Jewish Education

Do We Need to Change the Paradigm in Jewish Education?

Is Jewish education locked in a paradigm of crisis?

What if the Ten Commandments were Ten Essential Questions?

Students need to make their own meaning. It’s a precept of many innovative and thoughtful approaches to learning today. Yet time and time again we as educators worry if learners will get ‘the message’ of the content as they struggle to create meaning around it. We feel compelled to cover certain material that feels essential.

Be Nimble, Be Quick: The Paralysis of Large Scale

In a provocative piece in the Huffington Post, Hildy Gottlieb argues for faster-moving, decentralized, and opportunistic program development, taking advantage of communities, relationships, and resources that already exist. She uses a parable:

The Best Thing We Can Do for Students with ADHD and LD

The best thing we can do for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities (LD) is to help them find ways to manage stress, according to Dr. Jerome Schultz, neuropsychologist and author of No Where to Hide: Why Kids with ADHD and LD Hate School and What We Can Do about It. In listening to Dr. Schultz speak recently, it occurred to me that the Jewish educational environment may be uniquely suited to help all kids manage stress in their lives.

The #1 Relationship for Learning

Just before Passover I spoke to an educator in DC who is adopting an SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) process in his school.

Classroom Games—Motivating or Destructive?

In my travels around the country, educators regularly ask me for classroom game ideas. The kids love games, they say. Games can add liveliness, variation, and interest to a lesson. Games are experiential. I’ve seen games that facilitate learning in several ways. These games: • provide practice and review of Hebrew decoding and prayer recitation skills. • provide reinforcement in a relaxed setting.

I Do and I Understand

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. —Confucious That makes experiential learning at least 2,500 years old. So why has experiential learning been reborn in Jewish education?

Encouraging your Educators to Blog

BH guest blog by Yoram Samets, Founder of Jvillage Network

Imagining the Possible

By Lisa Micley Lisa Micley is Director of Education for BabagaNewz.com and a Jim Joseph Foundation Fellow. Contact her for suggestions for how you can innovate in your class or school.

Have Your Students Live A Double Life

Let your students explore the intrigue of living a double life by having them create their own avatar. Using this site, your students can create their own alter ego by customizing their avatar’s features, clothing, and background. Students can also add a voice to their avatar by recording their own commentary, or uploading text which the program will convert into audio.

Personal Growth Can Be Scary

“We value and respect personal development, creativity, and intellectual growth.” That’s one of our core values here at Behrman House. Personal and professional development is not just encouraged here—it is required. 1. Each of the fifteen employees writes a personal development plan for the year and reviews and assesses it quarterly with the department head. (Years ago this replaced the annual review.)

Online Passwords: Headaches or Lifesavers?

     Have you ever had a friend who has unknowingly sent you some kind of spam through email and then had to spend hours or even days sending around more emails telling everyone not to open the previous message because their account was hacked? Sure, we all have. It may even have happened to you.

Just Ask an Angel

One of my take-aways from the JEA and NATE conferences in the last two weeks was that there is money out there—you just have to know who, and how, to ask. Three examples:

High Tech; Low Tech; No Tech

I love my digital toys.  I use at different times an iPhone, iPad, and laptop.  I’m going paperless at the office. I was an avid PC Magazine reader until it stopped publishing—ironically put out of business by the internet.  And so my eyes lit up when—reading the presentation schedule for an upcoming conference—I saw a session “Innovate or Die.”

Without Bread... Reflections on Resources and Funding

“Who will pay for this?” is the question Rabbi Noa Kushner asks in her thoughtful S3K report “Doing Jewish Stuff”—An Experiment Called NITA.” NITA—meaning “we will plant, we will grow” is a program run by Rabbi Kushner in Marin County, California, a region of 15% affiliation rates, that connects young unaffiliated Jews with their Judaism.  Not an eas

Maybe Not So Easy: Technology and the GA

The General Assembly. Biden. Netanyahu. 4,000 Jewish professionals and lay leaders. High trief food options. Kippot at Café du Monde and on Bourbon St. Where to start? Most notable for me: technology was everywhere. From Shalom Sesame and the engagement of pre-schoolers, to teen programs, to engaging with marginally affiliated Jews in small communities, technology is in everyone’s solution set.

My Rewired Brain

My brain is getting rewired.  I can feel it. I’ve been testing an iPad—the office bought two for evaluation purposes.  As part of my test, I’ve been doing my newspaper reading—the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—on the iPad.  I try to the papers (why do I call them “papers”?) before work, and then catch up on parts I missed when I get home.  (And, sometimes I skip the arts section, not to mention sports.) So how’s it going?  It’s changing the way I read the paper.  Here’s how:

Early childhood materials: from classroom to home

There are so many rich, wonderful ways to create authentic Jewish experiences for young children to help them grow in their Jewish identity. This is a key goal of Jewish early childhood education. It’s a goal in my household, too, whether we’re lighting Shabbat candles or singing Hanukkah songs.

Connecting Kids to Character

Some days I feel like a dinosaur. This is especially true when I talk technology with my children. Living in an on-demand, digitally-delivered world, my kids just raise quizzical eyebrows at descriptions of quaint technologies from my own school days, such as computer punch cards and “corrasable bond,” the glazed, erasable paper that helped a generation of fumble-fingered non-typists turn in readable school essays in those dark days before the invention of the delete key. “What is she talking about?” It’s all ancient history to my kids, and it doesn’t really connect.

Celebrating Change with Bubbly

The neatly posed positions, smiling faces, and champagne glasses lifted in toast tell just part of the story of the strategic planning process we’ve just completed here at Behrman House.

Teach Israel

 Experience Modern Israel

New from Behrman House. Fly to Israel without a plane ticket.

Discover Israel

 Let's Discover Israel

Offer younger children an exciting and age-appropriate introduction to the Jewish homeland