Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education

Teacher Learning Project

The quality of a school depends on the quality of its teachers. Finding promising teachers is an ongoing challenge for many school leaders, and keeping them is even more challenging. New teachers leave Jewish day schools at alarming rates, creating what has been called a "revolving door" of educators.

In the Teacher Learning Project (formerly called the Induction Partnership), we helped school leaders in a diverse set of day schools create the conditions to help new teachers thrive by:

  • Building capacity to develop new teachers;

  • Distilling lessons from the field about what it takes to do so effectively; and

  • Creating tools and resources for school leaders to foster strong induction in their schools.

In this video, school heads, teachers and Mandel Center staff talk about the transformative effect a thoughtful induction process can have on an entire school.

Materials from the Teacher Learning Project website are now located here.

Two teachers sitting at a table

Phase 1 began in 2005 as a pilot initiative with several Boston-area day schools. With support from the Mandel Center and The Covenant Foundation, we helped these schools develop a comprehensive model of new teacher induction and built the capacity of school leaders to carry it out. In the process we developed a "toolkit" of self-assessments, teaching cases, and organizing documents.

In Summer 2009, with further support from the Mandel Center and The Covenant Foundation, the Induction Partnership launched Phase 2 of its work, welcoming partner schools from across the country as new, remote sites for further development and implementation of the Induction Toolkit. These schools included:

The project's work concluded in 2013.

Project Resources