JESNA - Jewish Education News

Gates teacher quality study enrolls close to 100 NYC schools

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:36:45 +0100

A two-year project to study what makes a teacher good or bad is taking root in some of the city’s schools after struggling to bring teachers on board.

The United Federation of Teachers and the city’s Department of Education announced in September that they had joined forces to promote a study of teacher effectiveness paid for by the Gates Foundation. The $2.6 million project, called Measures of Effective Teaching, will look at ways of measuring teacher quality beyond using Read More...

'New Jews' stake claim to faith, culture

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:16:21 +0100

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai about 3,300 years ago, he couldn't have seen these Jews coming.

A blogger writes about how one of Judaism's holiest days ended, for her, in a strip club, while elsewhere a guy strolls into a tattoo parlor requesting a Star of David. Two women exchange wedding vows in a Jewish ceremony, and hipsters toss back bottles of HE'BREW, The Chosen Beer. A full-time software developer prepares to lead a group in Jewish prayer, as a PhD candidate in Jewish thRead More...

Schools reward good character

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:14:21 +0100

This month, the Arizona Character Education Foundation celebrates 10 years of helping youths lead lives that reflect the six pillars of character: trustworthiness, fairness, respect, responsibility, caring and dedication to citizenship. Ten years of training teachers, youth-organization leaders and parents how to incorporate positive character traits into a variety of lessons.

Since 2000, the non-profit foundation has distributed free character-education materials to more than 900 schRead More...

Michelle Obama launches mentoring program

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:11:32 +0100

First Lady Michelle Obama kicked off a leadership and mentoring program Tuesday, opening the White House to 20 high school girls who will pair up with top administration officials to learn life skills.

At a gathering in the State Dining room, Obama told the girls that mentoring has always been important to her, and that she wanted to use her platform as first lady to "expand the mentoring role."

"In every part of government, there are women who are hungry to help briRead More...

FutureTense NY Launches With Focus on Jewish Education

Monica Rozenfeld — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:43:07 +0100

What is more important for a Jewish informational web site – being on the first page of Google search results or having credible, high quality content? Is the Internet just another tool in the arsenal of educators, or does it fundamentally change the way in which learning takes place and the power relationships between students and teachers? Is online learning over-hyped, or is it the future of Jewish education? These were some of the questions discussed at the first New York FutureTensRead More...

Bar mitzvahs trim down amid recession

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:21:54 +0100

With the weak economy forcing lifestyle changes large and small, one of the mainstays of American Jewish life -- the bar-mitzvah party -- is undergoing some recession-era adaptation.

While few seem to be doing away with the traditional celebration, many families are scrapping themed parties, trimming guest lists and in some cases holding joint or group bar-mitzvah parties.

“The creative aspect of bar mitzvahs has been decreased,” said caterer Jeffrey Stansfield, the Read More...

New coalition aims to make social justice a community priority

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:01:25 +0100

When Nancy Kaufman attended a national conference on Judaism and social justice in Chicago in 2005, she looked around the room and said to herself, “Wow, there are 250 [Jewish] social activists here -- there used to be only 10 of us. There's a field here.”

Kaufman, the executive director of the Greater Boston Jewish Communal Relations Council of Greater Boston, then thought, “What are we going to do to advance the field?”

Four years later, what is being dRead More...

A forum for researchers and practioners in Jewish education: NRJE Conference

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:58:30 +0100

The Network for Research in Jewish Education (NRJE) invites submissions for presentation at its 24th annual conference, to be hosted by The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, at New York University, June 6–8, 2010. Submissions are welcome from all those interested and involved in research in Jewish education, broadly understood to encompass quantitative and qualitative research (ethnography, case Read More...

Report: Birthright Israel Experience Significantly Lowers Rate of Intermarriage

Monica Rozenfeld — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:38:32 +0100

New research released this morning by researchers from The Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University backs up what many of us have known for years – Birthright participants return home with positive perceptions of their experience, increased connection to Israel, greater sense of connectedness to the Jewish people and increased interest in creating Jewish families.

The study, which has had the science behind it heavily vetted, is both the first to identify theRead More...

Prominent Jewish school receives largest gift to date

Monica Rozenfeld — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:34:52 +0100

A Jewish elementary school in the District has been pledged a gift of $5 million in what area private educators are calling a hopeful sign for fundraising.

The Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation's Capital, a 262-student school in Brightwood, announced Friday that it had been promised the gift, which is a mixture of outright gifts and a matching grant that will require the school to raise an additional $1.8 million on its own.

The money, which comes from an anonymous donor, Read More...

Educators' Showcase from The Girls Theater Project

Monica Rozenfeld — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:30:10 +0100

The Girls Theater Project explores the lives of Jewish girls ages 11-17 and provides them (and those who care about them) with tools to examine and develop self-esteem, independence and Jewish identity.

BECOMING, the debut play from The Girls Theater Project, is an original theater piece created in a series of workshops with a diverse group of Jewish girls from the New York City area and written by Joyce Klein

The evening will include filmed excerpts, talkback with worksRead More...

State of Mind: America's Teaching Corps

Monica Rozenfeld — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:35:39 +0100

Two out of five of America’s 4 million K-12 teachers appear disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, while others express a variety of reasons for contentment with teaching and their current school environments, new research by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates shows.

The nationwide study, “Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today,” whose results are being reported here for the first time, offers a comprehensive and nuanced look atRead More...

Proposed: A high school just for future teachers

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:29:04 +0100

John Jasonek wants to start grooming the next generation of educators at an earlier age — by nurturing them at a charter high school designed to foster teaching.

If they’re still interested in teaching when they graduate, Jasonek says, offer them a scholarship to a local college — on the condition that after they graduate, they stay in Clark County to teach for four years.

“These would be our kids raised up to be our teachers,” Jasonek says. “Read More...

Impacts of school organizational restructuring into a collaborative setting

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:53:25 +0100

A significant number of teachers spend nearly all their
time with students or alone planning and grading
papers, it is not surprising to hear them say that they feel
isolated from their colleagues (Lortie, 1975; Rosenholtz,
1989). According to some scholars (Deaudelin, Dussault,
& Thibodeau, 2003; Flinder, 1988; Smith & Scott,
1990), the perception that teaching is an isolated and
self-reliant profession is partly the result of the nature of
theRead More...

Choice of electives enhances learning

Monica Rozenfeld — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:51:54 +0100

SAIL High School teacher Sheri Nilles went from teaching an advanced art class one period to a gardening class the next.

She quickly switched gears from teaching students how to draw self-portraits to lecturing about mulch and composting before taking the class to the back of the school to work on the garden.

But according to Nilles her hectic schedule is a small price to pay to allow students a variety of electives to choose from.

Other than art and gardening, students can taRead More...

Choice Awards For Jewish Nonprofits

Monica Rozenfeld — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:25:59 +0100

Customers regularly review their favorite books on Amazon.com and share tales of woe from recent hotel stays at hotels.com. So why not rate Jewish nonprofits? That’s the idea behind The 2009 GreatNonprofits Jewish Choice Awards (www.greatnonprofits.org/jewish), a month-long contest that extends through the end of October in which ordinary individuals — along with donors, volunteers, those benefiting from the services, and board members — are asked to rate the Jewish nonprofiRead More...

New Name for UJC

Monica Rozenfeld — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:58:15 +0100

In an effort to establish a clearer identity, the United Jewish Communities renamed itself the Jewish Federations of North America and adopted a new logo that it hopes will be used by the network of more than 500 Jewish organizations under its umbrella. Together, they distribute more than $3 billion a year to support social services and education, but their collective strength has long been lost in a welter of different logos and names that James Tisch, a former chairman of the umbrella organRead More...

Slingshot Day 2009

Monica Rozenfeld — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:47:57 +0100

The fifth edition of Slingshot: A Resource Guide to Jewish Innovation will be unveiled today at a full day launch event to be held at Random House in New York.

Without diluting this year’s selected grantees, the bigger story is the creation of a free-standing organization which will steer Slingshot and the Slingshot Fund into the future.

Slingshot, fiscally sponsored by FJC, was started as an experimental project five years ago to begin mapping the complex world of nonprofRead More...

Jews of color explore identity

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:34:25 +0100

At Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco-based organization for ethnically and racially diverse Jews and their families, Amalia plays with other Jewish children who are black, Hispanic and Asian, as well as a sprinkling of white children from non-conventional families. They study Hebrew, celebrate the holidays, read Bible stories and learn about Israel, but they also talk openly with their counselors about what it means to be Jews of color, to juggle an identity people can’t see with thRead More...

L.A. Elementary Teacher Wins $15,000 Award

Monica Rozenfeld — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:58:10 +0100

Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Dov Goldman, the fourth grade boys’ teacher at Cheder Beit Menachem Elementary School in Los Angeles, received a Milken Family Foundation Jewish Educator Award in cooperation with the Bureau of Jewish Education of Greater Los Angeles.

Bureau executive director Gil Graff and Richard Sandler, executive vice president of the Milken Family Foundation, surprised the teacher, his students and colleagues during a school ceremony on Tuesday.

Goldman will beRead More...