Hevruta as a Tool for Differentiation and Personalization
Sandy Shulkes has logged plenty of miles in Jewish education, working in cities such as New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Boca Raton. He is currently a Rebbe and the Judaic Studies Department Chair at Katz Yeshiva High School (Boca Raton, FL), as well as a doctoral candidate at the Azrieli Graduate School.
These differences are not theoretical. They shape how students experience learning. I remember this vividly from my own early years of studying. My hevruta and I learned in completely different ways. He moved slowly and analyzed every word. I preferred to move quickly and return later to clarify details. Neither approach was wrong, but without guidance on how to work together, the experience felt frustrating and uncomfortable. Only later did I realize that our difficulties were rooted in the larger challenge many students face today. When learning is not structured to acknowledge student differences, those differences can become barriers rather than strengths.
Teachers face this challenge every day. We want each student to feel capable, to understand the text, to engage meaningfully, and to grow. Yet whole-class instruction alone rarely provides enough insight into how each student thinks. Personalizing learning requires structures that allow teachers to observe students closely, support them individually, and create opportunities for every learner to succeed.
Hevruta, when guided intentionally, becomes a very effective way to do this. It allows students to work in ways that match their learning profiles and gives teachers access to the thinking that usually stays hidden. But hevruta only supports personalization when it is practiced deliberately, structured carefully, and shaped by teachers who guide the process. With the right design, hevruta can become a powerful method for understanding students, challenging them appropriately, and helping them grow as independent learners.
Why Hevruta Matters
Teachers often assume that the main benefit of hevruta is increased participation or a more active classroom. These are real advantages, yet they only begin to capture what happens when hevruta is structured carefully and used as a way to support different learners.
A. Cognitive Growth That Does Not Happen Alone
Explaining a text to another person forces students to clarify their thinking in a way that private reading does not. When students restate ideas and ask each other questions, they reveal how they approach the text, what they understand, and where they struggle. For teachers, these moments offer valuable insight into individual learning patterns. Two students may arrive at the same answer, but their reasoning pathways can be entirely different. Hevruta makes those pathways visible, which helps teachers tailor future instruction.
B. Confidence and Motivation Built Through Partnership
Not all students feel confident participating in whole-class discussions. Hevruta gives quieter or slower-processing students a space where their thinking matters to someone else. One student may need more time to work through a pasuk, while another may need the reassurance that their interpretation is valid. These partnership dynamics strengthen both learners. As students experience success in hevruta, their confidence grows, which benefits the entire learning environment.
C. Social Presence and the Feeling of Being Seen
Hevruta creates a sense of connection that supports engagement, especially for students who feel lost in larger group settings. When students respond to each other, challenge interpretations, or clarify ideas together, they experience what researchers call social presence. This feeling of being noticed and valued helps students invest more deeply in the text. The partnership becomes a space where their thinking is taken seriously.
D. Interpersonal Skills That Support Differentiation
Hevruta helps students practice skills they will need in any collaborative learning environment: listening, questioning, disagreeing respectfully, and negotiating meaning. These skills allow partners with different strengths to function productively together. Strong readers learn to explain and justify their thinking. Developing readers learn how to ask clarifying questions. Creative thinkers learn to ground ideas in the text, while analytical thinkers learn to consider alternative possibilities. With teacher guidance, these interactions become natural forms of differentiation.
Practical Protocols for Humash Hevruta
Effective hevruta begins with thoughtful partnerships. Students approach text differently. Some see grammar, structure, and patterns immediately. Others think broadly and make intuitive or creative connections. Both kinds of thinkers contribute meaningfully, but they benefit from pairing in different ways.
A. Intentional Pairing as Personalization
Before pairing students, teachers gather insights about how each learner approaches text. These insights come from observing students during class, listening to how they explain their thinking, and using short formative assessments that reveal whether a student is a strong decoder, a conceptual thinker, or someone who benefits from processing ideas through discussion. Understanding these profiles helps teachers pair students in ways that support growth for both partners. It also guides the design of tiered prompts and tasks, ensuring that each student enters the study of the text from a point that feels accessible yet still challenging.
B. Guiding Questions That Match Student Needs
Once pairs are set, the teacher assigns guiding questions tailored to those pairs. One partnership may be asked to identify the central action of the pasuk while another may focus on why a particular verb or phrase appears. For students who need more structure, questions might specify steps. For more independent pairs, prompts may be open-ended. This approach ensures that each pair receives the level of support that fits their learning profile.
C. Teacher Circulation as Assessment
Circulating between hevrutot gives teachers real-time insight into how students learn. A teacher may notice that one student misunderstands a key phrase, that another dominates the conversation, or that a pair has formed a creative but unsupported interpretation. These observations are forms of formative assessment. They allow the teacher to intervene with precision and to adjust pairings, prompts, or instruction in ways that meet students’ needs more effectively.
The Teacher’s Three Roles
Before: Setting the Purpose and Structure
Before hevruta begins, the teacher develops a clear sense of how students think and where they struggle. Short formative checks, quick responses, or observing students with a sample pasuk help the teacher identify learners who decode well, process quickly, or read carefully. The teacher also attends to how students process information: pairing students with strong imagination and big-picture thinking alongside students who prefer more literal, black-and-white analysis often leads to more balanced and productive learning. In this way, pairings are based not only on skill levels but on complementary cognitive styles.
The teacher then frames hevruta consistently, reminding students that different strengths improve the learning. Finally, the teacher designs guided worksheets or step-by-step task sheets that give all students an accessible path into the text, ensuring that no pair is unsure of what to do next and that students with different needs can enter the work successfully.
During: Coaching for Clarity, Balance, and Ownership
As students work, the teacher circulates with a clear purpose: to make sure students understand the task, stay with the text, and work together productively. The teacher answers quick questions, clarifies difficult phrases, and redirects pairs that drift off task. When one partner is doing most of the talking or work, the teacher steps in to rebalance participation and helps them divide the responsibilities so both are actively involved.
Over time, the teacher also rotates pairings so students learn to work with different types of thinkers and so that no student is locked into an unproductive match. In addition, the teacher periodically joins a student in a brief hevruta. Learning the text together with that student allows the teacher to see how the student processes information, identify specific needs, and model effective hevruta behaviors in real time, such as active listening and responding directly to a partner’s thinking so that instruction remains responsive to individual learning needs as they emerge.
After: Reinforcing Individual and Shared Responsibility
After the hevruta session, the teacher gathers students to consolidate learning. The teacher calls on selected pairs to share what they figured out, how they resolved a difficult part of the text, or how their interpretations differed. Individual students may be asked to explain a line they decoded while the partner adds a supporting idea. These share-outs highlight both individual thinking and joint work, reinforcing that hevruta contributes directly to the class’s overall understanding. Throughout this process, the teacher’s goal is to differentiate the learning based on what students demonstrated and to continue honing each student’s textual and collaborative skills.
Conclusion
Hevruta does not replace the teacher. It expands the teacher’s ability to understand each student and support them with greater precision. When teachers circulate between havrutot, they hear how students make sense of the text, where they hesitate, what strategies they use, and what misconceptions they carry. This insight is rarely visible in whole-class instruction, yet it becomes clear when students speak their thinking aloud to a partner.
When teachers intentionally pair students, guide them with structured prompts, and set clear routines, hevruta becomes a natural form of differentiation. Stronger readers learn to explain their reasoning. Students who need more processing time can work at a pace that fits them. Creative thinkers and analytical thinkers sharpen each other’s skills. Each student receives the support they need without slowing down or rushing the class as a whole.
Equally important, hevruta builds both individual and shared responsibility. When students are asked to identify what they contributed to the learning and what they relied on their partner for, they begin to understand that hevruta depends on both members approaching the text with purpose. This helps students take ownership of their growth and value the partnership as a serious part of the learning process.
The culture surrounding hevruta reinforces this shift. When students know their ideas matter and that Torah learning thrives on dialogue, they approach the text with confidence and ownership. Hevruta then becomes not only a method for engagement but a powerful means for personalizing learning, meeting students where they are, and helping them grow into thoughtful, independent learners.
Sandy Shulkes has logged plenty of miles in Jewish education, working in cities such as New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Boca Raton. He is currently a Rebbe and the Judaic Studies Department Chair at Katz Yeshiva High School (Boca Raton, FL), as well as a doctoral candidate at the Azrieli Graduate School.
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.
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.
Differentiating Jewish Education – Not If But How
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.
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