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…

Given the centrality of Shabbat celebration to the weekly cycle of Jewish residential camps, it is surprising how little Shabbat-at-camp has been studied. This participant observational study of three American Jewish residential camps has focused on how Shabbat-at-camp is created and how the ritual celebrations engage the older campers. This study…

This article examines the ways that Jewish studies teachers think about their teaching. It analyzes data from a three month teacher study group in which teachers read educational research articles as a framework for reflecting on their own teaching. The data suggest that Jewish studies teachers take one of two approaches in talking about their…

Induction and mentoring are widely considered in the United States and in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries as a basic universal and critical intervention for a successful launch of new teachers. Based on an expanded set of survey data, this article focuses on how Jewish day schools offer professional…

This article offers a conceptual framework for assessing PJ Library programming grounded in the relevant scholarly literature and illustrated by way of conversations with PJ Library parents. It is built around three themes concerning how parents view their role as facilitators in their child's religious and cultural identity formation through the…

This study analyzes the ways in which practitioner inquiry engages graduate student educators in understanding how to navigate the complexities and contingencies of teaching. By examining the challenges graduate student teachers faced while conducting practitioner inquiry, as well as the categories of teacher knowledge they developed in the…

Modern educational scholarship has not substantially investigated the learning practice of havruta, paired study and focused conversation around classical Jewish texts. In this article, the author analyzes videotapes and transcripts of real-life havruta interactions and proposes a theory of havruta learning as composed of three pairs of core…

This article investigates the use of the contextual orientation to the Bible--which seeks to understand the Bible as a product of its time, and in the context of historical-critical biblical scholarship--as a deliberate, significant aspect of a teacher's overall approach to reaching Jewish adults in their 20s and 30s. Through classroom observation…

This article addresses teachers' understanding of spiritual development in public and religious schools in Boston and Chicago. It examines how teachers define spiritual development in different educational contexts and looks at the way they relate spirituality to a number of factors including community, identity, and character. The data from the…

Since 1993, Boston's Jewish community has supported "Sh'arim," a regional initiative in Jewish family education (JFE). This paper examines parents' perceptions of the impact of that initiative on their children, themselves and their families as a whole over the past 10 years. After briefly describing the initiative's original goals,…