Despite significant growth across nearly all curricular areas in recent decades, Hebrew language instruction remains a persistent challenge in many Jewish day schools. While schools throughout the diaspora have sought to address this issue by employing shelihim from Israel, this model has raised ongoing concerns, including a lack of continuity due to frequent staff turnover, uneven pedagogical training, differing cultural assumptions about teaching and learning, and questions of quality control. At the Moriah School (Englewood, NJ), these long-standing concerns converged with a broader question that many school communities face: How could it be that a child could spend twelve years in a Jewish day school and still struggle to speak Hebrew?

This urgent question became the catalyst for our recent initiative. The school’s leadership felt that the moment had arrived for a bold, systemic rethink. Student outcomes in many subjects were improving, yet progress in Hebrew remained stagnant. With research in second-language acquisition shifting significantly in recent years, the leadership recognized that Hebrew didn’t only need more exposure but also a different kind of exposure, one that would naturally lead to expression.

With this goal in mind, two years ago, we invited Mrs. Ilana Samberg, a second-language acquisition expert from Sha’anan Orthodox College of Education in Israel, to partner with the school in designing a research-based, cohesive approach to strengthening Hebrew fluency. This work emerged through a unique collaboration between three roles: academic expertise, instructional leadership, and classroom implementation. Our shared goal, simple yet ambitious: to create a schoolwide environment where speaking Hebrew feels natural, joyful, and achievable for every learner.

Understanding Before Prescribing

Before recommending any changes, Ilana spent a week embedded in daily school life as a “fly on the wall.” She visited classrooms across divisions, observed lessons, met with student panels, and interviewed teachers who teach Pre-K through 8^th grade, as well as administrators. This initial phase was rooted in the belief that meaningful change must begin with an accurate diagnosis. It was necessary to begin with an accurate understanding of Moriah’s culture, its routines, and its existing strengths and challenges, rather than to import a prepackaged program.

From this process emerged a cohesive schoolwide framework anchored in three pillars: relevance, engagement, and enjoyment. Over the past two years, these principles have reshaped daily classroom life and begun to transform Moriah into a community of lifelong learners who approach Hebrew with genuine curiosity, pleasure, and confidence.

Relevance: Making Hebrew Personal

Hebrew comes alive when learners recognize themselves within it; this principle guided us as we redesigned lesson structures and positioned Hebrew as a communicative medium rather than merely an academic target. Vocabulary selection became more intentional, focusing on students’ experiences and interests and not on isolated thematic lists. Instruction shifted from summary to reflection, inviting students to immerse themselves in cultural texts and grapple with characters’ decisions and moral dilemmas. Instead of workbook exercises that drill accuracy, students began journaling, responding to brief, purposeful prompts that fostered personal connection and creative expression. Though these adjustments seemed subtle, they reflected a profound shift: from prioritizing performance alone to cultivating true proficiency, helping students think in the language and in real-life context, rather than translating into it.

Engagement: Encouraging Active Participation

Engagement does not mean entertainment; it means active participation with a purpose. Teachers intentionally shifted the classroom dynamic from teacher-centered lessons to student-centered production. Hebrew is now the classroom’s working language, with students actively building and recycling language through structured peer interactions and meaningful discussions. Starting lessons with Hebrew energizers, incorporating daily speaking routines like partner conversations, rotating discussion groups, scaffolded mini-presentations, recorded short interviews and news segments, and readers’ theater ensures Hebrew is present throughout the lesson. Station rotations provide students with a variety of activities in each session, promoting active recycling, review, and retrieval of both new and familiar language skills. Using sentence starters and visible language chunks helps reduce anxiety and encourages participation from all students, including those who are hesitant. Most importantly, the team began measuring actual output rather than assuming progress, and results showed sustained growth in students’ spoken and written Hebrew.

Enjoyment: Lowering the Affective Factor

Joy plays a vital role in foreign language acquisition; it shouldn’t be a luxury but a cognitive necessity. When students experience stress or frustration in the learning process, their willingness to produce language drops. Conversely, when learners experience enjoyment, they take risks, experiment, and retain more. We infused learning with Israeli music, videos, role-plays, games, and culturally relevant projects to create authentic language experiences. Alternative assessments invited students to produce Hebrew through group skits, mock interviews, comic creations, and collaborative cookbooks. These experiences boosted both expressive skills and emotional connection.

Professional Growth: Two Pathways to Lasting Change

Relevance, engagement, and enjoyment can clearly serve as the foundation for instruction across all disciplines and levels. However, these concepts alone cannot create lasting change without one of the most important elements—the teachers. They are part of a larger framework that includes ongoing professional development and, in our case, two interconnected pathways of professional growth.

The first path centers on faculty-wide professional development. Core Hebrew & Tanakh teachers participate in monthly professional development sessions that enhance instructional practice and address topics such as cultural connections, kinesthetic learning, productive language skills, AI integration, and meaningful assessment. These workshops provide opportunities to share best practices and offer models, tools, and ideas that can be implemented immediately in the classroom.

The second path is individualized coaching. Through one-on-one mentorship, teachers receive personalized guidance that strengthens their pedagogical skills and professional confidence. This personalized process provides professional support that helps teachers translate broad principles into their classroom realities.

After establishing foundational changes in the first year, the model has evolved into what our team calls the “ambassador model”: veteran teachers with high self-efficacy began leading initiatives within their divisions. Ambassadors collaborate closely with Ilana both before and after professional development sessions, offering peer support to colleagues. Although Ilana is based in Israel, she visits the school three times a year, ensuring continuity, strengthening relationships with faculty, and maintaining consistent guidance across both virtual and in-person interactions. When she is abroad, the ambassadors continue to focus on instructional change under her overall guidance. This sustained professional development model unfolds through cycles of shared learning, collaborative planning, classroom experimentation, and reflective follow-up, with pedagogical support from both Ilana and the ambassadors. Through this collective effort, we have enhanced both pedagogy and community culture, enabling Hebrew to gradually evolve from just an academic subject to a language for everyday life.

Communitywide Responsibility

Lasting change requires the dedication of all stakeholders. Our administration meets regularly with Ilana to assess implementation and address areas that need additional reinforcement. Parents joined a workshop on incorporating Hebrew into daily home routines, reinforcing the idea that Hebrew is not just a school subject but a living part of our Jewish heritage.

This shared ownership among administrators, teachers, ambassadors, parents, and students has been key to the initiative’s success, built on the understanding that commitment doesn’t end at the close of the school day; Hebrew learning goes well beyond the classroom.

Early Observations

Now, midway through its second year, several encouraging patterns have emerged:

• Teachers report that students initiate Hebrew more frequently and sustain longer conversations.
• Writing samples demonstrate greater length, complexity, and creativity.
• Students anticipate Hebrew lessons and appear more willing to take risks and do so with enthusiasm and creativity.
• Teachers’ conversations increasingly center on output, fluency, and student voice.
• Focus has broadened from “covering the curriculum” to cultivating communication.

Mistakes are celebrated and viewed as part of the learning process. Joy is visible in lessons and in the corridors. Communication is the goal.

Although outcomes are promising, we do not view this as a completed project. Learning is a process, and we, too, are in the midst of ongoing refinement. The trajectory is clear: when production becomes intentional rather than incidental, growth follows. Step by step.

A Multi-layered Partnership

We believe that one of the factors for our success to date is the involvement of multiple layers of involvement within the school in conjunction with the outside guidance. The Head of School provided the institutional vision and has ensured that Hebrew language development remains a cross-divisional priority. The leadership of the Lower School and the Director of Curriculum and Instruction collaborated closely with Ilana over the past two years, planning PD workshops, monitoring progress, and guiding implementation. Ilana, the academic partner, brought research-based expertise, designed professional development lectures and workshops, and provided ongoing pedagogical coaching. That multi-layered leadership team worked with the Hebrew and Tanakh teachers, who implemented, adapted, and refined strategies in real time, sharing feedback and insights that have shaped this evolving model.

This collaboration created coherence. Anchored in daily classroom realities, this progress was neither purely theoretical nor merely administrative. It could not have been successful without all the pieces of the puzzle fitting together and working in unison.

Broader Implications for the Field

Our journey offers several lessons for schools seeking to increase Hebrew production:

1. Don’t rush to change textbooks! Increasing Hebrew production does not necessarily require new materials; it often requires new structures.
2. Institutional commitment must be paired with consistent professional development. Progress takes time; change doesn’t happen overnight.
3. Ivrit BeIvrit is best, but it must be paired with cultural immersion and emotional climate. Students produce more when learning feels meaningful and fun.
4. Offer frequent, structured opportunities for expressive language. Not all “speaking activities” are equal—students need supported, low-anxiety chances to communicate.
5. Focus on joy, scaffolding, and consistency. Quick fixes don’t exist!

From Requirement to Relationship

Our initial question, “Why aren’t students speaking more Hebrew?” has evolved into a more hopeful one: “How can we continue to design classrooms in which communicating in Hebrew feels natural?”

The answer lies less in dramatic reform and more in steady, joyful practice. When exposure is paired with intentional opportunities for expression, Hebrew moves from the page into our students’ voices. It becomes less of a requirement and more of a relationship, one that students can carry into their lives beyond school.