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

This was my third year teaching at Temple Beth El and my final year at Brown University. But, as a child of teachers, I’m always invested in deepening my pedagogy and improving my lessons. Throughout the course of this year in UTF, I’ve done both of those things and more. In my first year at Beth El, I struggled to plan lessons because I couldn’t always predict the skill levels and engagement of my students. In this seminar and in my classroom this year, I’ve learned that I can expect a lot from my students, so long as I provide them the scaffolding and support they need to be successful.

In one of the first lessons, we talked about the value of ritual objects for multisensory learning. It inspired me to start bringing in ritual objects in order to ground my students in the real applications of the lessons we’re teaching. When we talked about parshot we looked through a Tanakh and saw the breaks in the Hebrew. When we talked about Jewish history, we went to Beth El’s archive and looked at some of the ritual objects bequeathed by Beth El’s earliest members. My kids loved to see the objects we were talking about, and getting to engage their more tactile senses — and the lessons we were teaching gained more real-world value because of their material application. 

Inspired by the week on studying Jewish texts, we pushed our students to critically engage with lots of Jewish texts in different forms. We worked with the weekly parsha, and the Question Matrix allowed us to scaffold the students in order to understand texts on both basic and theoretical levels. 

I’ve loved being able to think, process, and work with this incredible group. Thank you to Laura and this cohort for being so thoughtful, kind, and silly. It’s been a lot of fun.

This fellowship has been invaluable to me over the course of this year. Prior to the fall semester, I had never taught students in a professional setting before. While I was excited to engage in this work, and I am grateful to Rachel and Temple Emanu-El for trusting me, I did kind of feel like I was throwing myself into the deep end. What was I to do when two of my students declared that they couldn’t be in the same room as each other? What about when my madrich and his brother decide to play-wrestle and derail the lesson plan? What if my students insist that they would much rather play basketball than whatever I had prepared that day? I am socially aware enough, I think, to be able to navigate these situations as they arise, but it is always hard to tell if my response is the correct one. It was a boon, then, to be able to debrief in each of our UTF sessions. Sometimes functioning like group-therapy, with each of us venting about the ups and downs of that week’s class, the others providing potential solutions but also simply a space to be heard. I was tremendously grateful for the chance to get a peek into Maya, Maize, and Miriam’s classrooms, as well as to draw on Laura’s vast amounts of experience and expertise. Curricularly, each session gave me concrete intellectual tools for managing my diverse classrooms and particular ideas that I should be holding in my mind. These include a plethora of Jewish sources, comprehensive charts of developmental stages, Bloom’s taxonomy for learning goals, social and learning techniques, and a general overview of diverse ideas of intelligence. I am grateful to everyone who helped make this fellowship happen, and, as I look forward to my post-graduation life, I hope to keep in touch with you all.

Teaching Hebrew school in high school was my first job, and because of that, it was a job that no one ever prepared me for. There were no expectations beyond doing the best that I could to pass on the material that mattered to our community. That openness was beautiful and special, but also terrifying. How could I, a teenager, be entrusted with shaping the Jewish experiences and teachings that will stay with my students forever? How could I build a bridge that invites exploration while still leaving space for disagreement? How can I teach meaningful content through a medium often dismissed as “fun” or “not serious”? How can I create a space where students want to learn? Having taught Hebrew school for six years, I know that learning is a long-term journey. I joined this seminar because I knew that I had received a great responsibility of shaping the minds of the next Jewish generation, and I wanted to take on that responsibility with the utmost care. And what I did learn totally exceeded my expectations. 

This seminar gave me the opportunity to unlock a new sense of creativity within my lesson planning, from using ritual objects like siddurim to engage my students with the text to accommodating multiple intelligences by adding more variety and movement to my lessons. Especially as a music teacher, I felt like I was completely starting from scratch because I had little specialized training outside of the traditional Hebrew School classroom. Classroom activities that I once relied on such as reading books, creating slide shows, and doing art projects were no longer options. Working within the constraints of a classroom and a specific medium forced me to think differently, and this seminar helped me figure out how to incorporate the breadth of Jewish learning into my little music class. I began to explore new ways for my students to engage in text study, such as pairing song lyrics with specific words of Torah to create more meaningful units. I practiced asking stronger, more open-ended questions and allowing my students to sit with complexity instead of rushing to fill the silence. I also learned to welcome my students as their full selves, meeting them where they are even when their moods didn’t align with my lesson plans.  I know that the lessons I taught this year, from a lesson on peace in times of conflict to a lesson celebrating the relationship between nature and humanity would not have been possible without this seminar. 

Through this seminar, I stopped focusing on proving to myself that I was a good teacher and started focusing on becoming a better one, even when that meant making mistakes or teaching lessons that fell flat. Above all else, I learned how to prioritize what really matters: my students. A lesson can only be good if it resonates with my audience, and by prioritizing social and emotional learning, I can take care of my students and ensure that they will choose to engage with Jewish learning long after they leave my classroom. Thank you all for being here with me, for learning alongside me, and for helping me move forward during a difficult semester.

My time as an Undergraduate Teaching Fellow has taught me about the value of catering to every student individually and not making assumptions about where anyone may be coming from. I have found myself frequently returning to our third seminar about the theory of multiple intelligences. Even though it is easier to simply create one lesson plan for all students to cover the goal material, it will inevitably only then sink in for a few. Rather, I have been trying to implement more stations in class. This way, students can rotate between activities like drawing, performing, or contextualizing ancient stories and values into modern life. I try to remind myself of Bloom’s Taxonomy from our fourth seminar. It is sometimes difficult for me to remember not to conflate my own background knowledge with what my students may or may not already know. Rather than starting with questions that I personally find interesting and thought provoking, I need to have questions that set a baseline understanding across the board. Going into my second year as an educator at Temple Beth-El, I am excited to use the lesson plans I have spent time creating this year and adapting them to include more of these features - it is helpful that I have a starting point in place for myself and now I can work just on improving the plans for future students. I am grateful for this experience and the documents with examples I can continue to go back to and implement in my classroom.