Category: 21st Century Learning (Spring 2014)

Rabbi Elchanan Jay Weinbach is the Executive Chairman of Project Kodachrome, a non-profit venture developing Blended Learning curriculum and alternative school models, and Principal of the Great Schools Consulting Group. He has served as Head of School at Kohelet Yeshiva High School in Philadelphia, the Shalhevet School in Los Angeles, and Principal at both the Jewish Educational Center (J.E.C.) in Elizabeth, New Jersey and Hillel High School in Ocean, New Jersey.

Elchanan Weinbach presents an innovative approach to Jewish studies with significant educational and financial benefits.

Mekorot Blended Learning seeks to improve both the quality and affordability of Jewish day schools by producing curriculum in Judaic Studies for students in grades five through high school that are teacher-led, student-centered, differentiated, and employ Blended Learning. Better education and lower cost creates a virtuous cycle of sustainability.

In this article we will explain our Design Thinking approach by defining the problem to be solved, presenting the motivation of the persons who want the problems solved, our idea for solving them, our prototype (Mekorot Learning), and our plans for testing the proposed solution.

Project Kodachrome is a non-profit organization created in 2013 that seeks to improve Jewish education by advancing enhanced models of education in Middle and High school. The product of collaboration between a high-level funder of a school and myself – the school’s former Head of School – the project has three initiatives, of which Mekorot Learning is by far the largest. The funder is a self-educated technology entrepreneur, and both he and I are strong believers in self-paced learning and individualized course of study. At the same time we were grounded in the reality of the marginal sustainability of the current day school model and the challenge of attracting first-rate Jewish studies teachers. As a result, the funder provided over $1million dollars of seed money to produce a Tanakh prototype which could be scaled up into a complete Judaic curriculum.

There are two intertwined problems Mekorot seeks to address: educational improvement and financial sustainability.

The education challenge

Every Tanakh class operates within certain limiting constraints. In the current classroom model a valuable segment of the instructor’s time is spent on essential tasks that rest at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy (Note: While we have based our work on the Understanding by Design model, for this article I have referenced Bloom’s taxonomy for its more universal familiarity). Tanakh study is particularly demanding of both of the lowest levels of the taxonomy – Knowledge and Comprehension. Knowledge includes mastery of terminology rooted in second and third languages that span different eras historically and therefore often have conflicting conventions. Bringing students to basic mastery of text for even simple stories is time-consuming, both because of language acquisition and because appreciation of the narrative requires knowledge of the conventions of societies whose history and culture are usually unknown to the student. Additionally, in most but not all Jewish day schools, there is a canon of traditional interpreters to be added to the basic knowledge (for Bloom, this is included in Comprehension). While an instructor or school may choose to bypass elements of skill or knowledge acquisition, doing so undermines the richness of intertextual interpretation that awaits at the higher levels of the taxonomy and which – along with the textual skills and classical knowledge base – is an explicit goal of many schools and almost all Orthodox schools. Furthermore, textual mastery is a strong predictor of later engagement with Jewish texts.

To develop the students’ skill base, instructors dedicate time to introducing or reviewing the narrative, listening to students read the text, and assessing their knowledge of the translation of the texts and often the grammatical construct of specific words (root, prefix, and suffix). As with all skill instruction, this is timeintensive and individual needs vary to the extreme, even in more homogeneous or “tracked” classrooms. Additionally, as a rule the pace of skill instruction defaults to the mean level (“the middle”), which marginalizes the effect and efficiency for both advanced and more needy students. For the more skills-needy students, absent time-intensive early intervention and remediation the skill gap increases with each grade as the pattern reinforces itself. At the high school level, many a student is underserved, either because their strong literary and thinking skills are misaligned with their weaker textual skills, relegating them to class placements that leave them underserved intellectually and religiously, or – for the weakest students – their lack of proficiency places them at-risk for weakened commitment to their Jewish future. With curricular goals set and demands on instructional time what they are, the instructor has little opportunity to achieve the meta-goal: impacting the life of each student.

In sum, properly differentiating instructions of skills and fixed knowledge to maximize the little available class time is a herculean, and perhaps quixotic, challenge.

The financial challenge

The cost of Jewish education works against Jewish continuity. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether the system can sustain the next economic “adjustment”; another loss of 15% to the system will lead to a significant diminution in educational quality far more profound than what resulted from the adjustment in 2008, most especially for our neediest learners. Finally, the situation is already dire in communities that lack the mass of available students to fill their open seats. The cost of homogeneous classes at the upper levels is draining their already meager resources. In sum, with the historic norm of an economic downturn every 7-8 years we are only a few years away from an unprecedented financial crisis in Jewish education.

Mekorot’s educational benefits

The basic building block of the learning experience is knowledge of the narrative in the text and the proper reading and translation of the text, including the development of the student’s vocabulary. With basic skill acquisition – reading, translation and foundational knowledge – being supported or provided by the program, the instructor is free to focus on providing students with higher-level learning at an individualized pace as well.

A Mekorot unit includes:

Reading the perek in Ivrit, simple English, and a graphic novel, all with accompanying assessments
Detailed translation of a few pesukim, using a vocabulary app to build translation and Ivrit skills
Detailed presentation of a few commentaries: Review of perek themes using analytical literary skills
Development of skills that provide deeper understanding of the Navi (map skills for Yehoshua, military strategy for Shoftim/ Melakhim, linking Gemara to Navi)
Presentation by leading Navi teachers
Tests on mastery
A Project-Based Learning segment
Advanced commentaries for the strongest students

By moving most of the 40% of class time dedicated to skill development and introduction of the text of the commentaries from instructor to Mekorot, we have achieved two outstanding educational benefits: improved teacher-student interaction, and differentiation that benefits even the fastest learners.

To understand this more clearly let’s look at how a two-week unit in Tanakh might unfold using Mekorot.

Blended Learning timetable

1: Sample School Time Allocation for 2-Week Unit

Activity	%	Student	Teacher
Routine Class Management	5%	16 min	16 min
Teacher-led class	25%	80 min	80 min
Small Group Activities - Remediation - Mini lesson - Enrichment - Drill/practice	15%	48 min	199 min
Project work	15%	48 min	25 min
Online learning instruction	40%	128 min	0 min
Total Time	100%	320	320

Chart 2 presents another way to think about how Blended Learning can work. Considering a 2-week unit broken up into 20-minute time blocks, the chart displays what each of five ability groups might be engaged in at one time. In the chart, Group 1 represents the most able students, and Group 5 the least able. Column 1 indicates the time units in 20-minute blocks; the middle set of columns lists what activity each group is engaged in (online lesson, time with Instructor, project work, small group or testing;); and Column 3 reports the content sequence of the unit. This column tells you approximately where in the unit the middle three groups would be. Below the chart is a legend explaining the abbreviations.

Chart 2: Unit 1 – Example 2-Week Unit Schedule

Time	Classroom Time					Unit Sequence
	Groups					groups
Minutes	1*	2	3	4>	5	2, 3, 4*
0-20	Teacher lecture – all groups together					Introduction to unit
20-40	O	O	I	I	O/td>	Introduction to unit/Reading
40-60	I/P	I	O	O	SG	Reading
60-80	O	SG	SG	SG	I	Finish reading and start translation
80-100	O	O	O	I	O	Translation
100-120	O	SG	I	O	O	Read the Perek
120-140	SG	I	SG	SG	O	Read graphic novel
140-160	SG	O	I	O	SG	Translation of Commentaries
160-220	Teacher-led discussion. All groups together or small group discussions					Teacher selected topic(s)
220-240	O	SG	O	I	SG	Translation of Commentaries
240-260	SG	SG	SG	SG	I	Translation of Advanced Commentaries
260-280	P	I	I	I	P	Project work
280-300	T	T	T	T	T	Testing
300-320	Teacher lecture – all groups together					Conclusion

O = Online Lesson I = Time with Instructor P = Project Work SG = Work in small groups or pairs T = Testing *

The Unit Sequence is listed for Groups 2, 3, and 4. Group 1 is the most skilled and is likely to be ahead of this schedule; Group 5 is least skilled and is likely to be behind this schedule.

Chart 3 shows a second way of seeing how a blended class differs by academic grouping. The academic group is listed in the first column, and going across, the 320 minutes is divided into online learning plus 1-to-1 tutoring, project and small group activities, and finally whole-class instruction. The chart shows how the time for a 2-week unit may be differentially allocated based on student proficiency. You can see that we have assumed stronger students will complete the online learning components more quickly, and will therefore have more time for enrichment and project activities. In this way, we assure weaker students get sufficient time to achieve mastery and stronger students are not held back.

Chart 3: Sample Time Allocation by Proficiency Level

Academic group

320 minutes instructional time over 2 week unit

Strong

80 min online learning and 1 to 1

160 min project and small group activities