Many American Jewish day schools, where most staff and students adhere to Ashkenazic traditions, perpetuate the normativity of Ashkenazic practice and culture, both reflecting and reinforcing the status of Sephardic communities as "minorities within a minority." This article draws on Sephardic adults' recollections of the…

Using an original data set of task-based interviews, this paper presents findings on how Jewish day school students make sense of Biblical Hebrew verses in Biblical Hebrew. This paper pushes back against the convention in Jewish communal discourse to evaluate and label knowledge, shifting the focus instead to understanding how knowledge is…

This paper presents the findings of a multi-site case study focused on the role of mid-day supervisors in English primary schools. Ethnographic approaches were employed to gain an understanding of the role and how this is experienced by those who undertake it. This included a fully participatory phase where the researcher inhabited the role of a…

The purpose of this Action Research study was to investigate the curricula used by Readers' Workshop teachers at an independent day school and the successes and barriers of having an external reading consultant provided by the program. The study compared the relationship between an external reading consultant with the desire of an in-house…

Universal design for learning (UDL)--an instructional design framework that promotes expert learning by promoting accessibility and reducing of barriers to learning-is gaining momentum on the global stage. However, UDL implementations with deaf or deafdisabled learners remain limited. This study examined how UDL enabled educators of deafdisabled…

This article uses data from site visits to four Hasidic elementary schools in Brooklyn to examine how specific learning, review, and testing activities used in these schools might be applied in other Jewish education classrooms to build knowledge depth and automaticity. The literature on learning and cognition in secular subjects has identified…

Tamim is an organization designed as a school network, much like those found in the charter school sector, among innovative public schools, and in smaller numbers in other corners of the private school sector. Tamim is built on the notion of expanding existing prekindergarten programs associated with local Chabad Jewish centers into full…

Brentwood School is an independent K-12 coed day school with two campuses, located four blocks apart, in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Brentwood's West Campus (Brentwood Lower School) includes grades K-5 with 266 students. It has a student/teacher ratio of 7:1 in kindergarten and 11:1 in first through fifth grade and is 39% students…

This qualitative study reports on principals' perceptions regarding the teacher characteristics deemed most important for hiring effective teachers. Data for the study come from semi-structured interviews with principals working in urban public, Catholic, and Jewish schools. Results reveal a tendency among principals in all three sectors to focus…

This article offers a detailed study of one child's relationships to Israel from kindergarten (2012-2013 academic year) through 7th grade (2019-2020 academic year). By tracing Avigail over the course of eight years, I argue that children do not develop "a relationship" with Israel but rather many different relationships over time. Using…

This study examines a Pre-K-first grade full-time synchronous remote track in a Jewish day school. In the fall of 2020, Hassenfeld (Fifth Author) remotely taught biblical literature to Pre-K-first grade students. Through our analysis of two months of classroom transcripts, we sought to understand, first, the nature of student-to-student text…

This article reports on students' and faculty members' experience of their pluralistic Jewish day school's educational mission to nurture students' Jewish identity exploration within a broader social and cultural world. It articulates these stakeholders' perceptions of the ways teaching and learning of Jewish values, customs, and knowledge are…

Visual phonics, a system of 46 hand-shapes with equivalent symbols, when used together are called "cues." These cues couple with the 46 phoneme sounds of spoken English. Visual phonics was originally developed by a mother for her deaf son to aid in teaching speech and reading. This study was designed to compare students in two different…

The effects of covert audio coaching, a form of performance feedback delivered remotely through a two-way radio and earbud speaker, was examined on the classroom attending behavior of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Four elementary-aged students with ASD participated. This study was conducted in a private, separate day school for…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of newly-hired faculty members in the induction programs provided by four independent schools in the greater Washington, D.C. area and examine how each induction program influenced faculty job satisfaction. Data came from six administrators and 17 faculty members and were…