Our schools’ curricula should be fulfilling intellectually and spiritually, as well as socially and emotionally, and classrooms should be places where teachers assess cognitive development, to be sure, but also facilitate students’ discovery and growth of all parts of themselves. Read more.

Strengthening educational excellence in our Jewish studies classes means teaching sacred texts in ways that promote high levels of student engagement, critical thinking, and meaning-making. A tool we have found effective for achieving these outcomes is called Total Participation Techniques (TPTs), teaching strategies that “allow for all students to demonstrate, at the same time, active participation and cognitive engagement in the topic being studied.” Read more.

I believe we all share a very similar vision of the outcome of an excellent Jewish education. We hope students will gain the knowledge and skills required to solve complex problems and develop the inclination to help shape a better future for all. One important way to achieve this vision is by considering how a scope-and-sequence of learning might be created to emphasize engagement with the world beyond the walls of the classroom. Read more.

One way to strengthen Jewish educational excellence in our day schools is to devote a much larger chunk of instructional time to textual-experiential, affective-oriented study of why we do what we do as Jews. When we involve our students in an experience that empowers them to understand how our religious rituals can help us thrive as human beings—existentially, psychologically, or communally—they bond with those rituals for life. Read more.

For millennia, Jews have responded creatively to their circumstances. After destruction, renewal. In the face of denial of the Jewish historical experience, insistence on memory. Moving and migrating necessitated reinventing and rebuilding. Reading, translating, reinterpreting, and imagining have been strategies for preservation, adaptation, and transformation over time. Our creativity is at the core of our resilience. Read more.

We know from the learning sciences that curiosity enhances memory encoding and consolidation, fuels intrinsic motivation, supports exploratory behavior, and improves attention and learning processes, resulting in better learning outcomes. Further, many scholars emphasize the social nature of learning. As human beings, we are wired for meaning making and social learning; being curious together further amplifies the positive impacts of curiosity. Read more.

How might we combine excellence and high standards with inspiration and connection? If lighting Chanukah candles presents a model for lighting the souls of our students, then the laws around the mitzvah show us two complementary ways to achieve excellence. Read more.

While the Chanukah miracle was an unambiguous victory of good over evil, it is rare to find such clear distinctions in contemporary society. The world is a place of nuance and complexity, and it is our role as Jewish educators to enable our students to navigate this world with sophistication and integrity. Read more.