Youth Groups are Fundamental

Once in awhile, we try to pass on stories or articles that catch our attention and that might be useful to Jewish teachers and educators.

This article really takes the cake. It’s by Lisa Greengard, a youth director who “gets it.” She works at Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles, and she recently wrote the piece linked below. It’s called “Youth Groups Are Worth the Fight.”

In it, she confirms the importance of youth groups’ role in creating Jewish communities and helping kids to really live Jewishly. She wants parents to realize how important it is to encourage their kids to participate:

Your child’s peer group during these years can determine what kind of Jewish life your child will lead in young adulthood and beyond… Don’t you want to know that your children are in a safe, nurturing environment where positive Jewish role models, Judaism and acceptance are the norm?

To read her whole article, click over to Temple Isaiah’s website.

A Serious Ennui

If the 1960s Hebrew school is really a thing of the past, then 1960s textbooks need to be a thing of the past, too.

by Josh Mason-Barkin

My wife and I went to see the Coen brothers’ latest film this weekend, A Serious Man. For me, it was a double-whammy must-see. First, I’m a huge fan of their movies. (“We’re talking about unchecked aggression here, Dude.”) Second, the movie purports to be about rabbis, Jews, and Judaism, and well, I’m a Jewish educator and my wife is a Jewish educator and soon-to-be rabbi. So suffice it to say that we were excited.

The film lived up to expectations, and then some. It’s a deep and fascinating look at Jewish life in 1960s middle American suburbia, complete with a Job-esque examination of a father’s quest to find meaning in his life. It’s rich with cultural and religious allusions, and has a lot to say about the relationship between Jews and Jewish leadership (especially rabbis).

But I have to admit I paid extra attention to the Hebrew school scenes.

Twice in the movie we visit Danny Gopnick sitting bored in his Talmud Torah class. It’s as old-fashioned a classroom as you can imagine. The teacher is trying to show the students how to properly conjugate the Hebrew word for “to go,” droning on “Hu holekh habayta, hi holekhet habayta, anahnu holkhim habayta…” The students are totally unengaged, they have no idea what’s going on, and their answers to the teacher’s questions suggest that they don’t understand anything he’s been trying to teach them. They each sit staring at their books, totally confused at the meaningless foreign language printed in front of them.

(As for me, I sat there during that scene praying. “Please don’t let it be a Torah Aura book…” Thankfully, the prop folks went with books from a different publisher. Whew.)

In a second school scene, the teacher tries to teach the students to say, in Hebrew, that they want to plant a tree in Israel. Not only are they all bored, but it’s clear that they have no idea what’s going on, they don’t care, and there’s virtually nothing meaningful, worthwhile, or redeemable about the entire enterprise. The non-Hebrew-speaking audience has no idea what’s going on either, which seems to be a very intentional choice by the filmmakers. As Naomi Pfefferman points out in the Jewish Journal:

The Coens chose not to subtitle the Hebrew lesson scenes in “A Serious Man” to help enhance the fictional classroom’s droning sense of ennui.

Pfefferman is a gifted writer, and her choice of the word “ennui” is perfect.

Ennui is “a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement” (thanks, New Oxford American Dictionary).

Jewish education has come a long way since 1967, when the film takes place, and I’m proud to say that I’ve worked with and in many schools whose students, I can confidently say, never feel a “droning sense of ennui.”

Schools are doing some amazing things to make Jewish learning exciting, engaging, and meaningful: experiential learning, family education, flexible scheduling, and rethought curricula. The entire idea of a supplementary (ahem, “complementary”) education has undergone a complete re-imagination (for the better!) in the past decade.

So if few of today’s classrooms look like the one in A Serious Man, why are too many textbooks designed for educational settings where children sit stoically at their desks as teachers attempt to mindlessly drill facts and Hebrew reading skills into their heads? (And lets be clear: Computer games that mindlessly drill facts and skills are just as bad. Being computerized doesn’t remove the ennui.) We’re not sure why these sort of textbooks still exist, but we know that we want to be part of the solution.

Here are four suggestions for improving the quality of Jewish educational publishing:

The High Distinction of the Melamed

by Joel Lurie Girshaver

When I went to graduate school the term was “teacher proofing.”

It was thought that such technologies as “programmed-instruction” were good, not only because of their ability to allow for individual pacing, but because of their ability to take teachers out of the equation. Today, we see schools that script teachers’ lessons that opt for camp like programming, that fantasize the use of technology and do everything possible to compromise teacher involvement. While understanding that they have experiences that suggest that teachers are the weakest link in Jewish education, they miss the truth that teachers are also the strongest link. The failure of Jewish education may rest in the hands of some teachers but the success of Jewish education also resides in the skill and attitude of other (or perhaps the same) teachers.

Teaching Naked

Naked Teaching, advocated by Southern Methodist University dean Jose Bowen, calls for active use of technology before and after class, but calls for student teacher interaction in class. According to a report on NPR:

“While it sounds like it’s an anti-technology position, really what I’m doing is using technology like podcasts and online games and things so that students have first contact with the material before they come to class,” Bowen says. He is inviting teachers to invert the traditional model, in which students come to class unprepared, are introduced to material by a professor, then leave to study on their own before coming back to be tested.

“First contact with the material is about, you, the student. Then you come into the classroom, and now we have what’s called learning. We work together, we work on problem sets, we argue. And then you go away and I assess you.”¹

Naked Teaching is the rejection of some methodologies and the affirmation of good teaching. It says, lectures are not the best way of conveying information. Power-point presentations make it worse, not better. The real goal is to use technology to transmit information and the classroom to process it. It is a process that say, the teacher is central to the learning that lives long term with the student.

Technology, Tradition, and Great Hebrew Tools

Larry Greenberg is a cool dad. He’s a writer for the tech website GearDiary, and he recently wrote a blog post entitled “Technology meets Tradition” about how he used techie gadgets to help his daughter with her Hebrew school homework:

My 9 year old daughter began Hebrew School just yesterday. Up until 2nd grade the children at my temple attend only Sunday School, where they learn mostly about Jewish holidays, traditions etc. In 3rd grade they also begin attending Hebrew School one night a week, mostly, I gather, to prepare them to become Bar or Bat Mitzvah.

My daughter came home from school today, and just like she does most days sat out to do her homework. After her regular was completed she took out her new Hebrew school text book and asked if she could read it to me.

I said of course. As she started reading it aloud it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea if what she was reading was correct or not. I’d long forgotten how to read and write Hebrew myself. I felt a little guilty that I was unable to help her.

Larry then goes on to describe his novel solution: He used his iPhone to take a photo of the page his daughter was working on, sent the photo to Dan, a friend and fellow techie who happens to be a rabbi, and set up a Skype conversation between his daughter and rabbi techie. This way, his daughter was able to do her homework with the aid of someone who could hear her reading, correct any mistakes, and encourage her when she was doing well:

Using Skype and my iPhone we’d created our very own Hebrew tutorial session. Abby continued reading, and Dan followed along via his electronic copy correcting and applauding her as she went.

Great idea, right? This is a great example of technological problem solving, and (even better) of a parent getting involved in the best possible way.

Of course, we’d love to make Larry’s life a little easier.

Though Larry’s webpost includes a picture of the page his daughter was decoding, we can’t actually tell what Hebrew curriculum his daughter’s school uses. But we can tell you this:

Abby wasn’t learning Hebrew from top-of-the-line curricular materials.

We know this because if Larry’s daughter was in fact using the best Hebrew materials available, this entire geeky miracle would have been totally and completely unnecessary.

Why?

Because Torah Aura Hebrew and prayer materials come with a free homework websites that are designed for this very situation. The websites have virtual versions of the homework pages, and they have built-in audio that reads the Hebrew words out-loud along with the student.

Larry could have headed over to the appropriate homework webpage, where Cantor Ilan Davidson would have read aloud (via the miracle of internet audio) with his daughter, right along with the page in front of her.

And one more thing: The homework websites are totally free. No passwords, no serial numbers, and no activation codes.

We created these websites precisely for parents like Larry who care deeply about their children’s Jewish education, and who wish that their own Hebrew skills enabled them to help their daughters and sons succeed. So we designed sites that allow parents and children to read Hebrew together, even if mom or dad (or grandma or grandpa, etc.) struggles with Hebrew.

Parents learning with their children. That is where technology really meets tradition.

When Larry used his technological expertise to help his daughter with her Hebrew homework, he was doing something very wonderful. He was taking an active interest in his child’s Jewish education.

Unfortunately, not every parent has a tech-savvy rabbi on Skype speed dial. That’s why we developed our home workbook websites. We believe that every child deserves a a little help with their homework.

Ten Ways Textbooks Enable Programmatic Experiences

Last week, we discussed why we believe in textbooks, and articulated why we think they’re important. In that article, we kept mentioning that textbooks aren’t boring if they’re used properly. Of course, that sort of talk flies in the face of the assumption that the only way to use a textbook is to read it out loud — paragraph by paragraph and line by line, or to instruct students to sit and read by themselves. It’s an incorrect assumption.

Textbooks can enable exciting, interactive, programmatic learning experiences. They should not be equated with static, frontal — boring! — learning. Learning with textbooks can be more exciting than learning without them. Textbooks can increase the amount of active learning that takes place in classrooms. They can be the sources for debates, drama, creative experiences, research and a lot of other idea learning moments.

So what do we mean when we talk about using textbooks “properly”? Here are ten exciting, interesting, and fun ways to use textbooks in the classroom:

Not So Sure About Woocher’s “New Approach”

by Joel Lurie Grishaver

Jonathan Woocher is chief ideas officer at JESNA (Jewish Educational Service of North America) and director of the Lippman Kanfer Institute. He once thought that religion would disappear in the North American Jewish community and that all would be left would be secular institutions.

He has said,

“From an educational standpoint, there is good reason to welcome a situation in which learners drive the agenda. The learning itself will be more powerful and more enduring when it responds to authentic questions, when the learner actively seeks out the answers to these questions, and when there is ample room for diverse learning styles and formats.”

When he wrote that a few years ago, that sort of thinking was a breath of fresh air, and it was especially poignant for day school educators. At the time, booming enrollments and adequate funding gave them the opportunity to do some innovative things in their classrooms, and Woocher’s notion of learner-directed education was very helpful.

With the recent economic downturn spurring reports that day school enrollment is down, Dr. Woocher is now thinking about supplemental schools. In an article published in the recent edition of The Jewish Week, Woocher wrote:

“At JESNA, we believe that every family that wants to send its children to a quality day school should be able to do so. And we want the same for those choosing supplementary education. It will take some creative thinking and a lot of collaboration. But it’s doable, and we’re working now with our partners in central agencies across North America to make that vision a reality.”

He gives the following example of this free choice in action.

“Take a day school family now seeking an intensive supplementary program, perhaps one that meets eight or 10 hours per week, rather than the typical four or five, and that emphasizes serious Hebrew literacy, either for purposes of conversation or text study in the original. Or, take a very different, but not uncommon family whose Jewishness is primarily cultural, not religious, or focused on social justice and activism. Perhaps the family has a child who is passionate and gifted in the arts and wants to approach her or his Jewish learning through this lens. Perhaps the family is an interfaith one, and seeks a Jewish educational program that is uniquely sensitive to their life issues.”

There are only a few problems with this thinking. First, it does no good in Shreveport, Louisiana and places like it, where there are fewer than thirty students in the combined religious school. Filling classes, finding teachers, and enabling success is the problem. Offering alternative school models is beyond fantasy. This is exactly the problem that the Institute for Southern Jewish Life is successfully focusing on, and they are doing it by going in the opposite direction. They are doing it by standardizing curriculum while training and inspiring teachers.

Second, this is not a moment in history to have great faith in market driven economies. My Rabbi and teacher, Shelly Dorph, used to worry about Gresham’s Law that states that “Bad money drives good money off the market.”

He was saying that given the decision making ability, families that want less will always control the level of Jewish education. That is how we moved from three days a week to two or one. Believing that there are a significant number of families who want ten to twelve hours a week of “Hebrew School” is one of the fastest ways of putting a school out of business.

The idea of involving families in making choices is a good idea. All the best of congregations are doing so in their visioning and executing of excellence. In Jack Wertheimer’s latest study he says, “Good schools regard families as allies and also clients.”

Dr. Woocher is right that we need to have our ears to the ground, that we need to offer options wherever possible, and the market place has room for entrepreneurs who want to find and serve niche markets.

Where he is wrong, however, just as he was wrong about civil religion, is that Jewish life begins and progresses as community. This is not the time to follow the rules of the market place, but of the extended family who knows how to meet the needs of each member.

Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars

Are you looking for interesting, innovative, and inexpensive ways to improve your skill set as a teacher or educator? Do you use (or are you thinking about using) Torah Aura materials in your school? Are you bummed because you’re missing the professional development opportunities that used to be offered by CAJE?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then we’ve got a great solution for you:

Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars.

Using the latest and greatest technology, the team at Torah Aura Productions is excited to bring you a series of six online workshops designed to help you become a more skilled professional who makes the most of the materials you use in your school. These webinars are absolutely free and are available to you while you sit at your computer in the privacy of your home or office.

Here are the first six Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars that we’re offering in the coming weeks:

Teacher’s Clinic for Using the Torah Aura Hebrew/Prayer Program
Tuesday, July 21 at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern
Missed the webinar? Click here to watch a video.

Do you use Torah Aura Hebrew/Prayer materials in your school? In this webinar, we’ll first examine the philosophy behind Torah Aura’s Hebrew/prayer materials (S’fatai Tiftah, Journeys Through the Siddur, and/or Pirkei T’fillah). Then, we’ll transition into a practical discussion of how to make the materials work in the classroom. By the end of the webinar, participants will have a firm grasp on…

• the philosophy behind the Torah Aura Hebrew/Prayer Program
• the goals of teaching Hebrew and prayer
• the pieces that make up a chapter of the Torah Aura Hebrew/Prayer Program
• how to use the accompanying teacher’s guides and home resources
• how to plan a lesson
• how to make Hebrew/prayer learning experiential and exciting, and
• how to pace the curriculum over the course of a semester or year.

Real Siddur Teaching: A Guide for Educators
Tuesday, August 4 at 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

This is a session about the philosophy of teaching Hebrew and Prayer in the supplementary school. We’ll examine goals, objectives, and some ideas for successful implementation of a Hebrew/Prayer curriculum. By the end of the webinar, participants will have a firm grasp on how to make a Hebrew/Prayer curriculum work in their schools, including the five elements that build towards the goal of enabling students to be meaningful pray-ers.

Everything You Need to Know About Using Teacher’s Guides
Wednesday, August 12 at 4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

Lots of principals buy teacher’s guides for their teachers, but these hefty volumes often end up (at best) being quickly skimmed in the few minutes before class or (at worst) a permanent fixture in the teacher’s car trunk. In this webinar, we’ll talk about how Torah Aura teacher’s guides are designed, and help teachers make the most out of them. Attendees should have a teacher’s guide handy as they participate in the webinar.

Making Israel Come Alive: Using Artzeinu in the Classroom
Thursday, August 13 at 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

Teaching Israel in a supplementary school setting presents a number of challenges. How can we teach appreciation and love of Israel to students who haven’t visited? How can we present the real Israel while at the same time trying to inculcate the values of Zionism? How do we address all the richness and diversity of Israel given our limited time and resources?

This webinar will address all these challenges and more, and will introduce teachers to using Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter to teach Israel from an historical, cultural, Biblical, religious, and reality-based perspective.

The Magical Lifecycle Curriculum: Using The Circle of Jewish Life
Tuesday, August 25 at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

What happens when you want to talk about brit milah (or brit bat!) or death? How can we teach about the Jewish lifecycle in a way that’s engaging, sensitive, and empowering?

In this webinar we’ll discuss why the Jewish lifecycle can be a challenging part of your curriculum, and we’ll explore ways to use The Circle of Jewish Life to turn lifecycle learning into a series of magical experiences for your students.

This webinar will be useful to teachers and educators currently using The Circle of Jewish Life, as well as to anyone interested in “jazzing up” their lifecycle curriculum.

All About Eizehu Gibor: An Introduction to a New Way to Teach Jewish Heroes
Thursday, August 27 at 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern
Click here to sign up.

Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values is a new heroes book for fifth and sixth graders. It’s revolutionary in the way it integrates the traditional pantheon of Jewish heroes with a set of new heroes for a new generation. It’s also unique in the diversity of it’s heroes, and in the way it integrates living a life of Jewish values with the lives of heroes. This webinar will introduce you to Eizehu Gibor, and will highlight some of the elements that make it a unique curricular tool.

“Hineini”

by David Singer

David Singer, a student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University, is the author of our new Israel book, Yisrael Sheli. He recently went on a trip with American Jewish World Service to Senegal, Africa. This is an account from that trip.

Standing on a rooftop, I looked around, and felt anywhere but home. As far as the eye could see was a morass of concrete and dirt. The thick humid air smelt of smoke. The sounds of donkeys, and horses, and a muezzin filled the air.

I was surrounded by twenty four colleagues – fellow rabbinical students from throughout the United States – as we prayed the morning service from atop a building in downtown Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal.

For two weeks, our delegation joined the American Jewish World Service to work with its grantee, Tostan, aiding in community-led development in rural villages facing extreme poverty throughout Africa.

No prior experience could have prepared me for what I saw in Senegal: children with flies in their eyes; distended bellies; open sores; bare feet; hunger; sickness; a land parched by drought. At first glance, the place seemed like hell. How could God allow such a place to exist?

Why Textbooks Are Important

The re-thinkers and re-visionists and re-imaginers are coming for your textbooks.

That’s right. They want to remove the textbooks from your classrooms. And the blackboards, too. And maybe even the teachers. They’re coming for your textbooks because they’re well-meaning Jewish leaders, and they want to put a spark back in the classrooms in your school. They want learning to be fun and meaningful and worthwhile (and not dull and stale and boring). They look at camps and Israel trips, and appreciate what a good job those folks do at Jewish education. So they decide that schools should be just like camp, and they come to take away the desks and the blackboards (or the whiteboards), and they come to take the textbooks, too.

We think this is a problem, and not just because we’re textbook publishers. Rather, we became textbook publishers because we think this is a problem.

Torah Aura Productions was founded in 1981 by a group of innovative Jewish educators who looked out at the field of Jewish education and found materials that were shallow and dull. We started a company to create new tools for teachers that would be exciting and meaningful. From the beginning, we’ve always believed in re-imagining synagogue schools, but we refuse to take an extremist or aggressive approach to school reform, because we’re afraid to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We got into this business because we didn’t think Jewish children should have to sit stoically at their desks as teachers attempt to mindlessly drill facts and Hebrew reading skills into their heads. We’re dedicated to publishing textbooks of a much higher quality, and we defend textbooks because we believe that well-designed curricular materials have the power to make a real difference in the lives of Jewish students.

Here are eight reasons we believe textbooks are important.

Altneu Non-Shul — The Sunday School for Jewish Studies

by Joel Grishaver

Started around 1970 by some Harvard professors, just about the same time some other Harvard faculty started the Harvard Hillel Children’s School (that morphed into Congregation Eitz Chayim), The Sunday School for Jewish Studies is a non-synagogue, parent cooperative, not for profit, way of providing a Jewish education and accessing a bar/bat mitzvah experience.

The school was featured in a recent article in the Boston Globe. The article described it as (a) a non-Synagogue and (b) cheaper way of providing a bar/bat mitzvah. The article centers on the fact that this “non brick and mortar” (non) institution that charges as little as 1/4 the cost of belonging to (and sending your kids to school at) a “brick and mortar” synagogue.

Here are the things I know.

[1] Harvard Hillel Children’s School (that I do know about) was started as a chance to provide an innovative, better, experimental Jewish education for a number of positively identified but “syno-phobic” Jews. It did a lot of pioneering work with adult education, family education, alternative education and a lot of the other frontier (for its age) areas of Jewish Education. For a lot of years it was guided by Rabbi Cherie Kohler Fox and her husband Dr. Everett Fox. The hallmark of the school was not its cost, but its ability to innovate. Much of that innovation was its ability to create community among a population that was considered fringe. That community ultimately felt the need to evolve into a synagogue.

[2] I had never heard about The Sunday School for Jewish Studies until The Globe article appeared. The little I’ve been able to learn about it on the internet makes it sound little different from the Harvard Hillel Children’s school at its prime. It is devoted to serving its students and its families. It has a social action vision of Judaism. It is open to all kinds of definitions of Jewish family. All this is to be praised!

[3] It is The Globe article that bothers me, not my understanding of The Sunday School. I have nothing against Jews creating independent institutions that meet their own needs. I have nothing against people choosing and creating alternatives to the synagogue. I do wish Jewish life was cheaper. What bothers me is the smug sense that this is a better way of providing a Jewish education because it has less overhead. The article provides no other way of evaluating the quality of the education offered at this school.

The article ends by quoting the father of a Bar Mitzvah, “He read it perfectly. I’d put his training up against any synagogue training,” Note: the standard was “his training” not “his education.” The author has a pretty classic misunderstanding of Jewish education. The school’s job is to “train” students for b’nai mitzvah. If the kid reads well, the school must have succeeded. It’s an economics equation. The school provides a product (“training”) for less money, so it must be a great deal.

[4] The article actually comes as a warning. The congregational school, that long believed that it has a monopoly on non-day school Jewish education, now needs to look over its shoulder. While we thought the major threat would come from “tutoring,” there are other alternatives on the horizon. Simply put, we are not the only way to have a bar/bat mitzvah. God’s creation of this world does allow for the rental of tents, the borrowing of Sifrei Torah and the photocopying of service booklets. If the only thing our schools offer is bar mitzvah training, we have a big problem because (a) we know that this isn’t a sufficient Jewish education, and (b) as this article teaches us, families can get a do-it-yourself b’nai mitzvah somewhere else.

[5] So here’s my final synthesis:

The article teaches us that congregational schools are not the cheapest Jewish education option in many cities. But we need to be the best. The research of Dr. Jack Wertheimer (Schools that Work: What We Can Learn from Good Jewish Schools) puts creating a nurturing Jewish Community, engaging Judaism at a high level, providing opportunities for experiential education, and valuing themselves and their students on the list of elements of high-quality Jewish schools.

As my friend and teacher, Rabbi Phil Warmflash, likes to point out, “The success of the synagogue school has as much to do with the success of the synagogue as the success of the school.”