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
Click here to sign up.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

What kind of computer equipment do I need to attend a Torah Aura Professional Development Webinar?
Basically, you just need any Mac or PC that is connected to a high-speed (not dial-up) internet connection. In order to hear the presentation, you’ll also need computer speakers (or you can listen to the audio over a plain-old phone connection, like dialing into a conference call). You can ask questions by simply typing them in (kind of like typing in a chat room or instant message), or you can ask via audio using a microphone connected to your computer or your phone handset. In a nutshell: as long as your computer isn’t totally ancient, and as long as you have an internet connection that’s faster than dial-up, you’re good to go.

Do I have to attend the webinar at the scheduled time?
A webinar is an interactive experience, like attending a real-live workshop. So, yes, to fully participate, you need to attend the webinar at the scheduled time. However, if you’re unavailable during the scheduled time, we’ll be uploading video of the webinars as soon as they’re completed. That means you’ll be able to watch a “rerun” on your own time (but you won’t be able to ask questions or participate in the real-time discussion).

How long are the webinars?
For each of our Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars, we’ve planned 50-60 minutes for the presentation itself, plus 20-30 minutes for discussion and questions. If you can’t make it for the whole webinar, you’re free to log-in and log-off at any time, as you please.

How do I sign up for Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars?
Just click on any of the “Click here to sign up” links above. Once you sign up, you’ll receive an email with a special link that you’ll use to log into the webinar.

Will you be offering more Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars at another time
Yes! These webinars are just the beginning. We’ll be offering more of them in the future. If you have suggestions about possible topics, dates, and times, please drop us a line.

Who should I contact if I have more questions?
If you want to learn more about Torah Aura Professional Development Webinars, please be in touch with Josh Mason-Barkin, director of school services. You can email him at josh@torahaura.com or call him at (800) BE-TORAH (238-6724) x122.

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?

For ten days we worked with locals in the villages of Darou Mouride and Keur Songo, building latrines and helping them in their daily chores. I swept, I tilled soil, I brought forth water from wells. All the while, I built bonds with people so different from me, and yet so similar. They love, they cry, they laugh, they play.

I played with many kids. Two in particular I will never forget, Tidiane Geye and Popmusonjop showed me firsthand the power of the AJWS and its grantees to bring positive change to the world.

As I butchered their names time and time again, the two kids laughed in a way that any would at a blubbering foreigner standing before them. “Tubob” they called me – white man.

Finally, Tidiane Geye crouched down and spelled out his name in the sand below him. In a country with almost no literacy, this defiant act writing was nothing short of miraculous.

But my new friends need far more than an education. They need food. They need mosquito nets. They need basic health services and access to a world which has left them behind. They need shoes.

They need an American Jewish community that remembers them, and does all we can to help the billions of people like them who live in abject poverty, trying to make ends meet on as little as a dollar a day in conditions more horrific than most of us could imagine.

I returned from Africa inspired by the work of the AJWS. I returned motivated by my new cadre of rabbinical students dedicated to bringing our message of social justice to our home communities. I returned ready for the hard work ahead.

The Wolof word used in response to a greeting is “mangifee,” which translates literally as “I am here.” The Hebrew equivalent is “hineini”, the response by Abraham when God first calls out to him in service.

To all my brothers and sisters in this world stricken by the disease of poverty – to Tidiane Geye and Popmusonjop – to all of the communities where AJWS works and those yet to be helped, I cry out Mangifee. I am ready to help you. I am here to work on your behalf. Hineini.

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.

Textbooks Should Be Books of Texts

The Talmud recalls a moment when Judaism changed. It says (Bava Kamma 82a) that Ezra, after the return from the Babylonian Exile, instituted tikkunim (fixes) to the Jewish tradition that included the regular reading and translating of Torah in every village and hamlet, and that he also told the elders to sit in the gates of the city on market days and use the Torah to judge between the people. These changes instituted the Judaism we now live, a Judaism of texts. This was first of all, the democratization of Torah, taking it out of the Temple and moving it into the hands of every Jew. The process of translation grew into the interpretation of Torah, the creation of Midrash, and gave every Jew the freedom and responsibility to decide what the Torah means. The process of using the Torah to resolve issues between neighbors grew into the ability of every community to apply Torah to the situations in their communities.

Our Judaism is a Judaism of words. It is a Judaism of Jews struggling with extracting meaning from texts and wrestling with the application of these words to real life. Classically Jewish friendships have been built talking to each other over a platform of texts. Simply put, had Moses come down Mount Sinai with a collection of learning activities rather than the Torah, the Jewish people would not have survived.

Rashi’s second comment on the Torah begins, “Ein ha-Torah ha-Zot Omeret Elah Darsheni,” “The Torah only asks, ‘Explain me, make sense out of me, make a midrash out of me.” For Jews, texts are conversations. We meet each other. We become friends through our shared struggle with words. That is why we are Yisrael, God wrestlers. Rashi’s first comment on the Torah was quoting a textual interpretation of his father, Rabbi Isaac.

The premise here is this: text books can be good or bad, but what Jewish schools need today is good textbooks. Abraham Joshua Heschel is often misquoted on the subject. He is often quoted as saying, “What we need more than anything else is not textbooks but text people.” He said that, but he wasn’t bashing textbooks. In actuality, he was talking about the importance of teachers. The quote comes from a speech (later published as an article) entitled “The Spirit of Jewish Education.”¹ In it, Heschel said:

To guide a pupil into the promised land, [the teacher] must have been there himself. When asking himself: Do I stand for what I teach? Do I believe what I say? he must be able to answer in the affirmative. What we need more than anything else is not text-books but text-people. It is the personality of the teacher which is the text that the pupils read; the text that they will never forget. The modern teacher, while not wearing a snowy beard, is a link in the chain of a tradition. He is the intermediary between the past and the present as well. Yet, he is also the creator of the future of our people. He must teach the pupils to evaluate the past in order to clarify their future. ²

Taken as a whole, the article is about the need to teach not just facts about Judaism, but to enable students to derive meaning from living a Jewish life. Heschel observes that religious schools effectively teach students the basic blessings said before eating bread or drinking juice, then bemoans the fact that few teachers exploit the opportunity to explore the “grand mystery and spiritual profundity” conveyed by the blessings’ words.³

People who take Heschel out of context suggest that relationships (“text-people”) are more important than book learning (“text-books”). But examining the entirety of Heschel’s argument, he’s not saying that relationships are more important than learning, but that relationships enable learning. Guided by Heschel, we believe that good text-books are designed to be used in the context of real relationship. So let’s talk about good “text-books” that let “text-people” do their best work.

A good textbook is not merely a well designed collection of facts with exercises that review those facts. A good textbook is filled with words that are worth remembering. Those words need to demand interpretation and choice. They need to ask, “What do these words actually say?” and they need to ask, “What do you believe about this text’s message?” Texts demand clarification, that why the first step in text study is the reading and translation of a text — even from English to English. In the final step, “The students’ concerns and words merge with the issues and language of the text… This, the ultimate step of the process, is the point at which life and lernen become one.”⁴

To watch this in action, let’s look at a transcript of a Being Torah lesson. Students have compared the story of Abraham welcoming strangers and Rebekah providing hospitality to Abraham’s servant. They learn (by comparing color coded words) that the two passages both involve repetitions of the words “run,” “hurry,” and “please.” Asked what lesson is taught by comparing the two stories we have this dialogue. They are asked to write their own answer, share it with this class, and then review an answer by someone else in the class whose answer they like.

SONDRA: Rebekah was the perfect bride for Isaac because she was just like Abraham. Both of them hurried and hurried to make strangers welcome. Just like Abraham, she cared about the “mitzvah” of hospitality. This made her the right woman to be the next mother of the Jewish people because she was kind, generous, and a great hostess.

(Sondra on Jonathan): He thought that Rebekah was the right woman to be the next mother of the Jewish people because she did hesed.

SH’MUEL: Rebekah was the perfect bride for Isaac because she was just like Abraham. Both of them hurried and ran to make strangers welcome. Just like Abraham, she cared about the “mitzvah” of hospitality. This made her the right woman to be the next mother of the Jewish people because she was generous and did more than necessary.

(Sh’muel on Ashley): Ashley thought that Rebekah was the right woman to be the next mother of the Jewish people because she has a lot of confidence in herself.⁵

Here we have a Biblical text decoded, analyzed, and personalized. While the answers are similar (because they respond to the same data set) they are also individualized in the way word and express this insight. We get “kind, generous, and a great hostess” on one hand; “She had a lot of confidence in herself,” on the other.

In other words, a good textbook is a series of discussions that have impact, that allow for self-clarification and self-actualization, that build connection, friendship, and community. The needs of Jewish learning are very different that those of secular learning. We don’t care about the ability to review a chapter and prepare for a test, we care about moments of introspection and being the next step in a student’s becoming.

Textbooks Should Encourage and Develop Hevruta

Hevruta is an Aramaic term for two overlapping ideas. First it means a study partner. Second it means a friend. One classic form of Jewish learning involves ongoing study with a partner. Partners prepare lessons before they are taught. They read, translate (into their own words), question, and explain material that will then be gone over by their teacher. Traditionally, these partnerships last a long time–years. Often when they are used in Jewish schools today the timing is considerably shorter (including different each session). But the Rabbis (Avot d’Rabbi Natan 8), make it clear that studying together leads to deep friendship and deep friendship leads to a deeper ability to study together.

While much of Jewish educational efforts are spent trying to keep students from talking to each other, we should actually be trying to get them talking together. According to Glenn A. Drew, executive director of the American Hebrew Academy, hevruta is

…based on the notion that each person has access to a piece of the truth and that we should talk to one another as a means of getting closer to the truth. By doing so, each student gains a greater understanding of themselves, the world in which they live and the subject matter.⁶

He adds that the hevruta method is about students coming to learn that they “must have trust in their partners, speak honestly, and listen to one another.”

Friendship is a key to Jewish survival. Friendships are the reason that most students stay in school, return to camp, and visit Israel. One goal of every Jewish classroom should be to build friendships and hevruta is a good way to do that. A good textbook presents opportunities for hevruta learning. Not only does it invite conversation, but it invites (and directs) conversations that two students can have together. There needs to be room in a textbook for students’ opinions and interpretations to matter. This has to include but go beyond feelings, to a place where what a student draws from and creates because of the textbook matters. Good textbooks respect students as innovators and problem-solvers. They leave space for dialogue and have faith in the students’ ability to respond.

In Make a Midrash Out of Me we have an activity called “The Canaanite Gazette.” Students work in hevruta to create interviews with characters in the Biblical text. These interviews invite students to create individual midrashim that parallel traditional investigations of the text. Here is an example:

Imagine that you are a reporter for the Canaanite Gazette. Conduct the following interviews.

1. Ask God: “What did you see Noah doing (as compared to what you saw other people doing) that made You comfortable with him?”

2. Ask Noah: “Why do you think God picked you? What makes you different?”

3. Ask Noah’s Sons: “What was it like being part of the only “Righteous Family” in the neighborhood?”

4. Ask Noah’s Wife: “How do you feel about all the work it takes to save the world?”

5. Ask any animal: “Tell the story of the flood from your perspective.”

What results is students using the information they have gleaned from studying the actual biblical text, opinions they have formed while studying the text, lead to articulate and original expositions of the text. It is both a process of interpretation and a creative expression. The activity is empowered by it happening with a partner, or being rehearsed in hevruta, before a classroom performance.

Good Textbooks Have Content and Structure that Leads to Activities

In their book Active Jewish Learning, Mel and Shoshana Silberman explain:

Yes, there is a whole lot more to teaching than telling! Learning is not an automatic consequence of pouring information into a student’s head. It requires the learner’s own mental involvement and doing. Explanation and demonstration, by themselves, will never lead… to real, lasting learning. Only learning that is active will do this. What makes learning “active?” When learning is active, students do most of the work. They use their brains…. studying ideas, solving problems, and applying what they learn. Active learning is fast-paced, fun, supportive, and personally engaging. Often, students are out of their seats, moving about and thinking aloud.⁷

Good textbooks need to lead to moments of active Jewish learning. They need to turn classrooms into memorable moments. To be clear, text study and hevruta learning have great experiential potential, but they are not the only vehicles for effective Jewish learning. Good textbooks provide multiple active possibilities.

Let’s look at an example. In The Circle of Jewish Life, the marriage chapter includes the following elements:

a. A Story about God’s Involvement in Marriage

b. The Wedding vow

c. A Piece about Relationships

d. A Summary of a Jewish Wedding

e. Texts on Mikvah

f. A Crossword Reviewing Vocabulary

g. A Series of Resources for Design Your Own Ketubah

h. The Story of Akiva and Rachel

i. The Text of the Marriage Service as a Script

j. X-Raying the Sheva Brakhot

k. A Piece on Commitment Ceremonies

About half of these are directly text study. Of those, most of those work nice in hevruta. There are a few expository pages, but most of the rest are hands on activities. Editing a Ketubah text, designing a Ketubah, etc. (We are not counting the crossword puzzle as active Jewish learning. It is just an exercise needed to help in mastering a lot of vocabulary). But in the end the whole chapter turns into a huge activity, a model wedding. The wedding service presented as a script becomes the hub of a whole class activity.

Good Textbooks Provide Scope and Sequence

Jean Piaget makes it clear that things like chronology and other organizational structures can’t be mastered until students enter the fourth development stage, concrete-operational, sometime around puberty.⁸ That means that teaching things like sequential history makes no sense much before Bar/Bat mitzvah. But that doesn’t mean that learning doesn’t need structure. Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, a Russian educational psychologist, taught that scaffolding is an important teaching strategy that is based on a concept of the zone of proximal development. The zone of proximal development is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance.⁹

In scaffolding instruction a more knowledgeable other provides scaffolds or supports to facilitate the learner’s development. The scaffolds facilitate a student’s ability to build on prior knowledge and internalize new information.¹⁰

The idea of scaffolding is that the teacher (or the text) can facilitate development by providing the right learning structures. Let’s take a Torah Aura example. Yisrael Sheli is a third grade Israel book. Its main purpose (and the main purpose of all our Israel materials) is to connect students to Israel. It does this through the interaction of two things: the stories of people who shaped the history and development of Israel and a visit to places in the Land of Israel. So we have (1) Solomon was a King of Israel, (2) he was famous for being wise, (3) King Solomon built a Navy in Eilat, (4) Eilat is a beachside community with coral and lots of fish. Students will not know the years that Solomon lived and who was King before or after him. Odds are that most of them will not be able to locate Eilat on a map. That, too, comes later. But, we will have built two connections. Solomon once figured out which woman got the baby. And, Eliat is a fun place to go diving. We anchor the two with King Solomon’s Navy. With those two concepts anchored, other connections will grow. This is an act of scaffolding towards history and an act of scaffolding towards geography while establishing a connection to a person and a place.

Too much curriculum today makes sense to the curriculum writer and not the student. One can divide the school year for each grade by God, Torah, and Israel. It looks really good on paper, but the chance of the thematic work done in second grade connecting to fifth grade’s thematic match is small. The chance of knowing how any three lessons fit together is less. Books designed to address the student’s learning progression help to make connections and provide both parallels and sequences.

Textbooks Actively Honor Visual Learners

Much of recent education has been built around the theory of multiple intelligences. It suggests that different learners have different learning styles, there are ways that an individual learner learns better and ways that this learner has a harder time learning.¹¹ This is sometimes presented in the simplified earlier model called VAK (for Visual-Auditory-Kinesthetic) that was first developed by psychologists and teaching specialists such as Fernald, Keller, Orton, Gillingham, Stillman and Montessori.

As we translate the theory of multiple intelligences into a post-textbook, post write-on the board, post-frontal kind of classroom, this shifts into a preference for oral learning and an under-serving of students with a visual preference. In other words, there are students who learn best when they have visual resources (like books) at their disposal. The growing informality of material, the more learning that is small group tasks (without printed material) and the more programming shifts to big all-school or all-grade programs, the less we support learners who need to see in order to process effectively.

The solution is to offer learning that doesn’t entirely abandon one learning style for another. Good textbooks can support interactive, activity-oriented learning, and when they do so they offer a win-win. Using this kind of textbook keeps much of the learning programmatic and exciting yet still honors the learning style of visual learners. Camp-style learning works well for many students, but educational psychology reminds us that we have a number of students who need to see it in order to learn it.

Torah Aura Hebrew and Prayer materials have a pattern. Teacher (or teacher and class) examine a prayer. This gives students a chance to both see and hear the material at the beginning. Then they are told to work in hevrutot. Students rehearse the material with each other. They are working with both seeing and hearing as they perfect the performance of the material. Finally, they present and the teacher has a chance to make any corrections. The process (unlike many self-learning programs) provides students with audio and visual reinforcements on their journey towards mastery.

Textbooks Allow Students to “Go Ahead”

Sometimes it’s hard for teachers to remember that students will not dedicate 100% of their attention to what the teacher is saying and doing. Students with diverse learning styles – especially those with ADD and ADHD – have taught us that their “survival secret” is drawing, doodling, and “browsing” (more on this in a sec) through class. In order to have their ears open to what their teacher and classmates are saying, these students need to also engage their eyes and hands. There is a bunch of research, especially in special education, that tactile involvement (like playing with koosh toys) helps students to concentrate on lessons.¹²

One of the things that students do when they are half-listening is flip through their textbooks, an activity that educational psychologists call “browsing.” When browsing, students are not only listening to the teacher, they are engaging with the material by contextualizing the information and reading to see “what’s next.” Research conducted by journalists suggests that captions (and sidebars) are the most mastered part of books (and magazines) thanks to the “flip factor.”¹³ Textbooks actually allow students to learn on their own (and often when you are teaching them) by reading and flipping ahead.

Textbooks Improve Tutoring

One of the third rail issues in Jewish education is tutoring. Some students use it to keep up, some to avoid attending. But more and more, because of shrinking hours, growing awareness of learning difficulties, greater pressure, etc. we are providing tutoring at school and at home for students.

Textbooks help tutors. Using textbooks gives them a structure to share with the classroom, and doesn’t force them to guess what track is appropriate. When tutors have access to a textbook, they can work out a course that parallels and reinforces what is being done in the classroom. This is much harder to do when the classroom teacher is “winging it.”

Textbooks are Really Important for Novice Teachers

Many education schools teach the mantra, “A textbook is not a curriculum.” They tend to imply that real teachers write their own curricular materials. At Torah Aura Productions, we agree that a textbook is not a curriculum (even when it has accompanying workbooks, teacher’s guides, flash cards, and assessment tools). A good curriculum is always a dialogue between community, school, students and teacher. Curriculum should be a balancing act that evolves as the classroom experience progresses. We make curricular tools that enable the process that is curriculum.

We have created our material with the belief that great textbooks and accompanying material can be a foundation on which schools and teachers can build curriculum. We believe that teachers teach students and the teachable moment and need to make lots of choices. We believe, and research shows, that textbooks and guides can be the best way for novice teachers to make such choices.¹⁴

The research on the subject is best summed-up by the abstract to a study by Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Sharon Feiman-Nemser:

Based on data from a longitudinal study of teacher preparation conducted at a large Midwestern U. S. university, this article describes and appraises what elementary teacher education students were taught about textbooks, what they learned, and what they did with these lessons during student teaching. Although the student teachers were enrolled in two different teacher education programs, all of them developed the impression that if they wanted to be good teachers, they should avoid following textbooks and relying on teachers’ guides. They believed that good teaching means creating your own lessons and materials instead. These ideas proved difficult to act on during student teaching when the student teachers worked in classrooms where textbooks formed the core of instruction and they confronted the fact that they were beginning teachers lacking knowledge, skill, and experience. This article points out that deciding what to teach beginning teachers about textbooks poses a significant dilemma for teacher educators. Although many textbooks have weaknesses, student teachers lack the knowledge and experience needed to develop their own curriculum. The authors argue that, rather than telling novices not to “teach by the book,” teacher educators should consider contextual constraints and the limits of beginners’ knowledge and skills and teach beginning elementary teachers how to learn from using published curricular materials.¹⁵

In Jewish education, where we often struggle with untrained teachers, avocational teachers who rise to the moment to fulfill community needs, we should provide them with the supports needed to create effective classrooms. We applaud and encourage innovation, improvisation and the development of teacher-created alternatives. We want teachers to go beyond our books and use their talents fully. But we want them to have a well-researched, well-written, well-thought-out, and well-collected set of resources that go in teacher and student hands to serve as the stage on which the drama of the lesson takes place. Contrary to the folk belief that textbooks interfere with the learning process, both research and our experience suggest that they enable great teaching and learning – especially for novice teachers. The idea for the Ball and Feinman-Nemser paper came from Sharon’s experience learning how to be a great Torah teacher from our book Being Torah and its teacher’s guide.

Many of our books (You be the Judge, Make a Midrash Out of Me, Journeys and S’fatai Tiftah, to mention a few) contain content and research that almost no teacher could do on their own, and certain not weekly, to create amazing teaching and learning experiences. They are content-rich and provide for teacher as well as student learning.

Torah Aura has never believed in overly scripting teachers or taking them out of the equation, but rather we aim at creating books that empower teachers to create exciting, interactive, rich, and enjoyable moments of learning in their classrooms.

In his book Managing the Jewish Classroom, Rabbi Seymour Rossel relates the following:

A Jewish communal worker once asked me “What is the one thing that, if you could have it, would significantly improve the quality of Jewish education?” Without hesitation, I replied, “Great teachers.”

“That’s right,” he said, “If you have great teachers you don’t even need textbooks.”

“Wrong,” I said. “If you have great teachers, they never do without textbooks. They know how to use them.”

…Texts are just one of the tools in the kit of the master teacher. But texts are the hammer. And it is a poor carpenter who refuses to learn how best to use a hammer.¹⁶

1. Abraham Joshua Heschel. “The Spirit of Jewish Education.” Jewish Education, Fall 1953, pp. 9-20.
2. Ibid, p. 19
3. Ibid, p. 15.
4. Samuel C. Heilman. The People of the Book: Drama, Fellowship and Religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1983.
5. Joel Grishaver. “The Technology of Making Meaning, A Systematic Inquiry into the Task of Enabling the Teaching of Jewish Texts,” (monograph). Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 1988.
6. Glenn A. Drew. “Momentum (mō méntəm).” Blog post, 10 Dec., 2008. http://aha-info.blogspot.com/2008/12/momentum-m-mntm.html.
7. Mel Silberman and Shoshana Silberman. Active Jewish Learning: 57 Strategies to Enliven Your Class. Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 2009, p. 9.
8. Jean Piaget. The Child’s Conception of the World. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1928.
9. Eileen Raymond. Learners with Mild Disabilities: A Characteristics Approach. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2000, pp. 169-201.
10. K. Chang, I. Chen, and Y. Sung. “The effect of concept mapping to enhance text comprehension and summarization.” The Journal of Experimental Education. Iss. 71, No. 1 (2002), pp. 5-23.
11. Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
12. Michael Gurian, Patricia Henley, and Terry Trueman. Boys and Girls Learn Differently!: A Guide for Teachers and Parents. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.
13. Lorie Oglesbee. “Captions: Looking at a picture without a caption is like watch television with the sound turned off.” Communication: Journalism Education Today, Winter, 1998.
14. Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Sharon Feiman-Nemser. Using Textbooks and Teachers’ Guides: A Dilemma for Beginning Teachers and Teacher Educators. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, 1988.
15. Ibid.
16. Seymour Rossel. Managing the Jewish Classroom: How to Transform Yourself Into a Master Teacher. Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 1998. p. 98.

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.”

by Josh-Mason Barkin

Old magazines can surprise you.

In 1994, CAJE published an edition of its Jewish Education News dedicated entirely to Jewish heroes. Fifteen years later, flipping through dusty papers on a bookshelf, that issue of JEN inspired us to publish our new book on heroes, Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values.

None of the many articles in that issue explicitly mention it, but there’s a tension throughout the Spring 1994 edition’s pages. On one hand, esteemed thinkers of Jewish education argue that we need to introduce our students to the mythological characters of Jewish history like Samson and Herzl. On the other hand, equally esteemed thinkers argue that we need to teach our students about everyday heroes, normal people who can show us how to live mitzvah-filled Jewish lives.

We teach Jewish values not because we want our students to know the Hebrew names for a bunch of ethical principles. Rather, we teach Jewish values because we want our students to live moral lives informed by the Jewish tradition and their connection to God. Knowing that kavod means respect is useless if you’re not a respectful person.

Recently, educators have been telling us a lot about this struggle to have the Jewish values they teach in the classroom translate into the way students treat each other. Suffice it to say that we hear a lot of frustration in those educators’ voices. We think Eizehu Gibor can help.

How do heroes fit into the equation of values internalization? And why are we publishing a new heroes book this year? Perhaps the best way to explain is to explore the tension between the “big heroes” and the “everyday heroes.”

Two Kinds of Heroes

Big heroes are the historical characters who have come to represent special places in our collective memory. In the American psyche, these are people like Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These heroes are educationally important because their mythology is powerful. They represent values bigger than themselves, values that we can all emulate.

In Jewish education, these sorts of heroes serve two important purposes. First, like their American counterparts, these larger-than-life personalities represent specific values. Professor Carol Ingall at JTS has written extensively on this subject. She teaches that Abraham represents the value of hakhnasat orhim (welcoming guests), just as Paul Bunyon “embodies the physical courage of the American frontiersman.” Heroes “stir the moral imagination through the moral values they stand for.”

For Ingall, teaching heroes is a really important way to teach Jewish values. She argues that simply teaching the values themselves won’t “stick,” since values are abstract concepts that are difficult for elementary school-aged children to grasp. Stories and narrative make those values tangible. (That’s one reason we offer a set of instant lessons called “Stories We Live By.”) Heroes go a step further by putting a real face to the narrative, and by giving students an actual person whose behavior is worthy of emulation.

The second purpose big heroes serve in Jewish education is that they are tools of enculturation. Giving Jewish kids a Jewish hero to look up to instills pride and connection to Am Yisrael. Our students can be inspired by Jewish heroes who’ve fought against tyranny from Roman times to Colonial America to the forests of Nazi-occupied Europe. They can feel a connection to Jewish writers and rabbis, ballplayers and actors, scientists and politicians. Jewish heroes help engender cultural connection and a sense of peoplehood.

Another kind of Jewish hero is the “everyday hero,” the person who isn’t famous or at the crux of history, but a normal person who makes important (sometimes even extraordinary) choices to behave in a way worthy of emulation. Danny Siegel has taught us much about these types of people through his work of introducing the world to “mitzvah heroes.” Everyday heroes are educationally important because they are so real for our students. On a very tangible level, they can inspire us to do what’s right, and to make a difference in the world. As Siegel writes, “It is because of their Tikkun Olam work, they have a profound understanding of caring, power, the nature of people as human beings.”

“Big heroes” and “everyday heroes” are different in a lot of ways. Big heroes connect us to our shared collective memory and to the notion of Jewish peoplehood, but they’re “bigness” may make it hard to identify with them. Big, mythological heroes are more likely to let us down when we realize that they have human faults underneath their heroic exteriors. Conversely, “everyday heroes” may be personally inspiring, but we also need to be careful to draw a line between truly heroic actions and those actions that ought to be expected of all of us.

Despite these challenges of using heroes in Jewish education, one thing remains clear: If the goal of values education is to help our students internalize what it means to live ethically Jewish lives, both “big heroes” and “everyday heroes” are crucial. Both provide tangible examples of how to live lives informed and enriched by Jewish values. In doing so, they help students to internalize the message, to see themselves as ethically Jewish individuals.

Toward a New Technique for Teaching Heroes in the Jewish Supplementary School

Engaging ourselves in the debate over “big heroes” and “everyday heroes,” we found ourselves thinking a lot about what we might be able to do differently to improve the way we teach Jewish heroes. Over the course of conceiving of Eizehu Gibor, we developed three new principles to guide a new kind of heroes education:

1. A heroes curriculum should introduce students to the pantheon of Jewish heroes, but also introduce new characters into that pantheon. Any study of Jewish heroes would be incomplete if it didn’t include some of the biggies: Hannah Szenes, Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Moses. If we’re going for cultural identification, our students need to be exposed to the characters who tell our people’s story.

But we also need to begin telling the stories of some new heroes. That’s why Eizehu Gibor includes people like Debbie Friedman, Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, and Lenny Krayzelberg.

They’re not quite “unsung” everyday heroes, but their inclusion sends the message that the hall of heroes isn’t closed to people born after 1950, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Furthermore, we need to recognize that contemporary role models resonate with our students differently than historical heroes. And one more thing: Sometimes contemporary heroes give us a chance to show another side of someone famous for a different reason. Did you know that one of Hollywood’s foremost Jewish actresses is also a tzedakah hero, or that the owner of an American football team is also dedicated to the upkeep of the Jewish homeland?

2. A heroes curriculum needs to present personalities to truly bring Jewish values to life. For every Jewish value in Eizehu Gibor, we present multiple heroes. There are two reasons.

First, our students aren’t going to identify with every hero whose story we tell. But if heroes represent values, wouldn’t it be a problem if a student doesn’t connect to the value of justice just because Louis Brandeis doesn’t resonate with her? By telling students the stories of more than one personality, we provide more opportunities for connection and internalization.

Second, Jewish values are complex. By telling multiple stories, we can show that there are lots of ways to save a life, to be humble, or to repair the world.

3. A heroes curriculum needs to teach particularly Jewish values in a particularly Jewish way. Character education, citizenship education, and empathy education are all buzz words for the trend to teach values in secular schools. It’s a good thing anytime schools help their students to be better people. But if we were to do the same thing in our Jewish schools, our students could easily ask themselves, “What’s so special about living a Jewish life if Jewish values are just human values?”

While there are lots of occasions for overlap, our ethical tradition is also pretty different than the American mainstream. For example, Judaism teaches the importance of anavah, humility, something our students desperately need to hear in today’s world. Furthermore, living Jewish values is about more than just doing the right thing. Everyone can agree that taking care of the body is important. But shmirat ha-guf is also about our relationship with God, and how being created betzelem Elohim comes with the responsibility of taking care of our bodies. Making the world a better place is a great idea, but tikkun olam is also about being partners with God in creation, and about finding vessels where God’s spark can dwell in the world. Living Jewish values isn’t just about living by a set of values that happen to be Jewish. It’s also about living those values in a Jewish way.

Clearly, we’re excited about the contribution Eizehu Gibor makes to the field of Jewish values education. In future issues of TAPBB, we’ll talk a little more about what makes it a special book. In the meantime, you can pre-order your copy and check out sample chapters here.

Josh Mason-Barkin is director of school services at Torah Aura Productions.

In the last couple months, you may have noticed Torah Aura Productions using a new mission statement: “Making success in Jewish education an achievable reality.”

We’re really excited about this new articulation of our mission because it so clearly sums up who we are and what we do. We’re in the business of helping Jewish schools succeed.

So it was with great pleasure that we read a new study from Professor Jack Wertheimer entitled Schools That Work: What We Can Learn from Good Jewish Supplemental Schools. It’s an analytical look at Jewish schools that suggests a path towards success. (You can download the entire report by clicking here.)

With the help of a team of top-notch researchers and funded by the Avi Chai Foundation, Professor Wertheimer looks at ten excellent supplemental schools and draws out common elements that contribute to their success.

What is important about this study is that it affirms a truth stated too infrequently: that supplementary schools can succeed. Perhaps more importantly, Wertheimer identifies the elements that help define “success” in schools, offering suggestions for replicating the excellence that he and his team found.

The study presents six “noteworthy characteristics of good schools.” Good schools (1) work on building friendships and community, (2) go beyond teaching facts to allow students to work on meaning, (3) use experiential education, (4) actualize a clear vision, (5) value themselves and their students, and (6) involve not only students but their families. Wertheimer makes it clear that it takes “a combination of traits to forge a strong school.”

Because we’re invested in making success in Jewish education an achievable reality, we take these six characteristics very seriously. Wertheimer’s work has pushed us to ask some meaningful questions about our work. How can we help enable schools to actualize these characteristics in their own authentic way? In what ways do these principles inform the curricular materials we publish? What does it mean to be a publishing company whose mission is to help Jewish educators and teachers achieve success?

Cultivating a Nuturing Jewish Community

Wertheimer writes:

“The best schools intentionally develop a community among their students, staff, and parents. They begin with the assumption that learning cannot be separated from context, and that to a large extent the school’s most important message is embedded in the culture and relationships it fosters.”

It felt good to read this, because this is something we’ve always believed. It’s why virtually all of our materials are built to encourage hevruta study. It’s why we’ve published books designed to enable teachers to build learning communities, and it’s why we’ve been outspoken in our rejection of individualized self-guided “programmed instruction” in religious schools. Wertheimer’s research supports our belief that real Jewish learning is fundamentally and inextricably tied to Jewish community.

Many years ago, Professor Saul Wachs taught us that when one student quotes another student in a discussion a teacher can know that they really succeeded.

Here’s how it works in practice:

Being Torah is a text that challenges elementary school students to engage with the real biblical narrative. It’s a powerful approach to teaching Torah, but the real magic happens in its companion, the Being Torah Student Commentary. In every unit of the Student Commentary, students write down both their textual interpretation and the interpretation of one of their classmates. The teacher regularly writes everyone’s interpretations on the board and students then choose from among the wisdom of their classmates. Being Torah isn’t just a set of textbooks. It’s a curricular approach that integrates the notion that a classroom is a learning community.

We believe that curricular materials should be designed from the ground up to be used in the context of community, to enable teachers to foster relationships, and to empower students to see Jewish learning as something that must happen conversation.

Beyond Being Torah, all our materials emphasize hevruta learning, small group work, and the regular involvement of active learning that happens through interpersonal interaction. Our lifecycle text, The Circle of Jewish Life, centers on the collaborative creation of lifecycle events. Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter utilizes a teaching process involving constant collaboration and consultation to create an Israel experience in the classroom. (Yisrael Sheli, that does the same on a younger level.) Our heroes materials, Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values, centers on small group and hevruta work to learn core values from Jewish heroes’ lives and words.

Wertheimer says that such community “attends to the needs of individual children, embraces them in an environment where they their classmates become good, often best friends…”

In Teaching Jewishly, we suggested the same thing:

“Torah both builds relationships and takes relationships. Being a teacher is an act of love (family or neighborly), and it comes with the responsibility to create friendships among your students.”

Engaging Judaism at a High Level

According to Professor Wertheimer,

“Good schools have developed a sophisticated curriculum that goes beyond rote learning, examining Jewish content so it ‘sticks’….Through class discussions and informal experiences, schools challenge students to analyze, evaluate, and compare texts, ideas and ethical dilemmas and encourage them to develop a personal relationship to religious questions.”

Our vision of excellent Jewish learning has always integrated a process we call “making meaning.” We think that when Wertheimer talks about “engaging Judaism at a high level,” he’s talking about enabling our students to make meaning.

Jewish education is not like math education. When you study math, you learn how to manipulate numbers, and how to apply equations and formulas and graphs to solve problems. The best math education encourages analysis and synthesis. Which formula will work best to solve this problem? How might I apply what I know about the volume of one container to figure out the volume of this bigger container, and which container might be better suited to a particular task?

Jewish education is different because it needs to go way beyond facts and skills, even high-level application of those skills. Simply teaching our students how to read Hebrew or how to parse a biblical text is not enough. We must challenge them to analyze the text, evaluate the text, and then internalize the text to the point that it affects their identity. Whereas the math student asks, “How can I use these facts and my skills to solve a problem?” our task is to get our students to ask, “What does this have to do with who I am as a human being?”

As creators of educational materials, we believe that this is a fundamental goal of Jewish education. What’s the point of knowing the prayers and how to chant them if you don’t know what they mean to you personally, or if you don’t think participating in services is worthwhile? What’s the point of knowing that kavod means respect if you’re not a respectful person?

Wertheimer says that this process is about developing a personal relationship to religious questions. Isa Aron calls it “owning our own texts,” and gives the example of learners who study liturgy and then develop their own siddur. Joseph Reimer talks about students who have ‘face-to-face’ encounters with texts and ideas, and who are taught to “seize the opportunity to enact their identities as Jews.” We call it “making meaning:

“It is the nature of these texts, and perhaps their profound magic, that many workable answers suggest themselves. In the end, the learner is forced to choose. It is this very act of choosing what the text means, of making it have meaning, which ferments the dialogue, forms the essence of the secrets revealed by the voice, and actualizes the drama of the experience.”

Our values materials are based on this principle, because understanding Jewish values is about struggling with ethical dilemmas so as to guide future behavior and personal identity. Start with an ethical dilemma. Let students work in small groups to work out their best possible solutions. Those solutions are shared, and then a series of primary sources portraying Jewish answers are present. Students decode these texts, voice their opinions, match them to their own solutions, and then make a choice as to the right answer. In the process they walk away with a clear understanding of one or more Jewish values. This methodology is behind virtually all of our values material: You Be the Judge, Mah La’asot, Bet Din, Body Ethics and Stories We Live By.

Our siddur curricula work in a similar way. They teach students how to perform a prayer, but also, they ask three questions: (1) What does this prayer literally mean? (2) What did this prayer mean to the rabbis and to our tradition? and (3) What does this prayer mean to me?

Most of our work has been involved in facilitating learners making their own meaning out of primary sources by empowering them to ‘analyze, evaluate, and compare texts, ideas and ethical dilemmas’ and then inviting them to choose its meaning as an act of ownership. This may be challenging for teachers, but it’s so fundamental to success in Jewish education that it cannot be ignored. For years, critics and competitors have accused us of making materials that were too hard to use, and they offered alternatives that were “easier” because they engaged in simpler learning. Wertheimer’s study is a validation of something we’ve always believed: Successful Jewish schools challenge their students to engage with their Judaism in deep and meaningful ways.

Create Opportunities for Students to Engage in Experiential Jewish Education

Wertheimer notes the value of experiential education in achieving success in supplementary schools:

“The experiential component, in tandem with formal learning, is vital, as it provides students with opportunities to live their Judaism and not only learn about it.”

Typically, formal and experiential (or “informal”) education are painted as opposing educational methodologies. Experiential education is what happens at camps, on retreats, and in special school programs. It involves fun, excitement, engagement, and projects. Formal education is what happens in the classroom, and involves chairs, blackboards, and… textbooks.

Torah Aura Productions has always rejected this dichotomy between books and experiental learning. The distinction is rarely as clear-cut as it is portrayed, and few classrooms (and certainly no good classrooms) are as purely “formal” as critics would have us all believe. Furthermore, we believe that formal and informal models of education are complementary, and Wertheimer agrees. He doesn’t simply jump on the bandwagon of experiential education, but instead suggests living Judaism and learning Judaism are part of the same equation, a “tandem” relationship.

We grew out of a fusion of camp, youth group, and school experiences. We firmly believe that a textbook can be the foundation for a good program and have regularly made use of this truth both in the books we design and the teacher’s guides we create to bring those words off the page. We believe that each classroom needs an experiential component in tandem with formal learning.

Recently we published a book called Active Jewish Learning that teaches,

“There is a whole lot more to teaching than telling! Learning is not an automatic consequence of pouring information into a student’s head. It requires the learner’s own mental involvement and doing. Explanation and demonstration, by themselves, will never lead to real, lasting learning. Only learning that is active will do this. What makes learning ‘active?’ When learning is active, students do most of the work. They use their brains… studying ideas, solving problems, and applying what they learn. Active learning is fast-paced, fun, supportive, and personally engaging. Often, students are out of their seats, moving about and thinking aloud.”

Wertheimer explains experiential Jewish learning:

“…participating in actual prayer, leading religious services, attending Shabbat retrats, engaging in activities to help the poor and needy, participating in programs that they may long remember and may stimulate them to explore questions of personal meaning.”

This may be the first time we disagree with Wertheimer, if only because we find his definition limiting. All of his “experiences” happen outside of the classroom. We firmly believe (and have created materials that enable) experiental learning as a classroom model as well. We don’t deny the need for extra-classroom experiences, but we don’t believe that a student’s experiental learning should be limited to them. As a result, we’ve begun creating teacher’s guides that aren’t just guides to teaching out of a book, but rather collections of programs and suggestions for integrating experiential learning with the texts and activities that live on the page.

A simple example: Our latest Israel textbook, Yisrael Sheli, has a couple of pages on “The Knesset.” We briefly describe the nature of Israeli elections. The teacher’s guide creates a simulated “third gradish” election where parties trade their “votes” for “power cards” and form a government. They might learn a few facts about Israel’s government in the book, but those facts are given the opportunity to jump off the page and become real learning experiences.

We regularly build major experiences into the materials we create. Some of our books like You Be the Judge are inherently programmatic experiences. The same is true of Torah Toons, Being Torah and Make a Midrash Out of Me.

Align all Their Efforts with School Goals

Wertheimer says that successful schools align their efforts with their goals. It is a common refrain in the report, perhaps because so many schools are out of touch with their goals, or perhaps because this element is so fundamental to school success. He explains:

“Good schools understand the need to align all their efforts with school goals… Effective school define a vision of their ideal graduate and the means they will develop to produce such students.”

Torah Aura says “Amen.”

Of particular interest is Wertheimer’s insistence not only on goals, but in efforts that align with those goals. We frequently hear from educators whose schools have clearly articulated visions. They can tell parents and colleagues and even students what it means to be a graduate. But they struggle when it comes to creating classrooms and curricula that are designed to effectively achieve those goals.

There is also a problem when schools try to accomplish too much, or adopt goals that are unclear. Unfortunately, the educational publishing field hasn’t helped this problem. Wertheimer complains, “Commercial publishers have muddied the waters by producing textbooks that purport to meet all of these goals (both modern Hebrew Language and Siddur Mastery).” We applaud this complaint. We make a clear distinction between our siddur materials (Journeys Through the Siddur, S’fatai Tiftah, and Pirkei T’fillah) and our Hebrew language material. We are sorry that other publishers don’t.

We have always made sure that educators and teachers have a clear understanding of both the educational vision and the learning goals of each of our products so that they can write them into their school or classroom curriculum. We also believe that schools should pick curricular materials that fit their own goals, not goals set by us. We don’t believe that every one of our products is right for every school, and that’s why we develop new products only after consulting with lots of “on the front lines” educators about how new materials might be best constructed to fit their needs.

An example: A few years ago, schools came to us and expressed frustration that there were no materials available that helped them to teach the complete structure of the service. In our previous siddur materials (and in materials offered by other publishers), each section of the service was set up to be taught in a different year, with a student studying the entire service over the course of three years. While this works in many schools, we learned that the structure didn’t meet the needs of schools who placed importance on teaching the service as a complete unit. Journeys Through the Siddur addressed that need, and we now offer schools the opportunity to choose siddur materials that help them to achieve the goals they set out for themselves.

Furthermore, in working with schools that successfully put vision into practice, we’ve tried to do the same thing as a publishing company. When we explore the possibility of creating a new product, our first question is not one of marketability, sales figures, or customer demand. Rather, we ask ourselves, “Will these materials help schools succeed at the task of enabling Jewish children to become empowered Jewish adults?” We hope that being a vision-driven publisher helps us to better serve vision-driven educational institutions.

We are committed to constantly defining a vision for our own materials and we have the resources to consult, enable, and assist a school with its visioning and curricular process. We have also published key resources for this process: What We Now Know About Jewish Education and The Family Education Case Book are just two examples.

Value Themselves and Their Students

Wertheimer says that “good schools value themselves and their students.” He clarifies that successful supplementary schools honor students (and effect discipline) “by attending closely to the needs of individual children and engaging them with compelling material.” He isn’t explicit on this front, but from his many examples it seems clear by implication that schools who value their students don’t waste time with busy work and hokey activities, don’t place the needs of teachers over the needs of students, and don’t treat school like it is just training that students have to suffer through.

We have taught teachers,

“The bottom line is that Jewish teachers represent God in their classrooms; they speak for God. Just as God deals with difficult individuals who have free will, so does the teacher. Just as God often has to try again and give second chances, so do teachers. And remember this: No matter how difficult, no matter the struggle, teachers are not in the classroom to teach their own message; they are there to bring Torah—God’s word.”

A good example of this is our siddur materials that respect students, respect teachers, and respect schools in the way they present content. We k’velled when we Wertheimer mentioned the use of our materials in his report,

“The two teachers work…with workbooks and materials from S’fatai Tiftah: Siddur Meaning and Mastery produced by Torah Aura Productions. The teacher adeptly connects the root words that the students read to one another (i.e. Kadosh and Kiddush)…The children are engaged and the words are connected to meaning immediately for them.”

This respect for students as competent learners is replete in out material. Wertheimer is observing a classroom where students aren’t doing word-search puzzles or coloring. They feel respected because they’re engaged in real learning.

(Wertheimer also takes this opportunity to mention the importance of teachers who are qualified to do a good job of teaching material of this depth. We share his concern, and will address it below.)

Families as Allies and Also Clients

Wertheimer’s final characteristic involves engaging parents. He explains, “In this sense, schools still have a mission to engage parents and not only children.” As Carol Starin says:

“BJL Beginnings is based on a simple truth. The more you link with parents, the greater the impact your teaching will have. This curriculum provides parent opportunities in each lesson, as well as folders designed specifically for parents.”

Torah Aura Productions understands families as partners in the Jewish education of their children.

We have published books about family education, Jewish Parents: A Teacher’s Guide and The Jewish Family Education Casebook. We have published books for families like 40 Things You Can Do to Save the Jewish People. And we have published materials with family components like Alef Celebrations, BJL Beginnings, and Drops of Honey (our pre-school curriculum). Also, Ot la-Ba’ot and Tiyulim (our Hebrew primers) come with home workbooks and interactive websites that empower parents to study along with their students.

In truth, this is an area with much room for improvement. Educators frequently tell us that there is a lack of good resources for family education. We agree. We’re working hard to meet that need, and to help enable this particular element of school success.

There is a Scarcity of Teachers

Wertheimer has a section on “intractable challenges that are endemic to the field.” In it, he points out the problems presented by the scarcity of qualified teachers. This is not a new phenomenon. Wertheimer discusses the challenge in two different ways:

• “There is a scarcity of teachers well-versed in Hebrew and Judaica who have the skill to transmit their knowledge to students.”

• “While ample curricular materials are available to schools…the real challenge lies in implementing them properly in the classroom.”

We take this problem very seriously. Anyone involved in Jewish education knows that staffing a school entirely with wonderful teachers is virtually impossible (no matter where you are). There are essentially two choices (as expressed in the title of a mediocre 1967 Jerry Lewis movie) “raising the bridge” and “lowering the river.”

Many of the other publishers believe in “lowering the river.” They see the same problem we do, that most teachers are ill-equipped to do a good job of teaching Hebrew and Judaica. So they lower the level of their materials to meet the needs of sub-par teachers. They advertise their materials as “easy to teach” or “teachable by anyone.” We believe this is code for “dumbed down.” It reduces what students learn and reduces the kind of experiences they can have in the name of protecting the teachers by making their lessons simple and boring.

In stark contrast, Torah Aura believes in teachers. We believe in their potential. We believe in their dedication. Our commitment is to empower teachers success through the materials we design, through the teacher supports we create, through the teacher education books we publish, and — most importantly — through the free teacher education we provide. We are absolutely prepared to work with any teacher teaching any of our material. We are prepared to help with Judaica, with pedagogy, and most of all with insights into our material and strategies with which other teachers have found success. We have more than 25 years of experience in working with schools to achieve success, and we put every bit of that experience to work when we help teachers. In the last year, we worked face-to-face with teachers from over 100 schools, and we used phone conferences, webinars, and e-mail to work with many more. The solution to the problem of unqualified teachers isn’t to dumb down the material. The solution is raising up teachers, qualifying them to create effective magic in the classrooms. Our materials are designed to that end, and we spend countless hours on the road and on the phone to make success a reality.

Believing in teachers means giving teachers choices. It means not scripting them. It requires ecouraging them to bring themselves into the classroom and it means inviting them to respond to their students, to teachable moments, to the dynamic of the classroom process. As we’ve said before,

“Jewish tradition believes in teachers. It sees teachers as rich (not mechanical) enablers of individualization and personalization. Teachers allow lessons to go off on tangents, listen to student needs, and take advantage of the moment. Teachers can appreciate and celebrate, understand and empathize…Not every teacher is ideal, but teachers are our ideal.”

In Conclusion…

We’re grateful to Professor Wertheimer for his important contribution to the field of Jewish education. As we said from the outset, perhaps its most important contribution is the notion that supplementary schools can succeed, and that there are some really good schools out there. We’ve always believed this, and we continue to. We think of ourselves as cheerleaders for good schools and also as teammates. We believe in your school’s success, and we want to be a part of it.

References

Aron, Isa. Becoming a Congregation of Learners: Learning as a Key to Revitalizing Congregational Life. Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights, 2000.

Grishaver, Joel. “The Technology of Making Meaning, A Systematic Inquiry into the Task of Enabling the Teaching of Jewish Texts,” (monograph) Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 1988.

—. “Thinking About Teacher’s Guides”, TAPBB, 2004. Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions.

—. Teaching Jewishly. Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 2007.

—. “Self-Paced, Point & Click: The Jewish Problem with Programmed Instruction,” TAPBB, March, 2009. Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions.

Reimer, Joseph. Succeeding at Jewish Education: How One Synagogue Made it Work. Philadelphia: JPS, 1997.

Silberman, Mel and Silberman, Shoshana. Active Jewish Learning: 57 Strategies to Enliven Your Class. Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 2009.

Starin, Carol Oserin. BJL Beginnings Teacher’s Guide. Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 2003.

Wertheimer, Jack. Schools that Work, What We Can Learn from Good Jewish Supplementary Schools, New York: Avi Chai, 2009.

Heroes are important for two reasons. First, they give students powerful examples of how to live a life richly informed by Jewish vales. Second, they connect students to Jewish peoplehood, allowing them to take pride in the accomplishments of important Jews throughout history.

Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values is a new way to bring Jewish heroes and the values they stand for into your classroom. It is a values text for our time, about being a person worthy of emulation. It’s about knowing how to do the right thing, how to make a contribution to the world, and how to be a mensch, and how to live up to being created in God’s image.

Designed for fifth and sixth graders, Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values adds new names to the pantheon of Jewish heroes, presents texts from the Jewish tradition as well as the heroes’ own words, and challenges students to think about how they can live up to the examples set by real role-models.

Did you know that Natalie Portman isn’t just a Jewish actress, but also a tzedakah hero? How can Debbie Friedman and Craig Taubman help us to sing praise to God by finding our own voices? What’s Jewish about owning a football team? These questions are at the heart of Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values, and they can be at the heart of your students’ classroom, too.

Eizehu Gibor: Living Jewish Values will begin shipping in July. But right now you can check out sample chapters and pre-order by clicking here.

by Joel Lurie Grishaver

Programmed Instruction

There is a growing fantasy in Jewish education that everything will be better if we only take the teacher out of the equation. This is manifesting itself in the claim that low level computer exercises can replace a day a week of Jewish learning. And it is leading to tools like self-checking folders that students work their way through at their own pace. What all of these hold in common is a reliance on an old education technique, programmed instruction, which was used mainly for industrial training and has mainly shown itself to be a failure in general education.

Programmed instruction grew out of the work of B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist who believed that learning was conditioning. In rewarding students who get the right answer, students become conditioned to repeat that answer. Programmed instruction sends students through a series of frames where they (a) receive information, (b) are asked about that information, and (c) are shown the correct answer. In more sophisticated forms, there is now a “branching” opportunity. If the student got the answer right, they move on to the next frame. If they get it wrong, they are put into a review loop.

The good news seems to be (a) the ability of each student to move at his/her own pace, (b) a high rate of retention (at least in the short term), and (c) the freeing of the class from the imposition of a teaching doing bad “frontal” education. But most of the advocates of programmed instruction, whether in software or folders, seem to forget three things:

1. Levels of Learning

Benjamin Bloom, one of my teachers, wrote a big book with J. Thomas Hastings and George F. Madaus called Handbook on Formative and Summative Evaluation of Student Learning. In it is a taxonomy of educational objectives that describes a series of “levels” of learning. In the cognitive domain there are six: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The problem is simple. Jewish life and real Jewish learning is all about Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation, the higher levels. Programmed Instruction is best for Knowledge, Comprehension and Application, the lower three levels.

There is also a taxonomy of affective objectives: Receiving (or Awareness), Responding, Valuing, Organization, and Characterization by a value or value complex. These affective objectives (usually called “Krathwohl’s Taxonomy”) are all about a process called “internalization,” whereby a student’s affect towards something goes from being aware (that’s the “receiving” part) all the way to the point where their affect has been internalized and consistently guides or controls the person’s behavior. It’s the path between knowing that kavod is a Jewish value and going through life treating people with kavod. Programmed Instruction can get you to Awareness, but it is not great at getting to the rest of the domain. Jewish education should be all about valuing and the rest of that process.

The argument can be made that Programmed Instruction is mainly being used to teach Hebrew language. That Alef Bet is only Alef Bet is partially true. But Alef Bet leads to Ashrei and Ashrei is supposed to build a connection to God. While learning folders with self-checking and computer programs may have a role in mechanical learning, they are incapable of taking it any further. When do you feel close to God? What is the right thing to do in this case? What do you think of when you say the Shema? These are all moments of Jewish learning that are simply not part of a computer’s function.

2. Community

The purpose of Bar and Bat Mitzvah is to acknowledge that a child is now old enough to function as an adult in the ritual life of the Jewish people. Reading Torah is a symbol that a child can now function as a member of the community. A new adult can now be counted in a minyan. Most importantly, this means that a new adult is old enough to go to a shiva house and be counted among those whose responsibility it is to help heal the pain of death. If we are going to turn our schools into B’nai Mitzvah mills, we could do worse than if they included the skills of participating in Jewish communal life and learning compassion and empathy. Those are not things that come from the kind of computer programs we have and are likely to have in the foreseeable future. They are the inverse of things learned when each student is moving at his or her own pace.

Tolerance is one of the things that one learns from being part of a learning community. So is patience, leadership, and being a good listener. The best way to learn how to participate in community life is practice. It is not an accident that Jews pray in community and demand community for most Jewish events. Studying prayer at home on the computer is not the best way to learn about community. Working alone at your own folder, checking your own answers, doesn’t develop leadership skills.

3. Teachers

Finally, the Jewish tradition believes in teachers. It sees teachers as rich (not mechanical) enablers of individualization and personalization. Teachers allow lessons to go off on tangents, listen to student needs, and take advantage of the moment. Teachers can appreciate and celebrate, understand and empathize. A teacher-free classroom can maybe transmit Jewish information, but it is not a Jewish classroom. The modeling of the Jewish classroom as Jewish learning community, the enabling of the community by a person manifesting and applying Jewish values – this is our goal. I know of no one who can claim that their best learning moment took place when completing a self-guided booklet. Not every teacher is ideal, but teachers are our ideal.

Every teaching tool that is effective has its time and purpose. Programmed instruction and computer-assisted instruction are tools that have their time and place. But ironically, as we have less time to spend together with our students, now is precisely the time for more student-teacher interaction, not less. As we are trying to teach the skills of communal worship, now is precisely not the time to invite our students to learn Hebrew from computer screens. When we are trying to instruct our students to maximize their humanity and use it to change the world, now is precisely the time to make human interaction a foundational value of Jewish education. The elimination of the human in education is a step backwards.

Steps Forward

At Torah Aura Productions, we are dedicated to producing curricular materials that realize a depth of understanding rather than focusing only on facts and feelings. That means that we also must be active partners with teachers and educators to maximize the Jewish educational impact on their students.

Programmed instruction is perfectly useful if the goal is to develop students who can perform at a one-time event. We’re encouraging a different goal: students who are lifelong Jews. Our mission is to make materials that help teachers and educators to enable their students to become empowered Jewish adults.

We believe in doing what it takes to develop good teachers who can actualize impactful Jewish learning. That may be more difficult than asking teachers to facilitate programmed instruction in booklets or on computer screens, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Human interaction is the key to the Jewish future. And because we believe in humanity, we believe that Jewish schools can succeed at doing something bigger, better and worthwhile.

by Adrian A. Durlester

When Will Israel Have A New Government? Just ten days after the elections which gave Tzipi Livni and the Kadima party 28 Knesset seats and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party 27 Knesset seats, Israeli President Shimon Peres broke with tradition and asked Netanyahu to form a government. Historically, the leader of the party with the most seats was asked to form the new government. However, after Prime Mister Olmert announced his intention to resign, Livni was unable to form a new government coalition, thus leading to the elections this February. Now, Netanyahu’s attempts to forge a broad coalition including the centrist Kadima and left-wing Labor parties have failed. Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu said that coalition talks are continuing and that discussing negotiations in public weaken the party’s standing. However, there is now widespread speculation that Netanyahu will announce the formation of a very narrow right-wing government next week. Some in Israel are very concerned about a right-wing government. The parents of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit are hoping that the outgoing Olmert government can secure his release before their time in office is up, and are fearful that a right-wing government will have a more difficult time negotiating for Gilad’s release. Lots of resources on this story on the web, most notably at www.jta.org, www.ynetnews.com, www.haaretz.com, www.jpost.com.

Controversial Arab-Jewish Duo to Sing for Peace at Eurovision – The Israeli public, at least those that were tuned in on Monday, March 2, picked the peace song “Your Eyes” to be sung by the Jewish-Arab duo selected to represent Israel in the Eurovision 2009 song contest in Moscow. Announced just one day after the Israeli incursion into Gaza started last December, the selection of the duo of Israeli artist Noa (Achinoam Nini) and Arab-Israeli artist Mira Awad (the first Arab-Israeli to be selected to represent Israel at the prestigious Eurovision contest) has stirred controversy and criticism from both Arab and Israeli quarters. That criticism has only increased with the selection of the peace song chosen on Monday by fellow Israelis. A group of Arab artists, some Israeli, some Palestinian, sent Awad an open letter calling on her to withdraw from the performance. Israelis have criticized Noa for her openly leftist views. Others claim the duo is watering down the realities and inappropriately trying to present a warm and fuzzy, feel good picture. However, the two artists, friends on and off stage, are determined. Awad says she wants people to realize that Jews and Arabs must find a way to live together. Nini said it was a chance to send a message of peace to the millions who would be watching the duo on stage. The chance to get viewers thinking is enhanced by the fact that, to many, Awad looks Jewish and Noa looks Arab. Israel has an interesting history, especially recently, of sending a very mixed variety of performers and songs to Eurovision. One might even examine Israeli politics through the lens of their Eurovision selections.
Official Israeli Eurovision Site: http://www.iba.org.il/eurovil/
Official History of Israeli Entries: http://www.eurovision.tv/page/history/by-country/country?country=18
An interesting Jewcy blog commentary: http://tinyurl.com/cat3tv

Conservative Rabbis and Leaders to USCJ: Don’t Leave Us Out! – The Conservative movement, once the largest in the U.S., but now eclipsed by Reform Judaism, has been grappling with its future for a number of years. A confluence of changes in leadership has sparked new hope among the movements adherents for future possibilities. JTS has a new chancellor in Arnold Eisen, who is already bringing change and a fresh breeze to the Conservative seminary. Rabbi Julie Schonfeld will become the head of the Rabbinical Assembly this summer. United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ) will be selecting a replacement for long-time Executive Vice-President Jerome Epstein. About 50 rabbis, cantors, and synagogue leaders are concerned that USCJ has kept their selection process entirely internal, without consulting with rabbis and other leaders. They formed a group Hayom: Coalition for the Transformation of Conservative Judaism, and wrote a joint letter to USCJ expressing their concerns. While JTS invited representatives of the movement’s other organizations to sit on the search committee that tapped Eisen, the United Synagogue kept the process closed-the search committee did not even include a pulpit rabbi. Ray Goldtsein, President of USCJ has now agreed to meet with the representatives of Hayom which includes clergy from some very large and successful congregations. He has conceded that keeping the process closed may have been an error, but said he had sought informal input from the movement’s other arms, including from Eisen. Complete article: http://tinyurl.com/dyayqv

The Tanakh Goes Sci-Fi?: A new tv show premieres this Sunday on NBC. Called “Kings,” the show is the brainchild of Michael Green, one of the writer/producers for “Heroes,” who models the new show’s characters on the biblical David, Saul, Goliath, et al. The show has some very overt religious and political symbolism. The show has had a lot of hype and expectation. Just try Googling it. Will it live up to the hype? Can the biblical stories survive such an updating? Watch a few episodes and send us your opinions. http://www.nbc.com/Kings/

Other Articles of Interest for Use in Your Classes:

Some thought-provoking comments about Purim and Anti-Semitism from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: http://tinyurl.com/d7reto

Jews and Food – Nothing New, Right? Wrong – Try “The Jew and the Carrot” site for a refreshing look at “Jews, food, and contemporary issues.” http://jcarrot.org

Secular Israelis forge new ways to connect with Judaism: http://tinyurl.com/bhgkw2

News2Use is a new feature written by Adrian A. Durlester. To comment or respond, send an email to Adrian at tapbb@yoeitzdrian.com or to the TAPBB at tapbb@torahaura.com.

On March 6, the editors of What We Now Know About Jewish Education (Paul Flexner, Roberta Louis Goodman, and Linda Dale Bloomberg) received the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Education and Identity. The awards ceremony was held at the Center for Jewish History in New York. We’re very pleased to present some of the words that Paul, Roberta, and Linda shared with the audience that night.

Paul’s remarks:
This is very exciting. To be recognized by our colleagues and our peers is very special to each of us. It gives us each time to pause and reflect on the endless hours of conversation, of editing and of the final product that resulted.

The comments that we have received over the last few months provide us with much food for thought. They suggest that we are entering (or have entered) a new age when a book is not just a book. Rather, a book serves as an inspiration for the reader to reflect and respond, to enter into a dialogue with others, to add to their knowledge and understanding, and to begin the preparation of the next sequel which may appear as an ongoing collection of digital bytes easily accessed from anywhere and at anytime by the truly curious.

Our exploration of Jewish education over the last 20 years raised significant and critical questions for all of us engaged in the educational process. With each new development, with each new technology, teachers are challenged to incorporate the ‘new’ into their practice; they have to make adjustments; and, they need to constantly reflect on how to connect the ‘new’ with the traditions and history of a 3000+ year old community that is now faced with rapid change. As teachers, and all educators are teachers, we are the ones who build the connections between the tools and the text, between the lives of the students and the traditions of a people.

To accomplish this transition, we chose to dig deeply into every aspect of Jewish education. We could not ignore a critical component simply to save space or to be more concise. And, this is the result of our efforts. For this, we simply say, THANK YOU!

Roberta’s remarks:
My husband always jokes that What We Know about Jewish Education is 350 blank pages, and NOW, the sequel, is 450 of even larger blank pages.

So what is the book about? It should be obvious, it is a love story. It is about the encounter between faith as represented by passion, commitment, and vision and science with its tools of rationality, statistics, predictability, and outcomes. All of this happens among the main characters–researchers, evaluators, practitioners, lay leaders, funders, and learners too-all who put their hope and trust in Torah and God to assure that the Jewish people thrive in a just and caring world.

So why the first volume? Those engaging in Jewish educational research were already organizing as a network, presenting papers prior to the annual CAJE Conference, in 1982 or thereabouts. With the 1990 Jewish population study and the interest in Jewish education as a response to the continuity agenda, Torah Aura Productions, Inc. published the first volume in 1992, to get the voices of academics and practitioners and their knowledge and perspectives from the then “thin” amount of research into the conversation about the future of Jewish education with policy makers and funders.

Why NOW? This sequel reflects the ways in which decisions about Jewish education, in terms of policy making, funding, and programming have come to both initiate and rely upon research and evaluation. The expanded number of chapters in this volume reflects that Jewish education is a topic of import to a broad range of Jewish and non-Jewish academics and others too. Finally, it represents, the ways in which those preparing to or already tarrying in the field, the college/graduate students and practitioners, can turn to research and writings in their own field, rather than always having to apply what the secular world has to say to Jewish education. We accomplish this by exposing the reader to the perspectives of the well established and the upcoming researchers, the latter, who will sooner than later be editing book #3.

Linda’s remarks:
The past decade has seen the emergence of a growing interest in evaluation and research by Jewish educators, policymakers, and philanthropists seeking to ascertain the extent to which various kinds of Jewish educational experiences can serve to impact learning and engender more meaningful engagement in Jewish life. The field of Jewish education has certainly worked hard to address the new realities of contemporary society. While we have much reason to celebrate our achievements, however, multiple challenges continue to confront Jewish education. Not least among these, as pointed out by Steven M. Cohen, is the significant decline in Jewish ethnicity and collective Jewish identity.

As such, Jewish education as a field of practice as well as an object of academic study must remain a matter of critical significance. Research must continue to address issues regarding the learners, the educators, the pedagogy, the educational contexts, as well as the more philosophical questions regarding the very purposes of Jewish education. Moreover, we need to create channels and opportunities to share what we know across contexts and practice areas, and in so doing make what we have learned educative, relevant, and meaningful to others.

This volume offers a forum for expanding the rich emerging conversation regarding an ideal Jewish education for our times and beyond. And the sequel will hopefully contribute to the ongoing discourse by capturing and further expanding upon the fruits of the research and evaluation efforts of the years that lie ahead. It is an honor that What we Now Know about Jewish Education: Perspectives on Research for Practice has received a National Jewish Book Award, particularly in the category “Education and Jewish Identity”. Indeed, a thread that runs through all of the chapters of this extensive volume is the significant impact that Jewish learning has on Jewish identity, and consequently on Jewish engagement, commitment, and continuity. Kol Hakavod to all those who continue to research the possibilities and opportunities that Jewish learning, in all its varied facets, has, in shaping and impacting our future, our Jewish heritage.