Differentiating Jewish Education – Not If But How
Shoshana Sturm is the Assistant Director at SINAI at JKHA (Livingston, NJ). She oversees the Judaic studies and therapy departments, facilitates inclusion opportunities, and liaises with school districts and child study team members. A speech-language pathologist by training, Shoshana holds a master’s degree in communication sciences and an advanced certificate in pediatric feeding disorders.
In the early 1970s, my mother sat in her 9th grade halakha class cowering in fear. Her teacher loudly berated the class as not one student volunteered to translate the words of the Rosh Hashana prayers. Her pulse racing, my mother suddenly realized she had an advantage. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors who came from two different countries, my mother’s first language was Yiddish and the mahzor she had pulled from her parents’ bookshelf the night before was a Hebrew-Yiddish one. She timidly raised her hand, provided the translation, thus saving her class from incurring further wrath from the teacher. Jewish education is unique in that each student brings their own personalized version of Judaism with them into the classroom. For my mother that day, it looked like a mahzor with a Yiddish translation.
In most Jewish day schools, students come from a range of backgrounds. Every family is unique, and even in relatively homogenous communities there are variations in practices and values. Recognizing, acknowledging, and respecting those differences provides fertile ground for student growth and for deepening their connection with God. This differentiation can only be accomplished when the school and the teacher approach each student with openness and curiosity. This necessitates an investment of time and can seem like one more thing added to a teacher’s already full plate. However, that investment will pay off repeatedly throughout the year, as it enables more focused attention that will allow teachers to teach in a way that resonates with students individually and in their small sub-groups.
In practice, there are many approaches to tailoring Judaic studies to the students we are teaching. Here we will focus on a few that give our students what they need without consuming too much time. With advanced planning, these ideas can be spaced out over a few weeks before a particular topic or over the course of the school year.
The Community Connection
In schools with recognizably diverse populations, welcoming that diversity is relatively obvious. Where it becomes more challenging is in schools which seem to be homogenous, but in which there are often outliers. Here are some examples of where accommodating the exceptions can be very significant to the individual students.
- Allowing, or encouraging, a student whose family uses a different nusah to use a siddur which is different from the rest of the class, even if it means the teacher may need to announce two (or more) sets of page numbers.
- Using commonly used Hebrew and Yiddish word choices, or even Sephardic and Ashkenazic pronunciations, interchangeably (dreidel and sivivon; shabbos and shabbat; davening and tefillah; etc.) so that all students feel included.
- Having a pasuk read aloud more than once using different pronunciations.
- Including the positions of a variety of Rabbis from the different communities which send their students to the school when discussing halakha.
- Regularly emphasizing that with all of the diversity and differences, we are all learning the same Torah.
We’ve seen the pride with which students present about a famous Jewish leader connected to their identity. For example, with blessings and encouragement, a Habad student created a slide show on the Lubavitcher Rebbe and used it to emphasize the Rebbe’s approach of embracing all Jews. Another student in the same class from a very Zionistic background chose to present on one of Israel’s historical figures, Yitzhak Rabin. The room for diversity of choice led to presentations that the students felt much more invested in and therefore willingly spent more time working on and editing.
The Family Connection
It is not just the communities which are different in broad strokes, but each family is unique with its own background and traditions. This provides a great opportunity for each student to feel seen and recognized, but involves some work on the part of the teacher. For younger students, the teacher can send a survey home in the beginning of the year for the parents to complete. Older students can be assigned to interview their parents or grandparents to understand their different observances before a holiday or lifecycle event such as a bar/bat mitzvah. This can range from reporting what goes onto the seder plate to a complex study into the history of maror in specific communities; when their tradition is raised in class, students will feel seen and proud of their heritage.
If we want to make sure students feel the joy of being Jewish, then we ask them what their families do to celebrate holidays, to mark special moments, to fulfill specific mitzvot, and we acknowledge it publicly in class.
In a bat mitzvah preparation class, the teacher took the time to find out the girls’ customs regarding lighting Shabbat candles. Although the students’ answers varied greatly, the students seemed genuinely excited to then learn more about the mitzvah. It no longer mattered that this was immediately relevant to some students and not to others because they knew they were following their family’s custom.
Today’s families are more diverse than they were just a generation ago. I remember one student off-handedly remarking that her step-grandfather leads her family’s Pesah seder. As some of the students in the class started to snicker, I said, “Oh, I also had a step-grandfather growing up.” The classroom attitude changed and we were able to continue learning because I had normalized the family relationship by sharing something about my own family. As teachers, we also come from different backgrounds, and sharing our own backstories helps students feel more comfortable sharing theirs.
The Individual Connection
A few years ago, I taught tefillah to a middle school girls’ class that was diverse in multiple ways: some girls were fluent Hebrew readers while others were not, students came from both Sephardic and Ashkenazic backgrounds, two girls had a parent who had converted to Judaism, and they ran from one end of the spectrum of Modern Orthodoxy to the other. Because the class met on weekdays as well as every other Friday, I decided to treat the Friday class differently. I invited the students to submit questions on anything in Judaism and we would have a question-and-answer session where we would discuss the answers.
The experience was enlightening for me and allowed me to understand where their thoughts and feelings on religious practice were. Through a mix of the practical (can women shave during sefirat ha’omer?) and the challenging (why do men say a blessing for not being made a woman?), I was given the opportunity to learn more about what drives them, enabling me to understand how they related to Orthodox Judaism and to shape my future lessons around what they were already thinking about.
As the year went on, I not only met the goals of my scope and sequence, to increase their fluency in tefillah, I also built their engagement with the most important aspect of tefillah, their connection with God. I came to understand that one of their difficulties with tefillah was its prescribed nature, something given to us by the Sages so many years ago. This led to facilitated discussions about the expansive nature of prayer. My students who lived in the heart of a busy metropolitan area got a kick out of the idea that “Hashem, please help me find a parking spot,” is also tefillah. After listening and validating their confusion over the differences in davening for men and women, we spent time analyzing Dr. Erica Brown’s article on the unique beauty of the blessing of “she`asani kirtzono.” By giving students regular opportunities to ask the big and small questions that are relevant to them, we allow them to make Judaism personally meaningful.
The pushback to an approach of differentiation and inclusion often goes something like this: “Are we compromising our/our community’s/our school’s religious values by opening it up to each community, each family, and each student to interpret as they wish?” This is certainly a challenge in an ever-diversified and polarized world, but we can be open-minded without being open-ended. We can and should operate within the guiding hashkafic and halakhic principles of our schools while allowing students to celebrate their differences within that framework.
Our Sages teach us that there are seventy “faces” to the Torah, different ways of approaching and interpreting the same information. Allowing our students’ different facets of Judaism to shine through is what brings Judaism down to each one of them. We have the power to personalize Judaism for our students. Our lessons are much more powerful when they speak to every child in the classroom.
Shoshana Sturm is the Assistant Director at SINAI at JKHA (Livingston, NJ). She oversees the Judaic studies and therapy departments, facilitates inclusion opportunities, and liaises with school districts and child study team members. A speech-language pathologist by training, Shoshana holds a master’s degree in communication sciences and an advanced certificate in pediatric feeding disorders.
From The Editor: Winter 2026
For many years I believed that I was a good educator. Students, alumni, and parents told me so. I was mostly effective at exciting my students to learn, drawing them in, and teaching them content and skills they remembered for a long time. Students thought that I was fair and sensitive and really committed to their success. Hey, I even learned how to admit my mistakes and learn from them.
And then I got married and started raising children.
From Scaffolding to Independence
I run a progressive N-8 Jewish day school (Luria Academy of Brooklyn) committed to inclusion of children with a broad range of abilities and needs and backgrounds. One of the questions I get asked frequently by parents is when we are going to build a high school. Truthfully, it’s not currently part of our plan and we are blessed to be in New York City where Jewish high school options abound. What prompts the parental requests for a high school is their very reasonable concern for how their child will transition from our student-centered, individualized, supportive classroom to a more traditional, less flexible environment.
What Mainstream Schools Can Learn From a School Like Mine
I recently had a conversation with a faculty member at a school of education which is part of a local university. He teaches a course titled “Learning and Cognition” and finds himself under pressure from students every year not to teach it. The students, as they enter the classroom, understandably want practical tools, and do not see the connection between how people learn and what they do in a classroom.
Choice in the Middle School Beit Midrash
In a small Jewish day school, differentiation is a fact of life. Some of our students have diagnoses which explain why they have challenges in learning and some do not; some need lots of repetition of material in order to synthesize ideas and others seem to understand and be prepared to explain the content the first time they read or hear an idea. In our small community, some are able to thrive in a Hebrew immersion class while others begin to shut down in this environment. A typical curricular model in middle schools at small Jewish day schools is to offer grade-specific Jewish studies courses; this has the advantage of all students being exposed to the same content, and building upon past learning is an easier task. At Oakland Hebrew Day School (Oakland, CA), a K-8 school, we, too, had this model until ten years ago, when we found ourselves grappling with the following issues:
Traditional Text Study for neurodivergent Students
During our time in school together, Jewish studies classes were streamed based purely on Hebrew language skills. This approach, with its exclusive focus on Hebrew facility, prevented us—and we suspect many other neurodivergent students—from accessing and engaging in the depth and richness of Jewish texts and traditions. Furthermore, by focusing solely on translation and basic comprehension, it denied us the opportunity to apply our own strengths of analytical and creative thinking, which are often reserved for advanced streams.
Trauma Awareness In Jewish Day Schools
A painful reality for Jewish educators is that, despite our most valiant efforts, a significant population of young people who go through the Jewish day school system feels distanced and removed from their education, as if they are perpetually outsiders to their community. Who are these young people? What causes this sense of distance? What can we do to help them? While every case is different, often these children are dealing with some sort of trauma that educators are not always equipped to support, and sometimes can inadvertently inflict. However, proper awareness and appropriate responses can go a long way in helping these young people feel welcome and understood.
The Unique Opportunities for Personalization in Jewish Studies
My experience at Jewish summer camp played an important role in forging my identity, first as a Jew, and then as a Jewish educator. When I made the jump from Director of Education at the camp I grew up at to the Jewish day school classroom, I would often reflect on what made camp so impactful and how I could bring aspects of experiential education into the formal classroom. I soon realized that it is not just about what camp has that the classroom does not, it’s just as much about the aspects of formal education that camps are unburdened by.
Forty Ways to Learn Navi
One of the most powerful sources of professional reflection for me has always been hevruta—the back-and-forth of honest, challenging dialogue. Several years ago, a teacher with whom I shared a classroom told me that my teaching was “too frontal” and that I needed to give students more “voice and choice.”
Being naturally competitive and reflective, I took the critique to heart. During winter break, I spent two solid days redesigning my Navi curriculum for my sixth graders. My goal was simple: to create a system where students could take genuine ownership of their learning while still meeting our academic expectations.
Differentiated Instruction in the Judaic Studies Classroom
Judaic studies is a high-stakes undertaking for teachers who aspire to cultivate in their students not only deep knowledge of texts and traditions that shape Jewish identity, but also a personal relationship with the Torah and with God. Either of those objectives without the other misses an opportunity to foster in children a love of their heritage and the desire to keep it vital in their lives.
Making Tefilah More Student-Centered
Every student enters tefilah with a different story. Some find comfort in familiar words and melodies; others feel unsure, disconnected, or skeptical. Yet tefilah in schools often assumes uniformity—everyone doing the same thing, in the same way, at the same pace. When we shift our focus to the people in the room, new possibilities for meaning can open up.
Differentiation, Relationships, and Planning with an AI Partner
Jewish Studies teachers have long known the importance of meeting students’ individual needs, yet differentiation in practice has remained elusive. Judaic Studies teachers often lack ready-made resources or formal training in differentiation models. In this article, we share our experience using AI to help Jewish studies teachers overcome those challenges.
Unlocking Every Learner: An instructional reflection for educators in Judaic Studies grades 1-5
Educate the child according to their path (Proverbs 22:6).
This well-known verse beautifully captures the essence of differentiated and personalized learning: each child enters the classroom with a unique constellation of strengths, challenges, interests, and ways of understanding the world.
Blended and Personalized Learning in Jewish Studies
Blended and Personalized Learning (BPL) has become a valuable approach for Jewish studies classrooms seeking to meet wide-ranging student needs without overwhelming teachers. BPL provides structures that allow educators to teach more precisely, differentiate more naturally, and build student independence and choice. When implemented with clear routines, consistent expectations, and thoughtful planning, BPL transforms classrooms into dynamic spaces where learners move at an appropriate pace, engage more deeply, and take increasing ownership of their learning. Educators also benefit from having a mentor/coach guide them through the different steps. The following overview outlines the core principles of effective BPL and illustrates how these principles come to life in real 1st–8th grade classrooms.
Hevruta as a Tool for Differentiation and Personalization
Meeting the needs of every learner in the room is one of the most complex tasks a teacher faces. No two students process text in the same way. Some absorb information quickly, while others need more time. Some think visually, others verbally. Some feel confident sharing ideas in front of the class, while others shut down the moment they feel unsure. Even highly motivated learners approach Torah with very different strengths and needs. Teachers want to support every student, yet it is difficult to personalize instruction when the class is moving through the same pasuk or section of Gemara at the same pace.
From Teaching the Class to Teaching Each Student: Building Sustainable Inclusive Classrooms
Walk down the hallways of many schools today or step into a teacher’s lounge, and the shift in conversation is unmistakable. Instead of talking about plans for a trip, Shabbat, or the newest and most exciting curriculum, the conversation frequently has shifted towards struggling students, classroom behaviors, and the plight of supporting an ever-growing diverse Jewish student population. These discussions reflect a new reality: Teaching at a Jewish day school now requires an expanding skill set to meet the evolving needs of students and the growing challenges teachers face.
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