Ronit Ziv-Kreger is a School and Learning Design Consultant to several Jewish day schools in the Boston area, including The Binah School and Cohen Hillel Academy. Dr. Ziv-Kreger is also a consultant to the Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ initiative to reinvent supplementary education in the Boston area, and is Designer and Trainer for Hebrew College’s congregational PBL professional development.
Ronit Ziv-Kreger translates 21st century learning into project-based learning, and presents a Jewishly grounded conceptual approach with applications from two different Boston-area schools.
Our sages posed the question: “Who is wise?” and answered: “The person who can see what’s coming” (Tractate Tamid 32a). As we speed into the rapidly changing world of the 21st century, the literature on education hails the importance of skills such as collaboration, creativity, communication, critical thinking, empathy and citizenship. How do we teach Torah in ways that support the development of these 21st Century learning skills? And how do we do so in ways that help our students understand that the world and Torah are deeply interconnected? This article describes two strategies for responding to the above challenges: connecting Torah learning with real-world service learning and supporting students in leading their own learning.
Connecting Torah learning with real-world service learning
At stake in Torah education, is whether students perceive Torah as something they will leave behind in school or in shul – or something that will travel with them into the future.
In today’s rapidly changing world, when young people already are more digitally literate than many of the adults they know, we need to foster in students a desire for learning that is based on more than trusting adults to know what will be good for them in the future. Students’ desire to learn Torah also needs to be kindled by direct experiences of Torah as relevant to their lives.
Real-world service learning provides an opportunity to meet this need. When schools design learning experiences in which Torah is central to engaging students in contributing meaningfully to their communities, students gain a deeper sense of purpose for Torah learning and a feeling of pride and even mastery in being Torah Jews. Doing real work for their communities gives students the experience – not just the abstract claim – that Torah is deeply connected to their lives.
Perhaps the Torah itself hints at the importance of taking concrete action to becoming a Torah Jew. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (www.rabbisacks.org/terumah-5774-home-build-together/) proposed a profound answer to the question of why the final third of the book of Exodus, which is about the Israelites transitioning from slaves to free people, attends in painstaking detail to the building of the Tabernacle, after the climax of receiving the Torah. Rabbi Sacks notes that the Israelites complain at almost every opportunity – not unlike some students. Then,
God said: Let them build something together. This simple command transformed the Israelites. During the whole construction of the tabernacle there were no complaints. The people contributed, some gold, some silver, some bronze, some brought skins and drapes, others gave their time and skill. They gave so much that Moses had to order them to stop. A remarkable proposition is being framed: It is not what God does for us that transforms us. It is what we do for God.
So long as every crisis was dealt with by Moses and miracles, the Israelites remained in a state of dependency. Their default response was complaint. For them to grow to adulthood and responsibility, there had to be a transition from passive recipients of God’s blessings to active creators. The people had to become God’s “partners in the work of creation” (Shabbat 10a). That, I believe, is what the sages meant when they said, “Call them not ‘your children’ but ‘your builders’” (Berakhot 64a).
When students do real work and serve their community as God’s partners, it not only helps them build 21st century skills, it helps them be Torah Jews.
Noah Hartman, Head of School at Cohen Hillel Academy, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, explains: “Information is more accessible than ever before, so the days of needing to know the answers are gone; today students need to know the questions! To successfully navigate school, work, and relationships students need to know how to communicate, collaborate, and to think and act creatively. That is why we are incorporating project-based learning into our classes. This way of learning goes beyond offering our students content, knowledge and skills. It also supports them to be productive and confident citizens who act on Torah values.”
The Binah School, a new Orthodox girls middle and high school in Sharon, Massachusetts, is devoted to engaging students in Torahcentered project based service learning. The Binah School seeks to maintain the best of traditional Torah skill-building while building 21st century skills.
This year, students at The Binah School have been studying Parashat Nitzavim. In analyzing the list of members of the community Moses assembles, students explored what it means to be a member of the covenant with God and what that teaches us about areyvut (responsibility) and community. Students considered the teaching that all people are created betzelem Elokim (in God’s “image”) and all Jews, those physically present and not, are included in the covenant – yet, many people with disabilities and their families experience difficulty in participating in the community, resulting in a sense of isolation. To begin to understand the needs of children with disabilities, the Binah students began a chapter of Yachad (National Jewish Council for Disabilities is the flagship agency of the Orthodox Union which provides social, educational and recreational programs for individuals with learning, developmental and physical disabilities to promote their inclusion in the life of the Jewish community) in their area and are fostering social connections with local children with disabilities.
They also are creating the first public art installation in Sharon: a mural that explores the topic of inclusion and disabilities. The artistic motifs of the mural are culled from the Nitzavim Torah learning about areyvut, and creating the mural makes this Torah learning a concrete reality, as the process is built on inclusivity. To create the mural, students are collaborating not only with each other but also with many people outside of the school. Binah students have been working with students at the Perkins School for the Blind, Chai Works Day Programming (a collaboration between CJP, JVS, and the Ruderman Family Foundation to help young adults with disabilities launch their careers by providing on-site job training, job search assistance and ongoing internships and employment opportunities), and Yachad, to incorporate their experiences and plaster their handprints into the mural. To gain permission for the public installation, the students presented their plan to the Sharon Commission for Disabilities.
At The Binah School, Torah is not just a subject that is separate from other school subjects, but is also at the heart of interdisciplinary learning. In their expedition classes, students are learning about “universal design” and “adaptive technology,” and each student is designing and building an adaptive technology project that could help make a disabled person’s life easier. They are being introduced to how engineers look at problems and come up with real-life solutions, applying science, design thinking and math to improve people’s lives. Students will be interviewing community members who need simple pieces of adaptive technology and they are learning Computer Aided Design to create prototypes using 3D printers.
In his groundbreaking book, An Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger (2003) writes about how real work motivates students to do their best work. He describes a learning expedition in which his sixth grade students tested homes in their town for radon gas. “These students checked their math, their spelling, their language, and their reasoning twenty times over before they rested easy. They begged me to check their work over again. This was not an exercise: it was real, important work that mattered to the world. Anything short of excellence would be intolerable.”
Guiding students towards an understanding and an experience of excellence is an important element of 21st century learning. Rabbi Dessler teaches about the importance that Jewish tradition puts on excellence using a midrash about the Torah verse about Hanokh, who was the seventh generation after Adam: “And Hanokh walked with God.”
The Rabbis say that Hanokh was a shoemaker, and with every single stitch that he made, he achieved mystical unions with the Creator. I heard a beautiful explanation of this in the name of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. He said that this Midrash cannot possibly mean that while Hanokh was sitting and stitching shoes for his customers his mind was engaged in mystical pursuits. This would be forbidden by law. How could he divert his attention to other matters while doing work he had been hired to do by others? No, says Rabbi Salanter, the “mystical unions” which Hanokh achieved were nothing more nor less than the concentration which he lavished upon each and every stitch to ensure that it would be good and strong and that the pair of shoes he was making would be a good pair, giving the maximum pleasure and benefit to whomever would wear them. (Dessler, 1964)
Achieving excellence does not happen by itself, and it certainly doesn’t happen when students are tasked with completing worksheets that only a teacher will read. Creating opportunities for students to address real community needs harnesses student motivation and desire for excellence. At the same time, supporting students to improve their work via multiple drafts, supported by critique, is another important ingredient for achieving excellence. To do this well, teachers need to invest time to examine student work, and identify the priorities for the next lesson that will meet students at their growing edges.
But these projects can take a lot of time. Educators often struggle with the question of how Jewish day schools can justify the time when students and teachers are already stretched by a dual curriculum of secular and Jewish studies. These are not simple questions. However, recent research provides evidence that even when there is vast content to cover, projects are effective means for learning. The Knowledge in Action project at the University of Washington suggests that project-based learning can help advanced placement (AP) high school students with diverse learning styles understand content more deeply, and found that:
- Students taking a project-based learning AP course did as well or better, and sometimes significantly better, on the AP test than students in control classes of traditional instruction – when equal amounts of students’ time was used in the two approaches;
- Students taking a project-based learning AP course generally scored higher than controls on a Complex Scenario Test, designed to assess deeper understanding, and the ability to apply information and knowledge to solve problems in a new simulated real-world scenario.
An important part of education will always be mastering fundamental skills. The excitement of 21st century learning is about moving into new territory with what we do with the skills. It is about shifting away from passive receiving and consumption, into active making and doing, using the community as a classroom. It’s about students being able to find what they need to accomplish meaningful goals. And it can mesh beautifully with Torah learning.
Supporting students to lead more of their own learning
The previous section addresses one principle in Rabbi Sacks’ narrative about “letting them build something together,” namely, enabling students to generate and share real-world value. But Rabbi Sacks’ narrative about building the Mishkan contains a second, equally important principle: enabling students to be partners in leading their own learning process, so that they are not simply to be passengers on the journey, but crew or even captains.
An effective first step in shifting responsibility for learning to students is to set learning targets. Learning targets provide students with clarity about where they are going in a lesson or unit, and thus enable them to actively engage in getting there. This is especially true when learning targets are shared early on with students. Knowing the precise intention of a lesson or unit allows students to participate in assessing their own progress, which in turn makes them more likely to express their learning needs.
Education expert Robert J. Marzano (2009) asserts that students who can identify what they are learning significantly outscore those who cannot. From reviewing the research on setting goals, he finds that two factors contribute to improvement in achievement: goal specificity – setting goals that are sufficiently specific, and goal difficulty – setting goals that students perceive as difficult but not beyond their reach. M.E., a student in a Jewish day school, explains how learning targets help him succeed:
I have two main Judaic classes. In one, the teacher tells us the objectives of the class. So even when the conversation digresses from the topic, we know what the focus is, and we can be responsible to know the material. In my second class, I really like the teacher, yet beyond which chapter we are studying, the goals of the class are not explained. So it’s much harder for me to stay focused in that class, and my grades are not as good.
Once students learn to take responsibility for meeting learning targets and using them in the learning process, they can begin to help craft learning targets. Further, students can participate in setting personalized learning targets; this helps not only to differentiate learning but also to further build student responsibility and ownership for learning (Ziv-Kreger, 2011).
Having students regularly engaged in tracking their progress with learning targets also prepares them to articulate their accomplishments and challenges. Some schools give students a leadership role in communicating their progress to parents via student-led conferences. In these conferences, students, parents, and teachers meet and students take the lead in describing their progress towards meeting learning targets and setting goals for improvement. For an excellent guide on this see Ron Berger’s book Leaders of their Own Learning (2014).
One of the fundamentals in supporting student ownership and agency is to allow more of the learning to emerge out of their interests. For example, Cohen Hillel Academy 6th grade students helped guide the direction of their learning this year. After they attended Teva (tevacenter.readyhosting.com) and learned about Jewish ecological and food sustainability priorities, they expressed a desire to take action. The teachers took the students’ interests seriously. Currently the entire sixth grade team of teachers and students is in the process of exploring how to implement aquaponics, for growing plants and raising fish at their school.
Torah teachers have often struggled with supporting students to take leadership in their Torah learning, since many students lack the needed breadth of knowledge to fully understand the texts. On the one hand, this barrier to students’ taking leadership in their learning is coming down, as extensive Torah texts have been digitally uploaded to the internet and made searchable. On the other hand, misinformation is a problem on some websites and effectively using the Internet to understand complex texts isn’t straightforward. Accordingly, The Binah School is planning a digital access course to enable students to access online Torah resources more skillfully, and with a critical eye.
Another way that some Jewish day schools, including Atlanta’s Epstein School and The Binah School, are working to support students to lead their own learning is through the use of “digital badges.” A badge is a symbol indicating an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest. Familiar to many from the Boy and Girl Scouts, and used extensively in digital games, badges are now being incorporated into education to engage students and to signify academic knowledge as well as other modern day competencies. A “digital badge” includes an online record of achievements that documents the work completed to get the badge. The Binah School is designing badges that will support students in pursuing learning that dovetails with their personal interests. Initial badges include video making, drama, showing areyvut, and studying Torah lishmah. The latter builds on the online video Torah courses of AlephBeta (www.alephbeta.org).
Conclusion
In the 21st Century, our Torah teaching needs not only to offer students access to Jewish wisdom, but also to do so in ways that befit our changing world. As John Dewey (1944) put it: “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”
This article described two strategies for teaching Torah in ways that support students to develop 21st century learning skills, and help students experience Torah as deeply interconnected with the world. The first strategy is to engage students in service learning where Torah learning is central to meeting a community need. The second strategy is to support students to lead their own learning by involving them in multiple steps of the learning process along the trajectory from setting learning targets to assessment.
Both of these strategies lead not only to students learning content and skills, but also to care about the learning. When students care, they are more likely to see Torah as a lifelong source of wisdom.
These strategies also can help students to internalize their Torah learning and to bring something of themselves to the process of learning. Barry Holtz (1984) writes, “Torah remains unendingly alive because the readers of each subsequent generation saw it as such, taking the holiness of the Torah seriously, and adding their own contribution to the story.”
As educators in the 21st Century, our work is to support students to add their own contributions. In so doing, we help them create their own links in the chain, not only by learning and teaching Torah, but by doing quality work to benefit the world as Torah Jews who take the holiness of the Torah seriously.
References
Berger, R. (2003). An ethic of excellence: Building a culture of craftsmanship with students. Posrtsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Berger, R., Bugen, L., Woodfin, L. (2014). Leaders of their own learning. Jossey- Bass.
Boss, S. et al. (2011). The quest for deeper learning and engagement in advanced high school courses. The Foundation Review (3)3.
Dessler, E. (1964). Mikhtav Mei’Eliyahu [Hebrew] (Aryeh Carmell and Chaim Friedlander, Eds.). Vol 1. Bnei Berak: Committee for the publication of the writings of Rabbi E. L. Dessler.
Dewey, J. (1944). Democracy and education. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Holtz, B. (1984). Back to the sources. NY: Simon and Schuster.
Marzano, R. (2009). Designing & teaching learning goals & objectives. Bloomington, In: Marzano Research laboratory.
Ziv-Kreger, R. (2011). Let’s aim together. Paper presented at Ma Chadash Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ Educator’s Conference at LimmudBoston.