Interview with Robin Kahn and the Undergraduate Teaching Fellows
Robin Kahn, Director of Undergraduate Teaching Fellows Program: "For the past three years, I have had the privilege of directing the Mandel Center’s Undergraduate Teaching Fellows Program, a program that offers professional learning to a select group of Brandeis undergraduates teaching in supplemental settings.
I am passionate about this work. As the director of Education and Teen Engagement at Temple Israel of Natick, I am engaged full time in supplemental Jewish education, which is too often overlooked as a location for serious Jewish learning. But we know that serious, engaging, powerful and creative Jewish learning does take place in supplemental settings in the Boston area and across the country.
It is a privilege to share what I have learned with these newer educators from our program. Ben Zoma asks, 'Who is wise?' His response, 'One who learns from every person.' I have learned so much from the Undergraduate Teaching Fellows.
Recently, I asked current and recent fellows to reflect on their learning. Some of their responses follow."
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- Raquel Feldman ’24: A few weeks ago, we learned about the theories behind different learning types and ways to adapt our lessons to suit everyone's needs. I have been able to explore my students' learning styles and they have become more comfortable in the class. I hope my students feel more seen by me and also given the space to learn and reflect in a way that works for them.
- Sarah Humphries ’20: One thing that I learned was to value the whole student as they enter the classroom. Students often come to us with a variety of different experiences, emotions, and thoughts. It is easy to focus only on the learning that needs to happen, especially when there are 20 other students in the classroom. However, students need social-emotional check ins to help them manage their emotions so that they feel valued as an individual.
- Raquel: I have gained so much confidence in interacting with my students and with creating lesson plans. At the beginning of the year, I expected every student to listen to my lesson and I had very rigid expectations for how they would answer and interact in class. My understanding of classrooms has shifted. Now I plan my lessons around questions that I want the students to explore. There is much more space for students to offer their own voices and experience. I have noticed that they love sharing about themselves: their own ideas, experiences, and emotions.
- Erika Lilienfeld ’22: The Undergraduate Fellows Program continues to give me perspective in my classroom. Without a balanced relationship between student, teacher, and content teaching and learning holds less passion and impact. I became better equipped with the tools to establish a more personal relationship and inspire more engaged learning.
- Adina Jacobson ’20: The Undergraduate Fellows Program was crucial to bringing a true sense of purpose to my teaching besides making sure that I got through the entire curriculum by the end of the school year. For example, our lesson on Social-Emotional learning really stuck with me and helped broaden my perspective in terms of what I can teach my students.
- Raquel: I have been teaching in supplementary Hebrew school since I was an assistant in middle school. The fellowship teaches me how to approach the complexity of Jewish topics even to the youngest students. I am given a space to discuss my own experience with Judaism and encouraged to bring it into the classroom setting for my students. The fellowship is also forcing me to get in touch with my own Judaism on a personal level which has been very meaningful.
- Yonah Shafner ’22: For me, the most meaningful part of the fellowships is my peers' opinions on education, pluralism, and God.
- Sophie Kieffer ’25: Being in a community of like-minded individuals who feel honored to educate impressionable individuals is deeply empowering as it reminds me of the sacred nature of our work. I am deeply inspired by my peers’ work and their commitment to Jewish education.
- Raquel: During one of our first seminars of the semester, Robin took us through a lesson on using multisensory learning to explore Jewish ritual objects. Several weeks later, I included a very similar lesson. As a class, we explored Hanukkah items through different senses. Since I teach the youngest students at Kesher, I was really interested in hearing how they articulated their experiences to the rest of the class. One of the most rewarding moments of this lesson was when another teacher at Kesher asked to make her own adaptations of this lesson.
- Eliana: Since completing this program, I have graduated and am working full time as a Youth Engagement Specialist at a synagogue in the Boston area. When lesson planning, for myself and the teachers that I work with, I make sure to include a variety of modalities in each lesson so that it will appeal to all different kinds of learners.
- Sarah: One thing that I have applied from our seminars is to incorporate images into our teaching. One of the activities that we did in the seminar was to have a number of images on a table and students selected the image that spoke to them the most. I have implemented this with my third graders when we discussed the different forms that strength can take. The students selected many different types of images that best reflected their feelings and brought us into a deeper conversation.
- Sabrina Casey ’23: The Undergraduate Fellows program has been such an amazing experience! I have learned so much about Jewish education, especially how important and unique our positions are. Most importantly, I have learned about centering the students within their learning and tools to provide exciting Jewish experiences. This fellowship has provided me with an amazing peer support network and has vastly improved my lesson plans. It has been incredible to take the time to reflect on how my own Jewish education made me feel, reconnect with that excitement, and pass it on to my incredible 5th grade students!