Sometimes the light bulb goes off, and we see something that has been staring us in the face for years. We understand that we have not seen what is obvious, and finally it comes to us—Parents Have Learning Styles, Too.
Schools use metaphors to know who they are. For a long time the “Hebrew School” (Congregational, Religious School, etc.) was imprinted on the American public school that in turn was rooted in the industrial revolution’s platoon system. Rows, textbooks, blackboards, talk of classroom management, homework, recess, and the other trappings of public schools were seen as optimal models for Jewish learning. Just as a generation of public school transformed Jews into Americans, American Jewry decided to use the same technology to Jewdify these new immigrants. Look at the work of Dr. Samson S. Benderly.
Similarly, Cherie Koller-Fox’s adaptation of the “open classroom” model (that had its ten minutes in the sun) gave birth ultimately to CAJE and a whole series of innovative educational strategies. Similarly, Nechama Skolnick Moskowitz and the URJ’s involvement in Understanding By Design shifted planning and assessment in many Jewish settings.
Joel Lurie Grishaver
Somewhere in a box of books I have an early 1950’s book on Sunday school that tells teachers (and or principals) to go to the “public schools” and learn how to be educational professionals. Teachers are told to watch the way they conduct lessons, manage their classrooms, and organize their days. The paradigm that “true education” takes place in the “public” and now “private” schools and what we do in Jewish education is a pale imitation.
The “do it like the public school” fallacy assumes that education is universal and all we add as Jewish educators is some Jewish content. So we hear, “they use filmstrips, we should use filmstrips, they use overhead projectors, we should use overhead projectors, they have computers in every classroom, we should have computers, and they have smart boards so we should have smart boards.” The fallacy rests in the outcome. The goal of the secular school, whether stated or not, is now to get kids into college, since a high school diploma is now good for nothing else. The goal of Jewish education is to create the next generation of Jews who will continue to educate their children. We can add do mitzvot, self-actualize as a human being, develop an understanding of the Divine, redeem the world, and a lot of other things to this list.
The foundational question here, taking the gift of good “backwards planning” from the “Educational Leadership Torah” is “do our goals really suggest the same methodology?”
How Our School Develops a Community of Torah Readers
by Debi Rowe
In my synagogue’s Torah School, our students do not memorize their bar or bat mitzvah Torah portion from a recording. All of them know trop.
You might assume that this means our students must spend hours and hours of extra time preparing for the b’nai mitzvah ceremonies, or that we must dedicate a huge amount of curricular time and energy to training these students. But that’s not the case. Our students all know trop because our students all read Torah not just at their b’nai mitzvah services, but several times every year.
For the past five years, students in our midweek Hebrew classes have been reading Torah as part of our regular Thursday minhah or ma’ariv worship service.
When I went to graduate school the term was “teacher proofing.”
It was thought that such technologies as “programmed-instruction” were good, not only because of their ability to allow for individual pacing, but because of their ability to take teachers out of the equation. Today, we see schools that script teachers’ lessons that opt for camp like programming, that fantasize the use of technology and do everything possible to compromise teacher involvement. While understanding that they have experiences that suggest that teachers are the weakest link in Jewish education, they miss the truth that teachers are also the strongest link. The failure of Jewish education may rest in the hands of some teachers but the success of Jewish education also resides in the skill and attitude of other (or perhaps the same) teachers.
Teaching Naked
Naked Teaching, advocated by Southern Methodist University dean Jose Bowen, calls for active use of technology before and after class, but calls for student teacher interaction in class. According to a report on NPR:
“While it sounds like it’s an anti-technology position, really what I’m doing is using technology like podcasts and online games and things so that students have first contact with the material before they come to class,” Bowen says. He is inviting teachers to invert the traditional model, in which students come to class unprepared, are introduced to material by a professor, then leave to study on their own before coming back to be tested.
“First contact with the material is about, you, the student. Then you come into the classroom, and now we have what’s called learning. We work together, we work on problem sets, we argue. And then you go away and I assess you.”1
Naked Teaching is the rejection of some methodologies and the affirmation of good teaching. It says, lectures are not the best way of conveying information. Power-point presentations make it worse, not better. The real goal is to use technology to transmit information and the classroom to process it. It is a process that say, the teacher is central to the learning that lives long term with the student.
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