Jewish Schools spend a significant amount of time on the teaching of Halakha--Jewish Law, custom, and ritual. The practice is most prevalent in Orthodox schools, although in truth all Jewish schools spend some time on the instruction of this discipline. Schools differ widely as to the approach they take in the teaching of Halakha, and this…

Research on Jewish day schools has long focused on the challenges they face in managing the tension between the "Jewish" and "general" components of their "dual curriculum." Interviews with 34 graduating seniors of a private, community Jewish high school found that students experienced another dual curriculum within…

Early career principals in Jewish day school are frequently unprepared for the role, contributing to attrition in school leadership. This narrative study explores the socialization of ten Jewish day school principals in the first three years of their first position. These leaders have similar feelings of being overwhelmed and unprepared as…

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 conceptual paper lays out an approach to teaching biblical Hebrew in American day schools. This paper builds on extant work in the field of Jewish education on teaching biblical Hebrew and offers day school educators a theory of language instruction for teaching biblical Hebrew.

Bibliotherapy is an educational approach that attempts to engage learners in meaningful discussions about relevant, compelling, and complex issues that they confront in their lives. Bibliotherapy begins with reading and reflecting on stories that can draw participants into a process of reflection, in ways that are user friendly and…

This paper intends to demonstrate how within the current contentious environment for teacher education in the U.S., two small teacher preparation programs conducted a voluntary coordinated long-term self-evaluation study, that partially responded to external accountability pressures by the Federal administration, state agencies and various private…

What do Jewish day school students believe constitutes good understanding and worthwhile learning in the context of their encounter with rabbinic texts in the classroom? This article shares findings from an interview study of Jewish day school students in grades 9 through 12 regarding their attitudes toward the study of Talmud. I argue that high…

Abram S. Isaacs (1852-1920), editor, intellectual, university professor, and rabbi, was a moral educator dedicated to making American Jews more knowledgeable and more virtuous. His role model was his father, who founded and taught in the Jewish day school that young Abram attended. While embracing the blessings of American life, Isaacs was deeply…

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…

The purpose of this study was to better understand how Jewish day school leaders in Toronto perceive non-Orthodox Jewish day school financial sustainability. This multisite case study used a questionnaire, completed by 23 leaders of non-Orthodox Jewish day schools, and one-on-one interviews with all eight heads of school of the non-Orthodox Jewish…

Purpose: This paper aims to illustrate how graphic novel adaptations can engage adolescents in conversations about gender and society, particularly when adaptations are weighed against messaging found in a student's everyday life such as religiously motivated gender normativity. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on quantitative and…

This study considers whether and in what ways graphic novel adaptations of traditional Jewish Hebrew texts can encourage adolescent Modern Orthodox girls to adopt autonomous critical responses when encountering narratives that present women in unequal roles vis a vis men. According to scholars, Jewish literacy should teach students to read…

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…