Teaching and Learning in Jewish Day Schools
This volume is focused on teaching and learning, and seeks to better understand how day schools are educating diverse Jewish youth in a variety of content areas. In light of the difficulties initiating, evaluating, and sustaining educational innovation as well as understanding classroom practices more generally, this volume takes stock of what is happening in contemporary Jewish day school classrooms and among Jewish day school students and teachers. The authors of this volume directly confront and question some bedrock principles of Jewish education, and some address how day schools intersect with broader societal issues, including race and gender. They point to themes and topics that scholars and practitioners are grappling with and reveal potential future directions worthy of attention: What do we know and what can we learn about what students are learning in Jewish day schools? What do we know about the alignment, or lack of alignment, between desired and actual student learning outcomes? What do we know about teaching and learning in specific core subject areas (e.g., Bible, Rabbinics, Hebrew, etc.) in day school education? What do we know about developmental (i.e., “whole child”) outcomes beyond, outside, or across the content of subject areas? How do broader social and environmental factors in the Jewish day school contribute to learning? How do social categories such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender shape student learning and school culture?
“From Bible to Zionism, Jewish history, and Hebrew, subject matter becomes the stage that provides access to how teachers teach and how learners think in Jewish classrooms. A virtual tour of schools of different denominations, ages and content areas treats readers to analyses of teachers’ pedagogies and learners’ experiences, including those of Latin American, Haredi, urban and suburban Jews.”
- Miriam Heller Stern, CEO Builders of Jewish Education, Los Angeles
“Research and practitioners alike will benefit from the volume’s accessible presentation of rigorous research. Readers will gain insight into how learning and development happen in these settings and an appreciation of the role Jewish day schools play in fostering positive Jewish growth.”
- Jeffrey Kress, Provost and Professor of Jewish Education, JTS
“As both timely and essential reading, Teaching and Learning in Jewish Day Schools makes a significant contribution by offering empirically grounded portraits of how Jewish education is enacted on the ground... the value of Krasner, Levisohn, and Avni's volume lies in the conversations it invites—about method, coordination, and purpose—across research and practice in Jewish education.”
- Contemporary Jewry