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.

Here is a thought experiment. What would change about the camp experience if we changed nothing about the experience itself, but at the end of a session, counselors gave each camper a grade that would later appear on a college transcript. It is obvious to me that that one small change would profoundly affect the whole experience, and not for the better. So, what does it mean that we give grades in Jewish studies? Why have we chosen to give those grades in the first place, and what other aspects of the “formal classroom” have we imported into Jewish studies that might actually be hindering our goals rather than enhancing them?

Jewish day schools, by necessity, have adopted many of the design aspects of our Western academic counterparts. The annual school calendar, the structure of the daily schedule, classroom design, curricular structures—semesters, class hours, units, attendance, formative assessments, unit tests, finals—all of these are necessary for schools to run effectively in the modern era, and many of them make learning better. The question is, which of these are necessary in the Jewish studies classroom? Which make learning better, and which are actually creating barriers to meeting our deepest goals? We often think about inclusion as removing barriers to success, but what barriers are there simply because, “that’s how classrooms work”?

Education reformer Sir Ken Robinson, in “Changing Paradigms” (his 2008 speech which later got edited into this viral video), lays out some of the economic, intellectual, and cultural assumptions that lay “deep in the gene pool” of education.

We have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism, and in the image of it. Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines, ringing bells…specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group…it’s like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture. If you’re interested in the model of learning you don’t start from this production line mentality.

Much about our world and our understanding of education have changed in the 150 years since the “modern classroom” came into being. We have moved from an industrial economy through the knowledge economy and increasingly have entered the age of the attention and meaning economies. Today we understand that variation, in the way students learn, the pace they learn, the things that motivate them, are the norm not the exception. Understandings of multiple intelligences and a value for inclusion have spawned countless strategies for overcoming the barriers that are inherent in the current system. UDL, differentiation, personalization, project-based learning, gamification, game-based learning, mastery-based learning, and many more are all powerful strategies for adapting the traditional classroom to meet our modern needs, but they can be costly, difficult, and time consuming to implement, and even so, the barriers that cause many students to struggle can remain. This is because many of these barriers are inherent in the Western academic school system. Even (and perhaps especially) in Jewish day schools, college admission is the driver that motivates parents, students, administrators, and teachers, and ultimately shapes almost everything about our schools. That can make change and adopting new models difficult.

In Jewish studies, by contrast, there are no state standards or Regents exams. That’s not to say that academic rigor ought not to be a goal. Nor is it to say that assessment doesn’t play a key role in motivation and accountability. It is to say that we have a lot more flexibility in how we structure the Jewish classroom and the learning that happens there. Perhaps we have more to learn from the best aspects of the beit midrash than we do from the beit sefer, and, at the very least, we should make careful use of the freedom we have to pick and choose from the best of each.

So let’s look at some aspects of the traditional classroom that generally represent the greatest challenge to a diverse, inclusive classroom, how modern pedagogy is addressing those shortcomings, and how they can be implemented into the JS classroom with as little friction as possible by drawing on the traditional beit midrash model.

Curriculum and Course Design

The current model of education generally starts with time. The school calendar gets set and the schedule built, determining the number of learning hours to be dedicated to each subject. Next, we tend to set our content goals. Given the amount of time dedicated to a subject, how much content can we reasonably be expected to cover? From there we select textbooks or other sources depending on the subject, establish a scope and sequence, set out units, start to build assessments etc. But with time and content largely fixed before school even begins, where is the room for variability? Variability, of course, comes in achievement. Given the time allotted to any piece of content, how well the student does at mastering the material in that time period gets measured. Some students are expected to excel, some expected to fail, and most are expected to fall somewhere in the middle. In its purest form, to maintain an even bell curve we should give most students Cs, and then an equal number of Ds as Bs and an Fs as As. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea has never worked in a Jewish school.

While that grading practice has long since been abandoned, the central premise of focusing our efforts on planning for the center of the bell curve and setting content goals based on what we can reasonably expect the “average student” to achieve in the given time, is still very much the norm. But what happens when you take a system designed in an era in which half the students were expected to underperform and then give teachers the responsibility to make sure everyone excels? Differentiation.

Now the teacher needs to adapt the curriculum designed for the “average student” to make sure that the advanced students are sufficiently enriched and the struggling students have what they need to keep up. In Jewish studies, where on top of the diversity that you see in every other classroom you have variation in Hebrew level, text navigation skills, cultural, historical, and ritual background, and more, you are setting up both the teacher and student to at the very least struggle, if not fail.

What would it look like to plan a course in a way that takes learner diversity as a given rather than an afterthought; to design something that works better not just for some students but that makes sure every student has the chance to maximize their potential? Personalization and Mastery Based Learning.

A traditional approach tells us that almost any area of Jewish study can be studied bekiut (breadth) or iyun (depth), with or without commentaries, in the original, or in translation, etc. Furthermore, there is far more content than can reasonably be expected to be covered in a lifetime, let alone a course. So, let’s change the expectation that every student needs to achieve the same goals in the same timeframe.

Some goals we might expect everyone to achieve, and because of the variability amongst the students this is where a variable timeframe is important. This is particularly true for skills which can often continue to be honed across multiple content goals. For example, let’s imagine that you are teaching a course on Exodus and have decided that Hebrew decoding is a goal for all of the students. Some students may enter the course having reached decoding fluency and might be ready to work on vocabulary starting in Chapter 1. Other students might continue to work to improve fluency for the first few months of class as you study the early chapters of the book. Still others might continue to struggle with this skill throughout the year.

Other goals, such as drawing lessons from a particular chapter might be fixed in time, and here achievement can be variable. Some students might only dive into the peshat (the plain reading of the text) while others will explore a thematic or literary understanding focusing on understanding character development or the narrative about the formation of the Jewish people and drawing out corresponding Jewish values, still others are identifying questions to explore, looking to the commentaries and engaging in debate about the meaning of a given verse. When the class is ready to move on, everyone moves on to the next chapter.

One criticism of differentiation, inclusion, and personalization is that accommodating students can end up coddling them, but that need not be the case. Every student should be encouraged, and even pushed, to grow: to expand their content knowledge, strengthen their skills, and deepen their commitment to Jewish values. This includes encouraging our students to become as skillful as possible even in modalities in which they might struggle. Even students with dyslexia, for example, should be incentivized to become the best readers possible. We should encourage all students to remediate the areas in which they struggle, but we should never allow these skills-based goals to stand in the way of larger aims such as cultural literacy, spiritual meaning, and, most importantly, a deep connection to community. Shared Jewish experience should be at the heart of everything we do. Therefore, when setting goals, we need not be afraid to also set goals that every student needs to meet.

When setting communal goals (or really when designing any learning tool or experience), there is no need to worry about the mythical, “average” student. Ask yourself: “Which, if any, of my students will struggle to meet this particular goal?”, “In what ways will they struggle?”, and “How can I make sure that this struggle is not too much for them to overcome?” Think also about your most advanced students. How can they achieve it in a way that feels stimulating and challenging? Once they have already achieved it, what other goals can they be reaching for? If you have designed any given goal, lesson, assignment, or test in a way that meets the needs, both of the students who will struggle most to achieve it and the needs of ones that will struggle the least, then it will inevitably meet the needs of those in the middle as well.

Once we have set our goals from the outside in, rather than from the middle, and each student has a set of well-articulated objectives we have gone a long way towards creating a naturally inclusive classroom.

Instruction and Knowledge Acquisition

If we have succeeded in our planning in creating a combination of personal and communal goals for our students, we can select our method of instruction to meet those goals. Many Jewish studies classrooms already incorporate self-directed modalities such as hevruta and group work; these are great for addressing personalized goals and might well form the bulk of time spent in an inclusive classroom, as they provide opportunities for students to practice and apply their skills at a level of granularity that cannot be achieved at the whole class level. It is quite likely that there be pools of students with similar goals, skills, and learning styles, and these students can be paired or grouped together to work independently and this is also where small group instruction can be invaluable. The social aspects of these modalities help students process and assimilate the knowledge they are gaining.

Whole class instruction is a valuable vehicle for establishing communal goals and done in ways that create community and shared experience. I’ve found it most effective to collectively bookend each lesson—greeting students, dedicating the learning, and/or reciting Birkat HaTorah (when appropriate), or other opening rituals, ground the group. By setting clear intentions before transitioning into independent study, we foster a cohesive community and sharpen student focus.

Similarly, following up on hevruta time with whole class processing, whether in the form of frontal instruction, class discussion, or other protocol or modality, makes sure students are ending the class broadly on the same page, and emphasizes connection and community. Students can use these opportunities to reflect on what they have learned, and what it means to them and to the Jewish people. If hevruta is where knowledge is acquired and skills refined, whole class processing is where understanding is built and values established.

Grading, Assessment, Reflection, and Back to Goal Setting

It may be that we can forgo letter grades altogether and focus on narrative or other assessment, but even if that is not the case, there are many different systems of calculating those grades that do a much better job of actually capturing student growth and achievement as well as keeping students engaged and motivated. One example is point accumulation, rather than score averages, in which students are continually growing their total. Let’s say the student got 20 points on the first assignment, and 100 on the second, even that first assignment brings them 20 points closer to their ultimate goal (of say, 400+ points for the semester to get an A), rather than dragging the 100 down to a 60%. It also allows for teachers to offer additional opportunities for students to increase their point totals, so that different students can achieve excellence in different ways.

Furthermore, when measured against specific goals, assessment becomes easier and more accurate—a well-articulated goal contains the means to measure the extent to which it has been achieved. These measures are often objective, but when they are subjective, it is important that evaluation be done in partnership between the student and teacher. When students participate in and understand the judgments about the extent to which they have mastered a goal, and reflect on their process so far, the assessment becomes yet another learning experience. When students are regularly encouraged to consider questions such as: “What helped them to succeed?”, “What represented a challenge or even may have caused them to stumble?”, “What goals still lay ahead?”, “What goals should be added, revised, or reconsidered altogether?”, and “Should achieving some goals be worth more points than others?”, they begin to gain an understanding of how they learn and can improve.

Conclusion

The ideas I offer here may not be realistic in every school or classroom and may not resonate equally with every educator. So, I return to the invitation that sits at the heart of this essay: What would your classroom, your department, your school look like if we freed Jewish studies from any preconceived notions?

Even small changes can make a meaningful impact. Choose one assumption to challenge, one norm to reconsider, one barrier to remove, one practice to reclaim, and take a step toward creating a learning environment in which every student can grow and thrive.