The Hidden Curriculum of Faith: How School Culture Shapes Religious Development
Barry Kislowicz is a leadership coach and strategic consultant who works with Jewish day schools and nonprofit organizations across North America and Israel. A former Head of School at Fuchs Mizrachi School in Cleveland, Ohio, Rabbi Dr. Kislowicz draws on decades of experience to help leaders think strategically, strengthen their schools, and navigate the opportunities and challenges facing Jewish education.
A student walks out of twelve years of intensive Judaic studies. She has learned Humash with Rashi, sat through years of Talmud, and taken courses in Jewish thought. But ask her, some years later, what shaped her relationship with Torah and with God, and the answer does not usually start with a class. Instead, it starts with the memory of a teacher who treated her with care during a hard stretch, an administrator whose handling of a particularly charged moment stood out, or the way that faculty members handled disagreements and differences of opinion amongst themselves and with students.
Much of Jewish education proceeds on the assumption that faith and religious development is shaped primarily by what we teach. We invest in curriculum, skill development, and pedagogic frameworks, with the assumption that the right content, well-delivered and combined with skill development, will produce strong religious lives. That assumption is not necessarily wrong, but it is certainly incomplete.
Faith, understood broadly as a person’s developing relationship with Torah, with God, and with the Jewish people, is also shaped, often more powerfully, by the students’ day-to-day experience in the classrooms and hallways of our schools. This means that the most consequential work on faith development often happens through channels we did not plan and too rarely examine.
In their 1993 study The Moral Life of Schools, Philip Jackson, Robert Boostrom, and David Hansen spent two years observing classrooms across a range of public, independent, and parochial settings, looking at how moral influence actually flowed. They found that deliberate moral instruction was only one channel among many. Even more impactful were the rules and rituals of the classroom, the substructure of the curriculum itself, the visual environment, the small spontaneous moments when a teacher reacted to something unexpected, and the everyday conduct of the adults. As they inventoried and studied these channels, these researchers found that children’s moral development is more meaningfully impacted by what happens around them than by what has been explicitly taught to them.
The same is true for what impacts our students’ faith and religious development. Teacher-student relationships, school rules—both general and religious—and how they are enforced, and how religious faith is modeled through adult behavior and school rituals, all powerfully impact our students’ growth.
This is not a novel insight. Most educators are aware of this impact. But that awareness remains at a general level and does not benefit from the same focused attention and improvement efforts that we bring to bear in more formal areas of religious instruction.
Taking a focused, rigorous approach to the impact of the school experience on our students’ faith and religious development can be transformative. What follows is an attempt to provide the foundation for understanding and elevating the hidden curriculum of faith development within our middle and high schools.
Authority and Discipline
James Fowler’s research highlights the key faith development transition that is the work of adolescence. This is the age when we move from “synthetic-conventional” faith, in which a young person’s beliefs are largely held in trust from authority figures and community, toward “individuative-reflective” faith, in which we begin to take ownership of those beliefs and to examine them.
Elementary school students, typically in the synthetic-conventional stage, see their teachers and parents as the embodiment of their faith. They are often happy to follow directions, join in ritual celebrations, and generally follow adult religious leadership. As these same students approach adolescence and early adulthood, they are no longer satisfied to follow the example of adults and, instead, need to take ownership of their own faith.
This transition involves testing boundaries related to religious norms and rituals held by adults and institutions in their community. And while this is a natural process, it represents a challenge for teachers and schools attempting to uphold community standards.
How can schools approach discipline generally, and in religious areas in particular, in a way that supports religious development?
We must recognize that the way Judaic studies teachers, principals, and other religious figures exercise authority plays directly into students’ development. This does not mean that we cannot hold the line around norms from dress code to tefilah, but it means that we must do so in a way that supports rather than undercuts student ability to internalize these commitments as their own.
Doing so means maintaining standards while displaying patience, kindness, and understanding. This is much easier said than done when dealing with enervating adolescent behavior, but the fact remains that when we display anger, impatience, and frustration when enforcing religious norms, students are more likely to associate the norm with the negative emotion and less likely to incorporate it into their own faith development process.
On the other hand, when we display a commitment to religious norms within the context of a kind and understanding relationship, even when we enforce consequences for students who violate these norms, we create space for students to slowly internalize these norms as their own. Our entire tefilah curriculum may be less impactful than the look on a teacher’s face when reprimanding a student for talking or encouraging them to participate.
On a broader level, viewing our school rules as long-term educational tools rather than only as short-term behavior management guides may impact how we shape the rules themselves. To take one example, imagine how we might design the dress code if we focused on how it would impact students’ developing perspective on communal and religious belonging, rather than how the kids look when they walk into school on Monday.
The aim is not to abandon standards but to reexamine how rules and their enforcement contribute to our students’ faith development. If we build our systems primarily for enforcement and consistency we may cause unseen damage. If we build them to preserve relationship and meaning, even while maintaining standards, we can provide a framework for long-term religious growth.
Teacher-Student Relationships
Students’ faith development cannot be separated from their personal development. Students see their teachers as authority figures, and they want to be seen by those teachers as individuals. They are eager to feel known and valued as real people.
Students who have the experience of being known by a religious figure or teacher, of being asked a real question from someone who cares about their answer, learn that their religious community produces adults who are interested in them. As a result, they come to see the religious community as a place in which they can explore their own personal development.
This is not merely a matter of gregariousness on the part of the teacher. Plenty of outgoing teachers do not actually know their students, and some quiet and reserved teachers certainly do. What students are looking for, whether they are conscious of it or not, is whether a teacher cares to know them as an individual. Does my principal remember what I told them last week? Does my teacher notice when something is off with my mood? Do they ask follow-up questions?
To put it in Fowler’s terms, faith development in adolescence is focused on moving faith held in trust with others into a student’s own internal beliefs. That is a much easier bridge to cross when students believe that those holding their faith in trust know and care for them as people.
Here as well, the implication for schools is easier to say and harder to implement. Structures which enable teachers to know students well, including advisory systems, smaller learning groups, sustained relationships across multiple years, and enough time in the day for informal conversations, are not extra enhancements which we can include when we have the time and funding. These are the core elements of religious education which help students feel known and thereby enable them to internalize their own religious commitments.
Modeling Faith
Adolescents’ work to internalize faith held in trust also means that students will keenly observe how the adults in their school community model their own faith in practice. Children at this age are famous for pointing out the hypocrisy of the adults around them. Right or wrong, their often biting critique shows how carefully they observe the adults in their lives.
Most religious educators are committed to their own practice. However, the irony is that it is precisely in school where we may have the most trouble modeling that practice. It is much harder to engage in meaningful prayer when we are trying to ensure the decorum of students around us. Similarly, it is often much easier to model our commitment to Jewish learning in our free time than it is to do so within the school building.
In truth, the challenge is much broader than our conduct in the religious sphere. Whether our word is reliable to students and colleagues, how we speak about current events and those with whom we disagree, and how we carry ourselves in times of stress are all part of how we model our own faith in ways that will impact student development.
Imagine how student experience might change if teachers and school leaders devoted the same time and energy to thinking about how we model our faith in practice as we do to tefilah policy or lesson planning.
To be clear, schools are run by humans. That means we will never perfect the full range of our behavior the same way we might perfect a particular pedagogy or curriculum. The goal is not perfection; it is deep engagement driven by an understanding that how we act on a minute-by-minute basis is a crucial ingredient in our students’ religious development.
The Challenge
The fabric of our school culture, from authority, to relationships, to the conduct of adults in the building, constitutes a powerful hidden religious curriculum. Elevating and enhancing it is a complex and demanding task, but if we truly care about our students’ faith development, this is an area we cannot afford to ignore.
Our challenge is to approach this hidden curriculum with the same care we give to our formal curricula, to set goals for its ongoing improvement, and to develop behaviors and habits that create an environment in which our students’ faith can genuinely grow.
Barry Kislowicz is a leadership coach and strategic consultant who works with Jewish day schools and nonprofit organizations across North America and Israel. A former Head of School at Fuchs Mizrachi School in Cleveland, Ohio, Rabbi Dr. Kislowicz draws on decades of experience to help leaders think strategically, strengthen their schools, and navigate the opportunities and challenges facing Jewish education.
From The Editor: Fall 2026
For part of the time that I was studying for my semikha I had a roommate whom I admired for his faith. It was pure, simple, genuine, rock solid. My friend never seemed to question, to waver. I sometimes challenged him, but he was unfazed. I often wished that some of that would rub off on me. Nope. He remained steadfast; I remained struggling.
The Courage to Ask
An eleventh grader this year wrote about her faith in the wake of October 7th:
In the weeks following…, I found it challenging to believe in a G-d that could allow such horrors to be done to humans, especially His chosen people…. I found myself wondering, “How could a merciful G-d put us in this world knowing the immense suffering that would ensue?” He is supposed to be looking out for us and protecting us…Eventually, my doubts started spreading into other areas of my life. Brachot lost their meaning, teffilot seemed to have lost their power, and motivation for some mitzvot completely disappeared. My day-to-day life lost its “light” without the meaning or motivation to guide me through my days.
Creating the Conditions for Faith: Emunah as Encounter, Not Instruction
Every summer my paternal grandmother, a devout Orthodox Jew from the Bronx, took me on holiday to the beaches of Far Rockaway. On Shabbat morning we would stroll just two blocks from our breezy apartment to the synagogue steps—though it was less a walk than a journey to another place and time. Modeled after the grand edifices of Europe, the sanctuary was physically stunning: soaring, cathedral-like ceilings, colorful stained-glass windows, the women’s balcony above, the men’s section below. The service was scheduled to begin at nine, but on this Shabbat we arrived a full hour early. Sitting together in the silence, alone in the large empty hall, I asked her why we had come so soon.
In God We Trust: Teaching Bitahon
In the immediate wake of October 7, 2023, the instinct of many Jewish educators worldwide was clear: we needed to teach hope. Many of us clung to the timeless words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “It is not too much to say that Jews kept hope alive, and hope kept the Jewish people alive.” Hope was our life-support system and one of the messages of every piece of Torah I subsequently taught.
What I Do Matters: Educating for Avodat Hashem
When Jewish educators in the modern West discuss “educating for faith,” we may unconsciously import a framework that does not quite fit our tradition. The dominant model in the broader cultural conversation, shaped largely by Protestantism, understands religious faith primarily as a personal relationship with the Divine: belief in God’s existence and love, and the cultivation of trust in and intimacy with a personal God. This is a coherent and meaningful vision, and in fact, we have much to learn from our Protestant colleagues. But this is not the most distinctively Jewish one.
From “What” to “So What”: Educating for Emunah Through Culture, Curriculum, Relationships, and Questions
We begin with a firm belief that each student has a neshamah—a soul, a divine spark—and with it an inherent capacity for emunah, or faith. Our task is not to try to create something new for them. It is to awaken and strengthen that inheritance, to reveal what is theirs already and to help students make it personally their own.
For us, the goal of Jewish education is to have Jewish identity expressed in thought and action. That identity is grounded in an awareness of God (Hashem), a personal relationship with God, and responsibility toward other people. This is not one objective among many; it is the mission of our school.
The Prophet as Rebel: Finding Faith in the Emotional-Psychological Classroom
I stepped into the classroom mid-year as both the homeroom and Tanakh teacher for a group of six 9th graders at an Israeli emotional-psychological school. These were students for whom the traditional educational system had often been a site of failure rather than growth. Most struggled with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) or had other neurodivergent challenges. Most were “talkers”—highly intelligent, deeply critical of systems, and, with one exception, entirely non-religious.
Faith in the Future: What Jewish School Leadership Has Taught Me About Emunah
It is often said that Judaism is a religion of deed, not creed. In Jewish day schools, that distinction is often taken one step further. Schools teach texts, practices, language, and history, but often hesitate to name faith as an educational goal. In pluralistic settings in particular, educators are wary of imposing theology or defining belief.
Faith and Doubt: Lessons from a Modern Orthodox Scholars Program
Three years ago, I launched what is now the Sloan Scholars Program, an enrichment program rooted in our Modern Orthodox mission to integrate rigorous Torah study with the best of worldly knowledge. Through seminars, readings, guest speakers, cultural outings, and independent research, students explore enduring questions at the intersection of Torah and modernity. Over time, however, I noticed that many of the questions students most wanted to investigate were not merely intellectual; they were existential. Students asked why Jewish traditions developed as they did, how halakha should respond to contemporary challenges, and, perhaps most fundamentally, how a Modern Orthodox Jew should live in a complex modern world.
It Takes a Community
In my role as board president, and as a parent of both graduates and current students, I frequently receive feedback from parents, staff, and administrators about the state of the school. Some of the most impassioned conversations revolve around the question of how schools can help students deepen their faith. Few, however, are able to articulate precisely what this means. For some, faith grounds and manifests itself in resilience. For others, it is a spiritual attachment expressed through greater religious observance, prayer, or ritual practice. Faced with this ambiguity, schools often attempt a little of everything. They expand informal programming, encourage visible religious behavior, and offer courses in Jewish philosophy. Yet these well-intentioned efforts are often premised on the assumption that faith is a discrete educational outcome.
Assessing Faith: The Gift We Owe Our Students
Faith is one example of a “non-testable” priority that Jewish day schools have. In a recent article for 18Forty, Hillel Rapp identifies inspiration as one of the four pillars of Jewish high school. If educating for inspiration, or faith, is as important as academic learning, it is actually essential for schools to find some way to assess and report on the progress, at the time that it’s happening. Otherwise, we run the risk of telling students that this is a core part of our purpose, while showing them that we actually only care about math and science. To be sure, I am not suggesting that we give students a grade on faith. Instead, we need to get back to the core of the purpose of assessment and then use that information to set goals for future growth.
Educating for Faith Through the Arts
When I learned to paint, my father told me to pay attention to light and shadows, there is something spiritual, otherworldly, but also recognizable, in captured light. Like in Rembrandt. Maybe he had read once that Rav Kook suggested that Rembrandt was blessed with a vision of the holy light secreted away at creation.
I never asked him, as he died when I was 14 and most of my questions came later. I wanted to believe in a rational world, yet met a world that didn’t make sense but allowed us to trust in ourselves and our own rationality. Where did God and religion fit in there? At moments in my young adulthood when faith seemed far, I would sometimes find glimmers of it in visual aesthetic experiences; the light of the Shabbat candles and the moments when the sun slips away.
Doubt as a Catalyst for Faith
Jewish day schools today educate students in a cultural environment shaped by distraction, rapid information flow, and exposure to competing value systems. For many students, religious language and practice can feel inherited rather than chosen, and belief can appear fragile or performative. In this context, the central challenge for Jewish education is not simply how to transmit faith, but how to cultivate a form of faith that is resilient, reflective, and capable of growth.
I submit that faith in K-12 Jewish education does not develop primarily through doctrinal instruction or rote assent. Instead, it emerges through lived experience, responsibility, and structured encounters with doubt. Rather than treating doubt as a threat, Jewish education can frame it as a catalyst for deeper commitment.
Faith Without Dogma: A Developmental Approach to Jewish Spiritual Education
Morah Elana gathers her students on the carpet in the morning. Each student sits in their place, though a few still squirm restlessly. But the routine begins, as the teacher and students recite together with the hand motions:
Personal Pathways to Emunah for a Diverse Student Body
AllIssuesJournalCreditsLinoy Even-Kesef is a Judaic Studies and Hebrew educator at Oakland Hebrew Day School (California). She is also engaged in research and writing on Jewish education, Hebrew language instruction, spirituality, and values-based learning. Dr....
Creating Space for Lifelong Conversations, Difficult Questions and Spiritual Growth is Jewish Education
Introduction Jewish educators need to make a radical shift in how we teach both children and adults about the Divine. Educators must be empowered to discuss God openly and often, ensuring that students’ spiritual identities evolve alongside their intellectual development. I learned about this from speaking to my congregants—highly intelligent professors and professionals—yet most had not revisited their concepts of the Divine since their Benai Mitzvah at age 13. This raised critical pedagogical and spiritual questions for me. How do individuals become spiritually stuck? How do we facilitate spiritual growth? How do people become spiritually stagnant? How do we as Jewish educators prevent our current Benai Mitzvah from becoming not only stuck in their 13-year-old theology, but also
And Both are True: Mimicry and Authenticity in Educating for Faith
Every teacher wants to make a difference in their students’ lives, and educating for faith involves relationship building. Jewish faith is founded on an individual’s relationship with God, the Land of Israel, Torah, and the Jewish People. Teachers who want to help students build their faith need to build relationships with their students which support, but do not supplant, the students’ relationships with the foundations of Jewish faith. Similar to the approach used to guide skill development in academic, behavioral, and social-emotional learning, where modeling, direct instruction, or coaching techniques may be effective, the teacher needs to step aside at the appropriate juncture to encourage independence. Emulation of role models can be a useful first stage, but mimicry that does not advance beyond imitation may impede authentic religious growth and development.
Developing Wholeheartedness
In the introduction to his 11th century book Duties of the Heart, R. Bahya Ibn Pakuda poses a question that Jewish educators continue to struggle with today. Bahya asks why he cannot find any source in rabbinic texts that describes the inner life of the Jew. He knows there are mitzvot to learn and perform, he knows that there are intellectual concepts to attain and reason with but where are, what he calls, “The Duties of the Heart?” The book that he writes, one of the most popular Jewish books for 1000 years, starts to enumerate these Duties and weighs them alongside the mitzvot and de’ot, what he identifies as the “Duties of the Limbs.”
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