The exuberance that each new school year brings for the children we greet through our doors is palpable throughout the school in the weeks leading up to September. But now, with so much uncertainty surrounding us, we are left wondering just how we’ll recreate that communal buzz of excitement and cozy school vibe through our sterile masks and socially distanced hallways. How will our educators and students re-enter a building they have not inhabited for close to half-a-year, and resume school life as they know it? How will our educators weave their magic and ease back-to-school tension and worries, restoring calm and reviving the smiles and laughter that we all miss? How will we partner with our parents to ensure that we are all working together and placing the social and emotional wellbeing of everyone within our educational communities, front and center of everything we do?

How I wish I could answer those questions, and foresee the future. We are all navigating unchartered waters, and in the absence of certainty, we are charged with the task of an abundance of planning, with an eye toward sensitivity and caution. Administrators and educators are working round the clock to ensure a healthy transition back to school and are at the center of efforts to restore the conditions for all of us to thrive and flourish this year. But in order to do so, we must reclaim our role as those who create the conditions, and don’t just respond to them. 

Agency

There’s a strong premise within positive psychology that when individuals have the psychological state of agency, progress occurs, but when they don’t, they face stagnation. Agency is a subjective, internal state of mind whereby individuals feel as though they can make a positive difference in the world around them. Agency is comprised of a sense of efficacy, which is a cognitive belief of one’s ability to exercise control, as well as optimism, the expectation of a positive future. 

COVID-19 has challenged not only our efficacy and optimism, but our core understandings of our place in the world around us. Thankfully, belief and conviction in our sense of agency throughout our school communities is embedded within Jewish education from the youngest of ages. It begins with the daily prayer of Modeh Ani, where, in the words of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, we teach our children to “begin your day thanking G-d; if not from faith in Him, then at least from His faith in you,” to be a productive and a positive force for yourself and those around you. The sense of agency that is central to the mission and vision of our schools fosters resilience and innovation, and allows us to try harder, dream bigger and brighter, imagining things other than the here and now. 

Make no mistake: we are all going to need to take an inside-out approach this year, as we engage in collective healing and social-emotional learning and join forces to cultivate inclusive and welcoming classrooms. We often think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, but really biologically, we are feeling creatures that think. We know that our emotions affect our ability to store, process and absorb information, as learning is a deeply emotional process that calls on areas of the brain that intertwine cognition and emotion-processing, particularly the prefrontal cortex. Positive emotions enrich our cognitive functioning in areas such as brainstorming, problem-solving, memory, creativity and lateral thinking. We know that no learning happens when our students are highly emotionally aroused, and we’re going to need to attend to their social-emotional needs so that they will be available for learning.

Resilience

As we return, our approach must remain relationship-focused, student-centered and restorative in order to breathe new life into our classrooms, fueled by courage, compassion and connection. The data speaks for itself: strong subjective wellbeing has been linked to enhanced health, immunity, better social relationships, productivity and resilience, and the best news is that wellness can be taught and character strengths can be developed. 

Resilience is a dynamic process that takes into account the complex and changing contextual interactions between individuals and their surrounding environment, including family, community and social systems, that influence one’s capacity to overcome adversity. Resilience is more than coping with difficulties; rather, it enables people to adapt and regain an ability to flourish, with room for positive growth, transformation and transcendence. 

Reconfiguring the Fragments

There’s a famous parable in the literature of trauma. Imagine you had a precious vase that you were gifted from a close relative that gets knocked on the floor and smashes into a myriad of tiny pieces. Panicked, you bend down and try to gather all the fragments so you can piece it all back together. You try and try, but shaping it into what it once was proves to be too arduous a task. Perhaps you can assemble the pieces into something new, and repurpose them to help you creatively process and preserve your memories. 

As educators, our task today is not to put back the pieces to what they once were. I believe that our task is to welcome everyone back into our sanctuaries of learning and empower each other to reconfigure our pieces and imbue our experiences with meaning, as we incorporate them into a renewed and enhanced version of ourselves. As Holocaust survivor and Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Let’s revive the sense of agency and human connection within our schools and pave the way for the powers of possibility this year.

Carly Namdar is an educational psychologist and director of middle school guidance at HALB. Carly is a doctoral candidate at the Azrieli Graduate School of Education, and is passionate about all things positive-psychology related. 

The Book of Devarim that we are reading in synagogue during these weeks is a recap of the previous four books; the material is largely familiar, but is presented in an entirely new way. Some of the classics (the Ten Commandments/Utterances) reappear with changes, while important new material (e.g., the Sh'ma) is introduced. Moshe is recounting the people's history for several important reasons: the new generation needs to review the experiences of their parents; the people require instruction regarding their identity and values before they fight a war upon entering the Land; the teller wants to leave a legacy that defines the meaning of his leadership, that all future Israelites can study and learn from.

However, the emphasis throughout Devarim is less on the recounting and more on the message. The experience that the people are about to undergo, conquering the land and ruling it autonomously, requires different qualities than were required previously. The purpose of Moshe's speech is to fortify the people in their faith and relationship with God and their understanding of the Land as the culmination of their formation and wanderings as a nation.

If the very meaning of Torah is instruction, the Book of Devarim is singularly focused on education:

And this is the Instruction—the laws and the rules—that the LORD your God has commanded [me] to impart to you, to be observed in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, so that you, your children, and your children’s children may revere the LORD your God and follow, as long as you live, all His laws and commandments that I enjoin upon you, to the end that you may long endure. (6:1-2) Translation found in JPS and Sefaria.

Most significantly, only after this period of education, reflection, preparation and change can Bnei Yisrael enter the Land.

Jewish day schools similarly have undertaken a period of reflection, education and preparation unlike anything that most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. When we return to our schools, either in person or online, or both, much will be familiar. We know our material; we know how we like to teach our subjects; we know many of our students, their families, and often the communities in which they live. Unless we are transitioning into a different school, we know the culture of our schools, we are comfortable with our colleagues, our departments, our faculty, staff and leadership, with whom we may have collaborated for many years.

And yet, our world has been shaken, our communities no longer function as they used to. Our schools have invested countless hours to ensure that our buildings will offer as safe an environment as possible. But for all this extraordinary, intensive labor, we simply do not know what the future, near and long term, has in store. Some schools are unable to open because COVID is still raging in their vicinity; when will they be able to return? For schools in states with lower rates of infection, will people truly be able to return to school safely, or will, God forbid, outbreaks recur and force additional closings? 

And we have no idea when this period of history will end and what the world, and our world, will look like on the other side. Will we have a vaccine in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year that will effectively inoculate everyone? Or will the vaccines only be partially effective, as some epidemiologists warn, requiring continued caution and vigilance? At the end of the day, we lean on our faith in God and our confidence in the importance of Jewish day schools and their mission to place our hope in a good outcome, no matter how or when we get there.

Nevertheless, the abundant efforts of our stakeholders are effecting changes that are serving our schools well now, in the present, and will continue to yield fruit for months and years to come. Our schools have proven to be agile to a degree even beyond our expectations, ready to transition to fully online instruction with a degree of success few others could achieve. Despite all of the stress, our teachers and administrators have shown incredible resilience, adapting to changing guidelines and forecasts, making the best of it with remarkable humor and aplomb. 

We see new forms of internal collaboration, with technology directors suddenly ascending in importance and consulting daily with school leadership while supporting the entire educational infrastructure; and unprecedented external collaboration among schools, with heads banding together weekly for critical networking and inspiration. Teachers are engaging in professional development on a massive scale never before seen in our field, in social-emotional learning, inclusion, and online instruction. And board members have worked tirelessly to help ensure the school's financial health, provide for emergency needs, and forecast a sustainable budget in these murky waters.

Like Bnei Yisrael, we do not know when we will arrive at the next stage of our journey or what exactly it will look like; all we know is that it will look different from our world today and the world that we have known until now. And yet, just like our ancestors, we can glean seeds of hope today that we may plant and may flourish one day soon, God willing, when we reach a better place.

Originally posted on JEIC. 

As school leaders, we find ourselves dealing with a unique situation none of us could have imagined other than as a summer science-fiction blockbuster film. We have been tasked with making informed decisions, yet we don’t really know what information and analysis to use to best inform our decisions. Like Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai (Berachot  28b, Bava Batra 89b), we can never be sure that our decisions are right, and, since each decision impacts so many people long term, we are painfully aware of the stakes at play and the price to be paid if we err or fall short. 

Frustratingly and to our great consternation, just when we think we’ve made progress, something beyond our control changes. Updated statistics, revised state guidelines, network “Breaking News,” and we’re back to where we started. Qualifying phrases like “as of now,” “as of today” or “as of this moment” pepper our memos and our posted “live documents.” An honest reckoning demands a rhetorical question: Will all these planning meetings have any value, or perhaps, sadly, we have been wasting our valuable time?

I am reminded of the military adage that “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” a statement attributed to Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, the famed Prussian chief of staff in the 19th century. Von Moltke wrote: “One cannot be at all sure that any operational plan will survive the first encounter with the main body of the enemy. Only a layman could suppose that the development of a campaign represents the strict application of a prior concept that has been worked out in every detail and followed through to the very end.”

If this is the case, then why make any plans ever? In answer to this very question, Dwight D. Eisenhower, general and later president of the United States,  replied, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” This seems to move the needle a little bit forward. According to Eisenhower, even though plans tend to disintegrate when confronted by reality, the process of planning has substantial worth. The question then becomes, In what ways might this be so?

We must distinguish between planning and preparing. Preparing is often undertaken in a controlled environment for a predictable situation. The Talmud provides such an example, when it declares that ”whoever prepares on the eve of Shabbat will be able to eat on Shabbat” (Avodah Zarah 3a). Prepare for Shabbat by cooking the food on Friday and you’ll have what to eat on Shabbat evening and afternoon. But this preparation isn’t  planning. A person cooking for Shabbat knows more or less how many people will be eating each meal, what time they will be eating, and what foods to cook. Of course the brisket could burn, the clock could run slow, or last minute sleepover guests might necessitate additional place settings, but it’s more likely than not that things will work out and the Shabbat meal will be enjoyed without a hitch.

Planning is fundamentally different. It often involves considering the possibility of something unknown or unpredictable happening in the future and of formulating strategies in the event of such an occasion. We can plan a family picnic weeks in advance, but if it rains on game day we are out of luck unless we have a backup plan.

I believe the halachah of Eruv Tavshilin might shed some light here. The Talmud describes that this eruv enables us to prepare on a holiday for Shabbat, an act that, absent the eruv, would be prohibited (Beitza 16b). In a situation when Shabbat immediately follows a holiday, some people will become hyper-focused on Shabbat to the neglect of the  holiday, others on the holiday to the neglect of Shabbat. The physical eruv is less about actually preparing the Shabbat meal on the eve of the holiday and more about ensuring that one “plans” appropriately for both the holiday and Shabbat. It’s the process of planning for both that guarantees that both the holiday and Shabbat will get their due.

In light of this, I would like to suggest some benefits of planning, even if the plans should end up changing throughout the planning process and, especially, during the implementation stage. Bearing these benefits in mind will justify to some extent all the time we have spent and will spend in planning meetings for the upcoming academic year.

1. The organization focuses on its mission, goals and values. When plans need to change, new plans should be adopted that keep true to the organization’s goals. For example, if in war the ultimate  goal of the battle is to win over the hearts and minds of the local population, a military unit that encounters friction will not switch to a tactic that wins the battle but causes substantial collateral damage.

2. An organization identifies its strengths, weaknesses, resources, capabilities, capacities, etc. While the original plan may need to be changed, new plans are designed with an acute awareness of these known variables, thus increasing the chances of success.

3. Various options are discussed. Even though one of them will be chosen as the primary course of action, the others should not be shelved. They form the core of other options to be looked at and possibly adopted during actual implementation.

4. The team accesses a range of sources of information. The planning group will be able to vet these sources for credibility and reliability so that they can know how much to weigh them during the implementation stage, when decisions need to be made based upon imperfect information. As part of this process, the planning group learns to operate and decide in a world of uncertainty.

5. The school selects outside agencies that can provide support and establishes relationships with them, as well as outside experts and consultants. Connections to these networks can be quickly accessed during the “action.”

6. Key members within the organization get to know each other and understand the leadership dynamic in a way that can be used during implementation.

May Hashem guide us in these difficult times as we forge our opening plans. And may we merit that our planning meetings become preparing meetings as well.

Rabbi Dr. David Hertzberg is the principal of the Yeshivah of Flatbush Middle School and an adjunct asst. professor of History at Touro College. His rabbinic ordination is from Yeshiva University. He holds a Master of Arts in International Politics from NYU and a Doctorate of Arts in Modern World History from St. John's University.

by Lisa B. Ziv

Tisha B’Av is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem in 586 BCE and 70 CE. Many tragedies for the Jewish people have fallen on Tisha B’Av. 

Every year, I do the traditional things to observe the day. I fast, read kinnot (dirges, poems of mourning) in synagogue, and yearn for the Temple to be rebuilt. I go through the rituals. But until now, I haven’t personally connected with Tisha B’Av. This year my heart aches as a mother helping her child struggling with depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. My perspective on so many things is filtered through my family’s mental health challenges. 

The day I learned that my child was “cutting” is one that forever changed my perspective on the idea that our bodies are our temples. The school principal called me saying she found a letter where my daughter wrote, “I have already hurt myself many times.” Although she was in counseling for depression and anxiety, neither my husband, her counselors, her teachers or I had any idea that she was in such deep pain. The letter was a cry for help that put us on a path to getting our daughter a higher level of mental health treatment. The journey to help her get to a better place is best left for another time. Thank G-d, she is doing better, but the scars from the razor blade are there to mark when her bodily temple was attacked.

Thinking about the body as a human form of the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Sanctuary, is both inspiring and imposing for me. As Mendy Hecht wrote on www.AskMoses.com:

With the destruction, G-d temporarily removed the Temple from its geographic location and placed it within us. Instead of traveling to Jerusalem, G-d wanted us to find Him in our inner Jerusalem. Now, our bodies are our Temples, our souls are our windows, our minds are our kohanim and our animal instincts are our sacrifices. We cannot offer physical sacrifices three times a day, but we can pray three times a day. We cannot attend Temple services three times a day, but we can tap into our souls three times a day. We cannot atone for our shortcomings by sacrificing animals, but we can sacrifice our inner animals—our hormones, our lusts, our desires, our beastly compulsions. We cannot find G-d in Jerusalem; we must find Him in us.

Just as we mourn for the destruction of the Temples, we hurt for our loved ones who are suffering. Some try temporarily to ease their pain through self-harm by cutting, abusing pills, drugs or alcohol, binging, purging, overeating or other unhealthy behaviors. This Tisha B’Av, as we pray for the Temple to be rebuilt, let us pray for our family and community members with mental health challenges.

Rabbi Yechezkel Freundlich spoke during Canadian Mental Health Week 2020 about the need to bring awareness and destigmatize mental health. He discussed the commandment to maintain the dignity and honor of those who need help. Rabbi Freundlich shared a commentary to the Torah equating helping those with mental health issues to rebuilding the Temple, saying: 

If the Jew can fulfill the mitzvah of maintaining the dignity and honor given to those that need in a way that they are able to feel good about themselves, it is as if, Rashi says, you constructed the Beit HaMikdash, you build the Temple itself, and went there and brought all the offerings that are necessary. That is our task.

On Tisha B’Av, I will join with Jews around the world to lament the destruction of the Temples and pray for the rebuilding of Jerusalem speedily in our lifetime. My prayer, for my daughter and all those struggling with mental health challenges, is that their personal temples be repaired and rebuilt in good health and peace.

Through her lived experiences, Lisa Ziv developed a passion for supporting parents as they navigate their children’s mental health challenges. Her private organization helps identify resources and build supportive communities, by connecting families and increasing awareness in schools and the Jewish community. Her reflections on Jewish holidays, traditions, and texts inspire families that are coping with uncertain times. Lisa lives in Baltimore, MD, with her husband and three amazing teenagers. [email protected]; www.lisaziv.com

Why School?
by Rabbi Laurie Hahn Tapper

I was walking up the steps of our garage with my groceries freshly picked up from the curbside of our local supermarket and realized I was carrying more than I usually do: a whole watermelon and a bag of brown sugar in one arm and two one-gallon containers of milk in the other hand. When had I gotten so strong?

This must be one of those real life, mundane moments my strength training had been preparing me for, I thought to myself with a smirk. Since the pandemic hit, I’ve been getting through the days by expanding my workout routine to include daily riding (on my bike that goes nowhere) and strength training. The instructors will often say things like “We are not doing this exercise for the sake of the exercise, but we are doing this to live our lives more fully,” or “Being uncomfortable by pushing faster or lifting heavier helps us get comfortable doing uncomfortable things in our lives.” One of my favorite instructors in fact used to say (pre-March 13th), “Go faster! We’re training for the apocalypse and when those zombies come, you want to be able to outrun them.” When she used to say that, I would both laugh and go faster.

Now, I hear those words differently. The apocalypse (though not a zombie one) feels like it has arrived. The pandemic, systemic racism, white supremacy, a federal government with no leadership, climate change—how have we trained to meet this moment? Do each of us have within us the necessary ethical, emotional and physical muscles to survive, live and thrive in this current moment? Have I trained myself in patience, self-discipline, empathy, just to name a few of the characteristics I find myself most needing to call upon right now? It’s a question I think is critical for teachers and administrators to ask ourselves as we figure out how we will return to school. 

Regardless of the physical or virtual form school takes, what is the content we will be providing right now for students to survive and thrive in this current world moment and beyond? Instead of focusing on how we will do school, what if we first asked why? 

So, at this moment: Why school? Yes, academics are important. One needs to know how to read, write and think critically. But more than anything, I have often felt that the goal of elementary school is to help a child learn who they can be and how they can be a respectful and productive citizen of the world. If this is so, then what do our children actually need to know and be able to do to be citizens of the world they are currently living in and help to continue to build?

As we look at the images of unmasked people gathering in large groups, videos of people coughing on others who disagree with them, or the general disregard of medical experts and scientific studies, how do we help children find the strength within them to withstand this moment and even to thrive?

Whether virtual or physical, schools need to be centers that develop respectful and productive citizens of the world who value common decency, empathy and critical thinking. Our job is to be training students with deep social-emotional and inner-spiritual skills. What are the fundamental building blocks that children can learn so they develop patience, resilience, hope, delayed gratification and, most importantly, the deep understanding that their wellbeing is inexplicably tied up with and dependent on the wellbeing of their immediate and global community?

I’m not sure yet what it actually looks like, but I feel that our world needs us to rethink the curriculum, and our religions compels us to. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in “What We Might Do Together”: “Many of our people still think in terms of an age in which Judaism wrapped itself in spiritual isolation. In our days, however, for the majority of our people involvement has replaced isolation. The emancipation has brought us to the very heart of the total society. It has not only given us rights, but also imposed obligations. It has expanded the scope of our responsibility and concern. Whether we like it or not, the words we utter and the actions in which we are engaged affect the life of the total community. We affirm the principle of separation of church and state, we reject the separation of religion and the human situation.”

If emergency learning required us to try to keep things as normal as possible so people could survive, I wonder if this next phase requires us to acknowledge and name the situation we are in, so that we may purposefully train and educate for this moment and beyond, rather than try to just perpetuate what we’ve always done in a modified way. I dare say that Judaism requires it, our world needs it and the future of our children depends on it.

Rabbi Laurie Hahn Tapper is beginning her fourteenth year as the School Rabbi of Yavneh Day School in Silicon Valley, California, where she is also the Director of Learning Integration, empowering teachers and students to make connections between all aspects of the learning.

What Makes Jewish “Zoom School” Different? Relationships
By Akiva Berger

Schools have a strong focus, both in mission and in practice, on academics. Acceptance to a top-tier college is seen as a predictor of future success. Since high grades are a precondition for admittance to such an institution, students are naturally incentivized to do well. 

Jewish schools are unique in that they have the added mission of connecting students not only to their future, but to their venerable past. Grades may motivate students to focus on their future. But to inspire the next generation of students to internalize their rich and multifaceted heritage requires strong relationships with role models. Indeed, ongoing research, including some recent findings, have pointed to student-teacher relationships as a key factor in the religious experience and success of Jewish schooling. As Professor Haym Soloveitchik put it, “A way of life is not learned but rather absorbed. Its transmission is mimetic, imbibed from parents and friends, and patterned on conduct regularly observed in home and street, synagogue and school.”

As a result of COVID-19, most schools are now implementing online teaching as a substitute to classroom learning. Relationships are being moved online as schools across the world scramble to create proper guidelines for “Zoom school.”

As part of my research at Tel Aviv University regarding Jewish distance learning, I, along with Dr. Arnon Herskowitz, conducted a study (pre-COVID) comparing teachers’ perceptions of student-teacher relationships in the classroom and online. The teachers in the study taught religious subjects in Orthodox schools both face-to-face and remotely. Teachers were asked to freely select a student they taught face-to-face and a student they taught online. Teachers were then asked the same questions aimed at describing each relationship.

There were three key findings in the study.

The Chosen Student

When asked to choose a student about whom to complete our questionnaire, there was a clear and consistent difference between the students. The students chosen from the online classes were all academically successful, while those chosen for the interview from the face-to-face class were all struggling, either academically or otherwise.

When describing the online students, teachers repeatedly used positive terms such as “intellectual,” “enthusiastic,” “on target,” “never gets discouraged,” and “initiates questions.”

On the other hand, teachers characterized their the face-to-face students using language that conveyed struggle, with descriptions such as “did not bring about the expected outcome, mainly regarding her motivation and cooperation,” “seemingly uninvolved with the course, not engaged,” “not sure that intellectually at that moment in his life he was actually able to […] handle the texts,” “she is really struggling with who she is.”

As we will demonstrate in the coming findings, the reason for this discrepancy stems from the very different avenues of support engendered by online learning and face-to-face learning.

Student First Versus Person First

In describing their relationships with their students, teachers expressed empathy for all of them. However, for online students, their empathy focused mostly on academics and school work, while empathy for the face-to-face student addressed multiple facets of the student’s life.

When describing her relationship with the online students, one teacher said, “She knows that I care, she will always write ‘Thank you for understanding, thank you for caring, thank you for letting me hand something in late, thank you for being so flexible’... I think she knows that I care and that my goal is for her to love class and to learn something.”

The focus there is on empathy and caring based on academics. When describing her face-to-face relationship with a student, however, the same teacher does not limit her descriptions to school work.

Because of our respect for each other, we really cared about each other, we were very close, she could come to me… She was very concerned about a student who was having a really bad relationship with the administrator and she came and talked to me about it.

In both the online and face-to-face instances, the teacher expressed caring and support for her students. However, due to the differences inherent in online and interpersonal student-teacher interactions, there were very different routes of support. The face-to-face route is immersive and touches on the “person” behind the student, while the online route is more focused and touches primarily on the “student” aspect of the person.

What Moodle Can’t Measure

Online learning technologies, like Moodle, are not structured to assess or facilitate student-teacher relationships. These mediums are designed for academics. The technology used to support the online courses and monitor online students’ progress may yield positive results for the academic goals of both teachers and students in promoting transparency, for example, but it fails to support and develop other facets of the student-teacher relationship.

When face-to-face relationships are absent, teachers lose the ability to assess in real time the effectiveness of their teaching; in other words, teachers cannot “read the room.” As one teacher describing her online class put it, “It’s not like in a classroom, where you can say, ‘OK, I see that he’s bored, so I’ll give him something to do.’” Another teacher described the difference as follows:

Wondering if you give the [right] response to students is stronger in face-to-face, because you see the student. [You wonder:] Maybe I could have gone easier on her yesterday, maybe I shouldn’t have gotten angry yesterday. You immediately see the results.

While online learning platforms provide a picture of a student's academic success, face-to-face teaching provides a much greater context through which teachers can assess, measure and understand a student's success and failure.

I believe there are several practical strategies suggested by these findings.

Keep Students and Teachers Together

This study was conducted on teachers who did not have a prior relationship with their online students other than the one they built online. If Zoom school continues on to next year, schools that have moved to an online format should consider keeping the current teacher with his or her class in order to retain the benefits of the existing student-teacher relationships. Teachers who have a prior relationship may be able to maintain the rapport they have built with their students online and have that more easily translate to their online teaching.

Encourage One-On-One (or One-On-Few) Opportunities

The class size in this study ranged between 8-15 students per class. Teachers teaching a student one-on-one, even online, report strong relationships with students outside of the subject matter. This implies that the academically driven relationship found in our study is contextual and can be overcome by smaller teacher-student ratios.

Be Cognizant of the Academically Struggling Students

Teachers should be cognizant of the fact that academically stronger students will more naturally thrive in online settings, while those whose strengths lie in non-academic areas will be challenged to succeed even more than in the traditional classroom setting. The face-to-face classroom is characterized by multiple avenues of communication, verbal and nonverbal, active and inactive, which are all very immediate. Online learning communication tends to be fragmented, focused and formal.

a. Model Non-Academic Avenues of Expression

While it is difficult to increase the frequency of communication, there are some strategies that can enhance the quality of the communication. For example, encouraging nonverbal cues can positively affect student-teacher interactions. Another strategy that has proven to increase online student-teacher relationships is exercising self-disclosure, by sharing opinions of ongoing events or personal habits. This strategy can create an avenue of expression for students who do not communicate academically.

b. Utilize Alternative Spaces

Another means of strengthening relationships between teachers and students is opening multiple spaces other than the virtual classroom where students and teachers can converse in informal groups. In this way, teachers can learn more about their students beyond just their academic achievements while also actually increasing the frequency of their communication and support. Some research has found that such informal settings as Facebook can increase perceived student-teacher relationships in students.

The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot 5:16 states:

All love that depends on a something, when that thing ceases, the love ceases; and all love that does not depend on anything, will never cease.

Online teachers do not lack any of the emotional capacities that face-to-face teachers have, and they are often the same people. Rather, the imbalance between distance-learning relationships and face-to-face relationships is rooted in the modality of instruction. With online learning, the relationship ceases outside of the academic environment. 

Developing a connection to one’s own roots needs to transcend subject matter. A role model holds history, morality and tradition in one hand, and extends the other hand into the future. Not every student can grab that hand with academic inquiry. Schools must strive to engender that independent love the Mishnah speaks of and allow an avenue to it for every student.

As we face the real possibility that schools across the U.S. will not be physically opening in September, we must be proactive in creating the most encouraging and effective models for online teaching, ones that will give every student the ability to thrive and grow, and ensure that no child is forgotten or needlessly struggles. The key to successful Jewish education is relationships, so let us provide teachers with the tools they need to best create those meaningful and lasting relationships online.

Akiva Berger is a doctoral student in the Applied Science Communications Research Group of the Technion and at the Technologies in Education Program at the University of Haifa.

Sometimes what is so obvious to us needs to be restated: Jewish day schools are places of excellence, in ways that the word “education” only begins to cover. Their excellence has never been more apparent than now, during the pandemic of COVID-19. At a time when schools everywhere are struggling to teach, to engage students, and to attend to the stress and mental health challenges of prolonged isolation and confinement, Jewish schools are rising to the fore for their ability to adapt, to persevere, to provide care and support to their students and families.

With all of the uncertainty in the world, it’s therefore a good time to revisit some of the arguments for Jewish schooling, with a special appeal to parents feeling a sense of heightened instability, uncertainty, and anxiety.

1. Jewish day schools show the values, commitment, and practices of Jewish life in action better than any other institution. They model the kinds of communities we hope to foster and develop in the future, ones where Judaism and secular culture, Zionism and patriotism go hand in hand. Communities where we model respect and love for Torah, for others, and for one another. In Jewish schools, stakeholders live our values in action, instead of having “real life” for part of our days and “Jewish life” in others.

2. Jewish day schools are excellent centers of learning that have continued to be excellent under these most trying conditions. Day schools know that education is at the heart of what they offer. While schedules have had to be adjusted and shortened, clubs and sports have shrunk or vanished for now, schools have kept a focus on delivering education in a way that preserves the essence of the program—critical skills, valuable conversations, important knowledge. Whether online or in-person, synchronously or asynchronously, day schools are experts at fostering student reflection and growth, at developing student abilities in ways that spiral and expand year after year.

3. Jewish day schools are communities expert at creating community. Our schools train students to consider themselves as part of a community, starting with the people within the school, and extending to communities far beyond. They inculcate habits of mind and dispositions for action on behalf of others: classmates, teachers, parents; the elderly, the poor, a wide variety of people in need; people who are oppressed and suffering. During this time, they have worked to create new forms of rituals and activities to replace the in-person community-building events that are the neshamah of our schools.

4. Jewish day schools care deeply about each and every student in their midst. They pride themselves that no student “falls between the cracks,” whether a student needs extra support or opportunities for advanced study. They find new forms of assessment and pedagogy to assure that they understand each student’s strengths and challenges.

5. Jewish day schools see their students in their entirety. Teachers, principals, deans, therapists, psychologists, learning specialists—everyone who has meaningful contact with students is part of a team that brings together all the knowledge available, from inside and outside of the classroom, to help inform the school’s plan for a student’s learning and growth. They attend to the intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual needs of students, and celebrate each student for who he or she uniquely is.

6. Jewish day schools are nimble and flexible. We saw this trait in extraordinary fashion through the rapid transition that all Jewish schools made to online learning. But that transition was built upon our schools’ foundations, their philosophies and practices. Jewish schools believe that teaching is a noble profession that requires investment for training and growth; schools and teachers cannot stay in place, deliver the same education, and expect the same results. The willingness to learn, grow, and improve has enabled Jewish schools to stay focused on their mission even during these times of unprecedented upheaval.

7. Jewish day schools plan for the future. While some might draw the lesson now that “The best laid plans…,” it is more accurate to say that the ability of our schools to make plans and to act strategically are what give them their advantage. Through all of the challenges under COVID-19, teams of teachers have collaborated on strategies for effective teaching and learning online; administrators have planned for revisions to school schedules and creative new school rituals, have created structures for professional development this summer and are envisioning multiple scenarios for the fall; boards have drawn scenarios for financial planning and school governance, development directors have found new ways to cultivate funders, admissions directors have created virtual tours and Zoom meetings with prospective families, all while technology directors have worked tirelessly with everyone to ensure that online school is as familiar and smooth as possible.

8. Jewish day schools care for their teachers so that the teachers can care for the students. This has been a time of extraordinary stress for teachers. Some have had to gain comfort and familiarity with online programs for the first time. They have dealt with having to recreate the personal engagement from a distance that was so natural in person. The line between their personal and professional lives, which they cherished and tried to hold firm, is bending and breaking: children and families in the background, extra work and pressure off hours. Schools have done their best to show their teachers appreciation and to give them support they need and deserve. These include everything from gestures of thanks to varieties of support and professional development.

9. Jewish day schools partner with families. Parents have been under burdens most have never seen: overseeing their children’s online studies while working from home—if they have managed to keep their jobs. Parents with younger children are under even greater strain. Schools have worked with families in numerous ways, and financially in particular: increasing their financial aid budget substantially, providing significant refunds for early childhood education, preparing for discounts in the year ahead for days when the school building needs to be closed.

10. Jewish day schools go many extra miles for their students. Perhaps this has been most evident in the remarkable graduation and moving-up ceremonies seen everywhere: caravans of cars with teachers and administrators stopping in front of each student’s house, floats rented with heads of schools delivering a speech via microphone, parking lot ceremonies, graduation-in-a-box deliveries, taped Pomp-and-Circumstance marches down hallways and driveways—all via Zoom, enabling people near and far the opportunity to celebrate and witness the creativity of day school students and faculty.

Through the strength of their values and commitments, their flexibility, their devotion to the people who teach and learn together, and the remarkable people who work there, Jewish day schools have demonstrated their worth as an invaluable treasure of the Jewish community—now more than ever.

Elliott Rabin is Prizmah's director of thought leadership. He works to promote thought leadership in the field of Jewish day schools, in particular as editor of Prizmah’s magazine, HaYidion. He has taught classes in Jewish studies, Hebrew language and literature, and world literature in universities, JCCs, and synagogues. Elliott holds a PhD in comparative literature, with a specialty in Hebrew, from Indiana University. He is the author of Understanding the Hebrew Bible: A Reader’s Guide and The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility.

“This was so much better than we expected!” The 8th graders reflected on their two weeks of virtual Israel programming that stood in for their IRL Israel tiyyul this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our two-week experience, led by Avi Allali, the Israel tiyyul coordinator, and Elisa Rotman, school social worker, was designed with the two prominent requests from the students and the school’s educational and value-driven goals in mind. The students voiced their desire to have their distance-learning schedule suspended for the time they would have been in Israel, and to have time with their peers (albeit virtually) to bond and hang out. Israel is one of the school’s seven core values:

Through Hebrew language education and immersion in Israeli culture, Solomon Schechter Day School personalizes for its students the American Jewish connection to Israel, instilling a passionate, lasting commitment to, and a sense of responsibility for, the State of Israel. 

The dilemma was to create an engaging and immersive chavayah (experience) that would solidify an emotional connection to Israel and expose the students to a variety of sites, people, and facts about Israel. We wanted the programming to break through the screen with synchronous interactive offerings presented in charismatic and interesting ways. 

The first step was to find a tour guide in Israel willing to play with us and step out of their comfort zone. I reached out to Ami Braun, who had guided my 8th grade students at Kellman Brown Academy a decade earlier. I knew Ami as an energetic, engaging, and fun guide, but he hadn’t worked with this age group for years. His touring schedule halted, and stuck at home due to the pandemic, Ami was willing to try something new. We agreed that he wouldn’t hand us video clips to show the students. Rather, he would prepare a presentation to show the students on Zoom, where he could guide students and answer questions. We added another layer by providing the students with activities to complete while they were in the sessions. One session Ami prepared a  bingo card with key names, places to fill in as he presented. Another day, he sent a scrambled recipe for the students to re-order as Ami and his wife made hummus with the students.

Each day began with Ami guiding in a different location. We even tried for him to “take” the students live to one or two locations, but the connection wasn’t stable enough, and we found it was best to take the hybrid approach of having Ami live while sharing taped videos. Ami enhanced his presentations further by interspersing historic film clips and GoogleEarth live 360 images of the location. Among other locations, the students visited Ir David, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City including the Kotel, Nahal David, and Tzfat. 

My vision was to design the experience as multisensory as possible, adding in music, photography, cooking, and more. We invited Ami Yares, a talented folk musician who performed Israeli music for the students. Ami connected me with a gifted photographer, Udi Goren, who shared his colorful and dynamic presentations of his experiences on the Shvil Yisrael. Our timing was fortunate in that the Prizmah organized session with Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, took place during this week. Other events included student-led games and cook-alongs; meet-ups with peers from Israel and local Schechter alumni; Krav Maga sessions; a talk with the head of Israel baseball. We honored the students’ request by creating a daily “lounge” over lunchtime, an open Zoom managed by Elisa where the students could shmooze and relax. 

On our last day, teachers volunteered to deliver a felafel to each student’s home. As we shared our Israeli lunch together and apart, the students reflected on the virtual experience over the two weeks. Over and over, the students thanked us for putting together the virtual experience and expressed gratitude for creating an experience that was so much more than they thought it was going to be. 

As schools plan for the upcoming academic year, the path of the virus is uncertain, and our experience with pandemics is unprecedented. We are all challenged to forge ahead in multiple directions, yet it is certain students will not be able to participate in the experiential adventures which make our programs unique. How will we create Shabbat experiences when we can’t bring everyone together in our schools or retreat centers? How will students visit historic sites in our cities, neighboring states, and Israel? What outdoor experiences have become traditions in our schools?