What I observed one day in my visit to an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom last year opened my mind to completely new ways of teaching Tanakh, leading to greater student engagement.I work at a pluralistic elementary school that emphasizes growth mindset and continued development for each educator. One specific policy that helps educators learn from each other is the requirement to visit at least two other classrooms every semester. This routine fosters a genuine culture of professional growth, where teachers share ideas, observe varied teaching methods, and offer constructive feedback. I’ve always found these observations beneficial, but one visit left a lasting impact on my approach to teaching Tanakh. Stepping into Mrs. Michelle Petrova’s 6th grade ELA classroom, I was greeted with an incredibly vibrant atmosphere.

Much of the discussions we find about teaching Humash focus on the narrative portions—Genesis, the story of the Exodus, the wanderings in the wilderness. To a large extent that makes sense, as they provide students with their origin stories—so critical for building the foundations of identity—and are inherently interesting, as stories tend to be. That being said, there is another half of the Torah, whose nature is primarily legal. While some skip it intentionally or somehow “don’t get around to it,” for others it is no less important to teach, even though the content often doesn’t lend itself easily to grab and hold the students’ attention. As with any teaching, we must first identify what we want to achieve before we can think about how we want to do it.

As many teachers of Tanakh know, the Tanakh classroom serves as a crucible for interpreting sacred texts, particularly in theologically and denominationally diverse day schools, camps, and beit midrash settings. The question I wish to explore here is: how do Jewish educators navigate the complex landscape of multiple orientations towards Tanakh that they might find in the seats of their classroom and make sure to empower all their students as interpreters? Central to my own Tanakh teaching, at almost every grade level, in almost every type of day school context, is the realization that my students don’t read Tanakh according to the same orientations or literacy practices, but it would be helpful if they did—at least for the duration of my class.

“My students insist on translating every pasuk (verse) into English and then using their translation to answer the questions. How can I get them to work from the makor (original text)?”“When I give in to their learned helplessness and teach them an interpretation, they can’t identify the problem in the pasuk that the interpretation comes to solve, and then they get stuck on the one understanding I presented and won’t consider an alternative. How can I help them think for themselves?” “I want my students to identify with the avot (patriarchs) and imahot (matriarchs) and learn from their example. But they somehow can’t relate to them as role models. What am I doing wrong?”Sound familiar? For years these complaints were a constant refrain from my Tanakh-teaching colleagues.

Any Tanakh text, whether narrative or legal, contains an abundance of ideas, elements, and complexities, and has the potential to raise countless questions. How does a school community decide which of them to pursue?Nechama Leibowitz, quoted by Shmuel Peerless in To Study and to Teach: The Methodology of Nechama Leibowitz, wrote that educators have……to decide what to leave out and what topics should not be touched, because it is pointless to tackle a number of different topics and problems superficially or incidentally in a chapter. It is preferable to concentrate on just a few topics, but in depth (p. 15). Standards serve as powerful tools for deliberating about a vision for Tanakh education and for shaping Tanakh curriculum once the school’s vision is clear.

In my roles as a Tanakh teacher and an instructional coach, my goal is to inspire Tanakh students to become engaged, proud, and even passionate Jews, fluent in Jewish literacy and deeply committed to the future of Jewish education and community. This goal is daunting under the best of circumstances; when teaching Tanakh to weaker students, it becomes more so. In this article I will outline some of the most ubiquitous challenges that arise from teaching Tanakh to weaker students and offer suggestions for navigating them based on my own experience as well as conversations with other educators and research from the field. I believe that navigating these challenges requires both modifications in practice and shifts in mindset, and I will outline each of them.

For the past decade, educators have been using the term student-centered learning (SCL) but still finding it tricky and challenging to apply to the Tanakh classroom for a variety of reasons. One is the amount of time teachers must dedicate not only to teaching content but also to developing textual reading skills. Another is that teachers might feel reluctant to engage in a pedagogy they feel allows for too much free thinking and not enough respect for the mesorah, classical commentators, and tradition in general. Here we offer tips and strategies for how to introduce SCL into the Tanakh classroom in large and small ways. Differentiation and Social-Emotional Learning Are you differentiating in your classroom? Great! That’s one time-tested way to employ SCL in the Tanakh classroom.

Tanakh in dialogueWhat position does the Tanakh occupy in the life of an early teen? For many, the Tanakh resides in the mental box into which school is commonly placed—a box of academic pursuits, Hebrew language and grammar, Jewish history and Biblical knowledge. There is nothing innately wrong with this, to the contrary, Tanakh study certainly can and does involve these important elements. But a missed opportunity arises when compartmentalisation precludes Tanakh from forming dialogue with the other “boxes” that rise to prominence in the early teen years.Early teenagehood is often marked by questioning and exploration as students begin a journey of seeking to understand that which may have previously gone unquestioned.

“Give a man a fish,” the saying goes, “and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” At Netivot, we have developed a Tanakh program that gives each child the personalized gift of feeding himself for a lifetime. The Montessori method is predicated upon the idea that each child, if provided developmentally appropriate opportunities, will inherently learn and grow and master at each phase of development according to his own individual needs. For this reason, in our classrooms, the expectation is not for children to memorize translations of text “chorally,” but rather to develop individually the skills to translate for themselves. Using key elements of the Montessori method, our students build a series of skills that allow them to tackle pesukim independently.