Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun describes a world where artificial friends are acquired as companions for children. Programmed to learn from interactions with people and the environment, Klara, the artificial friend who narrates the novel, has trouble picking up social cues from her companion’s mom.
The Mandel Teacher Educator Institute (MTEI) engages its participants in improving the quality of teaching and learning in Jewish spaces through an intensive 2-year cohort-based professional learning program and ongoing graduate learning. At the end of 2019, a small group of graduates and leadership began planning our biennial 2020 Graduate Conference, an opportunity to share successes and collaborate around challenges of leading professional development for Jewish educators.
The transition from in-person to online learning necessitated by COVID-19 had many implications, including detrimental effects on student mental health. Precisely at an age when social interaction is crucial for development, lockdowns separated students from their peers. This separation, in addition to academic concerns, generated stress and anxiety in children. During this challenging period of rapid change, teachers were expected to create stability and certainty both in their capacities as teachers in the virtual classroom and as caregivers for the students.
The school year is coming to a close in the northern hemisphere, and in-class parties (to the extent they are not on Zoom) have begun.
JEWISHEDUCATIONALEADERSHIP Jewish Educational Leadership is a publication of The Lookstein Center for Jewish Education of Bar Ilan University. Chana German, Executive Director Journal Staff Hyim Brandes | Editor Sarah Golubtchik | Copyeditor Zvi Grumet |...
Ask a teacher to teach the same short story to children every day for eight or more years, and they will likely look at you like you are crazy! Yet, in a sense, that is the challenge of teaching tefillah (prayer). We have the same tefillot, more or less, that we use with our children day after day for their entire school career. Unless there is a conscious effort to create a rich tefillah experience, group prayer is at risk of becoming a mindless task, with children (and adults!) on autopilot.
There are always a few students who are the first to raise their hands in response to a teacher’s question even if they have no answer in mind. At the same, many classes have a handful of students who prefer to remain silent during classroom discussions….
A number of years ago, at a community Shabbaton in Cape Town, I was presented with a dilemma. Until then, the government oversaw all learning even in private schools. That meant that there were governmental standards in Jewish studies and that Jewish studies grades appeared on students’ official transcripts, like their grades in History and Science. The department of education had recently decided to change the policy and get out of the business of overseeing non-core subjects, and the Jewish community was anxious—why would their students pay any heed to their Jewish studies classes if they were not going to “count?”
A friend once told a story of her first year in rabbinical school. The Rabbi who was leading the class gave an assignment to work with a partner to study a section of the Torah. The student raised her hand and asked the teacher, “How far do you want us to get?” The Rabbi smiled and said, “You get as far as you get.”
Jewish educators speak about meaning in multiple ways: There is a factual or descriptive sense (e.g., The meaning of the Hebrew word סוס is “horse.”). Meaning can also refer to the relevance of what is learned, the ability of learners to engage with learning in a way that has some emotional investment (e.g., Max found the unit on horses to be meaningful because he grew up on a farm. The unit on iguanas? Not so much.).
