Eliana Lipsky spent a year researching and co-teaching a Humash class. She shares her findings about using religious studies to teach the whole child.
Introduction
To teach the “whole child” necessitates that we understand that child, including being attentive to who she is and wants to be throughout her time in school. It follows that hearing the student voice should play a significant role in studying texts. After conducting a one-year qualitative, collaborative action research study in one Modern Orthodox Humash class, my data show that giving students opportunities to dialogue authentically with parshanim (classical commentaries) and the teacher is essential to teaching the whole child, especially in a religious studies class.
This paper presents an overview of the study, highlighting three pivotal curricular and instructional choices that made it possible to teach the whole child: planning with backward design, humanizing the parshanim, and creating the “Balancing Textual Authority with Student Voice” rubric.
These curricular and instructional choices were successful because they placed the students first, listing them as the first ingredient in the learning process. They also integrated the opportunities students had for identity and religious exploration with explicitly teaching social-emotional, academic, and life skills. This naturally placed students at the center of the curriculum, leading to more meaningful differentiation according to students’ interests, learning profiles, and biblical Hebrew text skills.
Context
Every student is a person and every person has a complex identity with multiple, and potentially incongruous, parts. As educators it is our responsibility to help our students consider who they are, why they are who they are, and the multiple communities to which they belong. With every new piece of information a student encounters, whether through transmission, education or experience, students reconfigure their individual and cultural identities (Erikson, 1980; Schachter, 2005). Consider the Modern Orthodox student who is learning the laws of Shabbat but is also a member of a team that competes on Shabbat.
Previously, identity theorists understood identity configuration as a step-by-step process in which individuals moved through four stages of identity formation until they reached a stable, unchanging identity status (Erikson, 1980; Kroger, 2007; Marcia, 1966; Phinney, 1989). However, contemporary identity researchers acknowledge that people’s identities are increasingly complex and inconsistent due to growing multiculturalism (Hammack, 2008; Schachter, 2005; Wardekkar & Meidema, 2001). In this study, configuring one’s identity was understood as a “continuous activity of construction and deconstruction, of developing, maintaining, and evaluating personal commitments to values, persons, and practices” (Wardekkar & Meidema, 2001, p. 37).
Students must be able to see themselves in the curriculum if we are to assist them in navigating their constant identity reconfigurations. A culturally relevant curriculum allows a student to examine who he and his multiple communities are. To succeed, students must have ample opportunities to critically consider the knowledge and values presented to them. Transformative education is one in which “the subject matter (being the starting point) becomes the property of the student” and it “is necessary that students take this step in order to acquire their own personal identity” (Wardekkar & Meidema, 2001, p. 40). Teachers, students, and classroom texts should be viewed as partners in the learning process, each with something valuable to offer the other (Banks, 2002; Gonzalez et. al., 2009; Wardekkar & Meidema, 2001).
One approach
Eliciting student voices in the classroom discourse in this study became critical to the students’ educational experience and the teacher’s ability to understand her students. The curriculum was altered to allow students to see themselves in the curriculum and to establish students as equal participants in the ongoing discourse about Jewish values, traditional knowledge, and Jewish text study. “Our conception of literacy reflects an attitude that regards Jewish knowledge as cherished, even sacred, yet it opposes regarding it as unquestionable” (Schremer, 2013, p. 28). As such, we created a safe place for students to share more honestly their hopes, dreams, concerns, and struggles with their teacher and peers. We made it our educational duty to ensure that as the teacher transmitted the very Jewish values, norms, and knowledge she holds dear, she engaged students in equally common opportunities to examine these aspects of their heritage critically, honestly, and openly. With greater insight into the needs of her individual students she better differentiated the curriculum according to her students’ social-emotional, academic, and religious or spiritual needs.
Balancing textual authority with student voice
The purpose of the study was to examine the use of a Modern Orthodox Ideology Curriculum (herein, MOIC) framework in a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school Humash class and the framework’s contribution to opportunities for student voice and critical questioning while grounding students in tradition and maintaining reverence of religious texts and respect for the classroom teacher. A collaborative action research paradigm was chosen because it relies on researching with people not on people and of working with local people to fix local problems (Herr & Anderson, 2005; Reason, 2006). This study took place at MOJDS (all names are pseudonyms), one Modern Orthodox Jewish day school located in North America. The MOIC framework, which was created as part of a pilot study, was implemented in one Humash teacher’s eighth grade class with students assigned to an “8A” or “8B” section according to their pre-assessed Hebrew skill level. Five action research cycles were completed from July 2014 through July 2015, with three of the cycles occurring during the school year. The average length of each cycle was twelve weeks.
The teacher, Sarah, was a fifth year teacher at the beginning of the year, yet it was the first time in her career that she had the same curriculum and grade levels two years in a row. Sarah’s original curriculum was traditional and authority-centric in which she and the parshanim were the most valued voices in the room. As part of our collaboration I provided her with teacher mentoring and coaching on curriculum development, instructional design, differentiating instruction, and classroom management.
Sara’s students fell within a relatively homogenous academic level regarding critical thinking skills that is in the normal range for eighth-grade students. Moreover, as was expected, abstract thinking readiness and social-emotional maturity differed among the students in the class (Adams, 1992; Steinberg, 2005). Students in the “lower-level” class were labeled as having executive functioning challenges.
The overarching question that guided this study is, “How do we (the researcher and classroom teacher) maintain an authoritative status of the text, acculturate Jewish students to traditional Jewish text study, and make them intimately knowledgeable of the authoritative commentaries, while empowering them to think critically for themselves and feel that they have an important voice in a long-established conversation?” The question was broken down into four smaller questions each with their own specific sub-questions to make it researchable.
Data collection and analysis
Data collection tools included teacher and student interviews, pertinent teacher-researcher emails, almost weekly classroom observations with and without audiovisual recordings, all of the teacher’s lesson plans, student assignments, publicly displayed student work, and journals kept by the students, teacher, and researcher. I completed all of the transcriptions of the audiovisual data, continuously member-checked to further validate the findings, and maintained a rigorous audit trail. Classroom observations were conducted almost weekly until the last six weeks of school when there was little to no formal class time to be observed. Classroom assignments were developed to determine how the class and individual students participated in collective and personal inquiry. In addition, class assignments demonstrated how learning more explicitly about Modern Orthodox ideology might alter student perceptions about themselves and the denomination as a whole.
Data analysis included closed-coding during each cycle adhering closely to the research questions designed at the beginning of the study. Codes included themes related to power structures, identity exploration, curricular and instructional choices, teacher and student roles and perceptions, the MOIC framework, and the classroom environment. Open-coding was conducted at the end of the study and revealed a year-long theme of being explicit and transparent about curricular goals, the learning process, teacher expectations, and identity discussions (Merriam, 2009; Yin, 2014).
Beginning with the goal in mind
The MOIC framework is an unscripted curriculum that intends to disrupt “transmission education” by using enduring understandings and essential questions to drive a Judaic studies course instead of a selected topic (Wiggins & McTighe, 2006). Sarah’s original understanding of her role as a teacher was that she “teaches Devarim,” Once Sarah and I redesigned her curriculum using backward design and the MOIC framework, Sarah realized that her goals as a teacher were to engage students in the moral underpinnings of Torah and to make Torah relevant to her students’ lives. In her final journal entry, Sarah reflected,
…what this curriculum really brought out is thoughtful practice in learning and in life, no matter what shape it takes. Think about what you’re reading, who you’re reading, what messages you’re getting from the world around you, and how they shape/interact with your beliefs. Think about what you believe in and act according to your credo. On the other hand, keep an open mind and be an active listener as you learn, ready to accept a wellsupported idea and allow it to become a part of your personal beliefs.
Indeed, Deuteronomy became the medium through which to engage her students in thinking about the world around them and in practicing life skills such as critical thinking, critical literacy, reading comprehension, active listening and communicating respectfully and thoughtfully. By redesigning her curriculum in this way, Sarah was able to establish her students as critical participants in an ongoing dialogue with her, each other, and the parshanim.
Humanizing the parshanim
Throughout the study Sarah struggled with the students’ level of reverence and respect for the parshanim. At the beginning of the year, Sarah tried convincing her students that the “mefarshim are like friends” who “help us understand the Torah.” Instead of corralling the students into respecting the parshanim, the students responded by doodling, gazing out the window, or talking over her. We made three changes to her approach to make it transformation- oriented.
First, I urged Sarah to increase the number of parshanim to whom the students were introduced and had to critically analyze. By the end of the year, Sarah’s students studied over ten commentaries’ perspectives in depth instead of the one (Rashi) they had focused on previously. Moreover, the parshanim incorporated into the curriculum were from multiple time periods spanning a thousand years of Jewish text study, and included at least one female voice. Second, I stressed to Sarah that it was important for students to think of the parshanim as people with backgrounds whose lived experiences influenced their thinking. Sarah made a point of providing students with biographies of each parshan prior to learning the person’s commentary. Students had to underline or highlight any information they thought might influence the commentator’s understanding of the text. Only after gaining a sense of this person’s story did they begin a critical examination of his or her commentary. At the end of the study, Sarah believed this to be one of the most important factors in building student reverence for individual parshanim. These two changes were instrumental in humanizing the parshanim for the students, making it easier for them to interact with them as if they were in a Hevruta. When students had trouble with a commentator’s perspective, they would use the sociopolitical context of that person’s life to better understand why they might have interpreted the Torah in such a way. For example, one student wrote,
This year, when we learned the opinions of Parshanim, first we learned their biographies. This affected my learning because it helped me understand why they said something… For example, I learned a Rashi perush that explained that somebody was more desirable because they were exotic and not black like everybody else in Egypt. To me, this seemed a little bit racist but then I understood that Rashi lived in a time period when there were not necessarily equal rights… so by learning his biography I understand where the opinion came from.
By understanding Rashi’s sociopolitical context and exegetical approach, this student saw Rashi’s perspective as something valuable to consider even if she did not agree.
Allowing students to learn multiple perspectives with varying backgrounds broadened the students’ abilities to engage in critical text analysis as well as student dialogue about Torah. As one student reflected, “Last year we learn[ed] the classic way by learning a pasuk then doing a Rashi. However, this year we learned all different parshanim and we did both pshat and drash .” Several students indicated the “new” way of learning gave them opportunities to see the Torah from multiple perspectives, including their peers’ and their own.
Third, Sarah created graphic organizers for the students to track the different commentaries’ perspectives. Significantly, Sarah included an “I” box under the list of parshanim on each graphic organizer so that students were able to consider their individual perspective as part of the collective Jewish discourse. Establishing a classroom culture with the expectation that students will develop an independent opinion, affirmed for students that their “opinion matters.”
The rubric
The most pivotal curricular change resulted from the creation of the “Balancing Textual Authority with Student Voice” rubric at the end of Cycle 2 (August 28, 2014 – December 2, 2015). In the middle of Cycle 2 I interviewed Sarah about her thoughts on the essential components a teacher needs in order to balance student voice with textual authority. As Sarah described what she hoped to see in her classroom, we realized that she was listing reading comprehension skills, text analysis skills, critical thinking skills, and active listening skills. The learning process outlined in the rubric is equivalent to the skills students are expected to use when encountering scholarly work in any other field. The first three elements delineate the student’s ability to read and understand who the parshan is and what the parshan is saying without superimposing the student’s voice onto the parshan. The final element provides a safe space and designated time for the student to agree or disagree with the parshan, using textual evidence to support the student’s opinion.
The rubric established and maintained a balance among the students’, the commentators’, and the teacher’s voices. Prior to the rubric, students did not understand how to critically analyze a text. Most of the students focused on memorizing what the author said and did not delve into how that author’s ideas contribut- ed to the broader conversation or related to them personally. The rubric provided students with an explicit and systematic process by which they learned how to approach a text and examine the ideas emerging from the text.
Essential to the rubric’s success was Sarah’s commitment to modeling the rubric for her students. Sarah modeled all four elements and practiced each step with the students as they studied their texts. During classroom observations, I witnessed Sarah repeatedly asking students to review the rubric element upon which they were focusing and to identify the next step of their text analysis. Students were able to articulate when they were supposed to read for comprehension and for what purpose, to actively listen to the parshanim without superimposing their own perspectives onto the authors’ ideas, or to use the time to logically reason with their peers and parshanim about the idea put forth. Most importantly, students used their text study skills to support their critical thinking about the text. By the end, students were able to dialogue with the parshanim. As one administrator commented about the students’ end of year projects, “It’s like they’re [the students and parshanim are] having a conversation.”
Impact
Two months into the school year Sarah lamented, “I’ve actually had conversations with quite a few students where it’s clear they want me to teach it [the material] to them, they want me to tell it to them.” Students hesitated to study a parshan in pairs or even small groups and they rarely learned independently. Moreover, most of the students reported it was their job to “fill out worksheets” to regurgitate the information they had learned, and classroom observations showed little critical questioning of a parshan. With consistent modeling of the rubric and insistence on placing student voice at the center of the classroom, students’ perceptions of their roles and the teacher’s role in class shifted by the end of the year. In their end of year reflections, all but one student reported that it was important for them to “share my opinion” and “to learn a parshan’s biography because depending on a person’s past, their perspective on Torah changes.” Significantly, the students spent the final six weeks of their class engaged in independent learning, absorbed in conversations with parshanim spanning a thousand years. The students gained enough confidence to be able to ask critical questions of the parshanim when learning and to offer their own opinions on a given subject matter in a respectful way. Some students even made a point of including themselves in their final projects as part of a storyboard conversation with parshanim such as Nechama Leibowitz and Rambam.
Critical thinking and perspective taking skills became essential to succeeding in Sarah’s Humash class. Students recognized that the teacher’s questions did not have a single, pre-scripted answer, as they were accustomed to in years past. As one student wrote, “this time we didn’t have to answer a question a certain way. We had to think to answer.” Another student mentioned “it was the first time we got to think for ourselves and I got to be more creative.” Perspective taking did not just apply to understanding the parshanim. One student reflected, “The different activities we did this year allowed me to not only learn the opinions of mefarshim , but also learn the opinions of my classmates and how we connect [to] these Mitzvot today.” During one activity, when a particular student had trouble expressing his thoughts, another student encouraged him to take his time. Once the student finished his thought, the other student followed by saying, “I think what you’re trying to say is…” This observation highlights the active listening and interest in other’s perspectives that Sarah was able to cultivate in her classroom using the MOIC framework and the abovementioned interventions.
Finally, students were enthusiastic about Humash class. One student praised the class for being more “interactive,” continuing to say, “I was much more involved in the class and it wasn’t just sitting down, taking notes, and having [tests]. We had a lot of fun activities and do things that makes me want to participate, and get me excited to come to class.” Some students advised future students to “expand their minds” and “actually think and say their opinion.” And even though the study did not focus on increasing spirituality, one student reflected that this class “inspired you to work hard and diligently for the rest of your life on everything you do, especially working on your spiritual connection with Hashem.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, engaging the whole child compels Jewish day school educators to reconsider what is valued as knowledge in their classrooms, including valuing our students as equal partners in Jewish discourse and paying careful attention to the details of what our students are saying, asking, and doing in the classroom. Their communication gives us insight into the issues with which they might be grappling. Valuing students’ voices and respecting their individual journeys enhances our ability to encourage spiritual and academic growth. Findings from this study indicate students need time to reflect on the opinions they form throughout their learning with respect to who they are as people and their journey. By emphasizing identity exploration and academic skills, such as critical thinking and historical understandings, Sarah was able to teach students social-emotional skills such as active listening skills, comprehension skills, and perspective taking. As a result, the curricular and instructional interventions changed students’ perceptions of their roles in class. They gained the confidence to think critically about the parshanim and saw themselves as part of the ongoing Jewish dialogue. Indeed, a transformative curriculum such as the MOIC framework in an authority-centric classroom can promote transferable social-emotional, academic, and life skills.
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Eliana Lipsky, Ed.D., (etlipsky@gmail.com) is a school consultant and teacher coach with REACH, Resources for Educational Achievement, Collaboration and Health, serving the Chicagoland Jewish day schools.