting them in critically examining the premises that influenced their thoughts. This process took a while as it involved challenging existing perspectives, building new paradigms, and developing new strategies through one-on-one consulting, interviews with students to get feedback, and watching videos of their own teaching with a consultant.

As a result of the shift in perspective, the teachers altered the class flow.

• They continuously asked, “what will the Gemara do next?” Since the teacher already shared where the Gemara was going, the students most often could discern what the next logical steps would be to get there.
• The teachers familiarized themselves with the commentary of R. Asher (commonly known as the Rosh) as the summary with which to guide the students. This allowed the teachers to answer big questions about the strategies of the Gemara text and what the ultimate halakhah might be.
• Emunah was mentioned in every class. Students need a daily dose of outside philosophical clarity to keep the Gemara front and center in order to continue conveying meaning to them. Each student kept a list of theological questions for which he did not yet have satisfactory answers.

Students similar to my former student Yossi benefited from this type of approach still in its early stages. Just the question about what the Gemara would do next made them feel engaged and like they were part of the process instead of passive and compliant. Towards the second half of the year, they even started to risk answering the question and got it right several times.

Many Jewish day schools still approach pedagogy in Talmud as an apprenticeship, with the teacher/rebbe lecturing the students who are supposed to catch on through a figurative process of osmosis, a system that does not work for the majority of today’s students. We, however, want our students to internalize the lessons of learning our Talmud; we never want it to become an exercise in reading comprehension of a foreign language and a strange culture. Adopting the methodology described above allows a greater number of students to master early and intermediate Talmud skills in middle and high school and students may even gain the skill for independent and immersive learning of one of the great gifts in our tradition, our Talmud.

At the pilot school, students ended the first year with an enormous sense of pride. In our interviews, each student spoke of the magic moment when Gemara went from “impossible” to “challenging, but possible!” The teachers spoke of one time they were late coming to their classes because a meeting ran late. They were shocked to enter the classroom to find their students were reviewing the previous day’s material in hevruta without any teachers present. One student asked the teacher, “Why do Rabbi Akiva and his students get quoted so much in the Mishna and baraita?” The teacher paved the way for new understanding with a timeless Gemara response, “Good question, let’s discuss it.”