“Die!” That’s what it sounded like I shouted to my English-speaking students when they overwhelmed me one day with questions in our American Jewish classroom.

!די (Dai) is what I knew I was saying. It means “Enough! in Hebrew, the language I grew up speaking as an Israeli.

My students were shocked. I was confused by their reaction.

I asked why they look insulted. Then I explained what I meant and they took turns asking questions.

Eventually we understood each other and worked together.

That’s an example of a model we are building into our program of Master of Arts of Jewish Education (MA in Jewish Education) at Towson University in Maryland: recognizing diversity’s dangers and using diversity as a bridge rather than a barrier in education. We are working to bring new teachers into Jewish education, encourage professional development for veteran educators, and help develop a vital environment for day school, supplementary and informal Jewish education. Our students reflect their own diversity, coming from a variety of religious, educational and personal backgrounds.

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I have yearned to be a Jewish educator since first breathing in the ruach at a URJ summer camp at age 13. And yet, after my first year in the field, I was seriously considering giving up on my dream. The work was truly meaningful, and I was honored and excited to have an impact on so many Jewish children and teens…but I was exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that you feel in your bones; the kind that can’t just be cured by a good night’s sleep. If you are a Jewish educator, you probably know the feeling all too well.

One of the biggest challenges facing Jewish education today is teacher and administrator burnout. Our schools have some of the most innovative educational models, vibrant curricula, and dedicated lay leaders. We have so many resources at our disposal, but they cannot be implemented without enthusiastic and energized administrators and faculty. My perspective comes from working in a large congregational school as a young professional, but the following suggestions for combating educator burnout could apply in many different settings.

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Jewish education is now enjoying a renaissance that it has not experienced since Germany in the 1930s. There are many different models of education open to students, from chavurot to supplementary schools to yeshivot. The opportunities for men and women to study have opened up, with new Internet technologies that allow people to communicate across continents. Many schools are focusing on expanding opportunities for their students to learn through different modalities and focus on the Jewish text and technology skills that will prepare them for an ever-changing world. I believe that this is an exciting time to be a child in a Jewish day school, because teachers and schools are focused on the individual student and his needs.

However, the world of Jewish education is not perfect. Sometimes in the pursuit to create a better learning environment for students a school forgets that teachers also have an ability to learn and grow. Professional development for teachers has not kept pace with the requirements schools have for teachers. Most of the teachers I encounter are in a constant quest to continue as learners and find the best ways to reach their students. They do not always feel comfortable sharing that they perceive their teaching as less than perfect. Teachers in Jewish schools who have finished their formal instruction and training often turn to schools’ in-service programs to continue their education. As a teacher, I have heard many of my colleagues complain about these in-service programs. The most common criticism is that the programs are in lecture format and teachers are treated as a monolithic group, without regard to individual needs.

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The 1995 remake of the film “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” stars Kirk Cameron as Dexter Riley, a so-so college student who is struck by lightning while browsing his computer online, effectively downloading the contents of the Internet to his brain. As Dexter’s self-confidence as an information warehouse inflates his ego, a sagely teacher warns him that the information on the Internet isn’t always accurate, and shouldn’t be accepted at face value. Sure enough, while hustling the quiz show circuit with his new superpowers, Dexter calls up a website of information about ancient Greece only to discover that this information was recorded incorrectly online. More than 15 years later, the premise of this film offers a prescient message about the importance of managing the relationship between students and educators in a world where a wealth of information is freely available to all.

Today, teachers still rely heavily on textbooks to teach material. With students increasingly capable of searching for information online — not to mention increasingly dependent on procuring this information (e.g., turning to Wikipedia for quick answers for papers and exam-preparation) — it is increasingly difficult for these students to accept the authority of assigned secondary sources at face value. Rather than place limitations on students’ independent exploration for information, educators and digital information specialists should partner to help students develop the critical faculties necessary in order to assess the quality of the information they discover outside of the classroom.

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Jewish education is constantly evolving and is highly debated. Technology has provided both an opportunity and a challenge for Jewish education today. Education as a whole, whether Jewish or secular, is most successful when engaging and relevant. Technology is highly relevant to the students we are educating– for most of them it is also highly engaging.

The ability to learn about and participate in Jewish communal life always has predicated affiliating with a particular physical community. That is no longer necessary. Skype allows for conversation and study – even prayer – in a community on the other side of the city or the other side of the world, from your very own home. Live feed video broadcasting can be used to attend services. You can even convert online – though immersion in a mikveh must still be done “offline.” Jewish texts and sources are more widely available: different languages, translations, interpretations and commentaries – all at the click of a button. Practice Hebrew with a native speaker, plan a vacation, apply for a Birthright trip, watch the sunset at the Western Wall, buy Dead Sea salts, find new recipes, research and explore holiday and life cycle information, read Torah portions, give tzedakah, create and explore Facebook pages for Judaism/Jewish life, follow people/places on Twitter, start and/or read all kinds of blogs, and so much more. No longer is information and learning out of reach to those outside of a community.

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At times I feel as if, instead of being in the Jewish education business, or even the God business, I am in the B’nai Mitzvah business.

I am responsible for “lifelong learning” at the congregation where I work. If something educational is happening in the synagogue involving anyone from birth to death, I have a hand in it. Given the range of ages and venues in which I work, including weekly parasha classes, the Hebrew school, youth groups, and cultural arts, it is amazing how often a child’s preparation for her Bat Mitzvah is the center of the conversation. It comes out in conversations with 7th graders who cannot wait for their journey to end and in the anxiety I hear from parents of four–year-olds, nine years before the event will take place.

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What will “Jewish” look like as today’s new media evolves into tomorrow’s new media? Learners are increasingly Gamers, Designers, and Builders (Tinkerers). New media landscapes allow learners to develop and hone their affinities, teach themselves, and mentor their virtual peers. They collaborate in problem-solving online and offline, and their design skills are increasingly important. How does the formation of identity morph as game spaces allow us, through role-play, to try on a variety of new possible selves? What do Jewish educators and leaders need to know as print shifts to digital, the role of teachers increasingly becomes that of guide, and games become a new language of learning?

In the secular world, Games for Learning are receiving a great deal of attention. This inter-disciplinary set of pursuits combines the learning sciences, media studies, design, performance studies, linguistics, and other fields. In particular, Games for STEM Learning (STEM refers to Science, Technology Engineering, and Math) have received attention from the White House and funding from MacArthur Foundation, AMD, Microsoft, and others. But Games for Learning reach beyond STEM (now, some add an “A” to STEM to make STEAM – adding “Art” to the mix). Games for Learning are being built to teach civics (Sandra Day OConnor’s iCivics.org), environmental awareness, and social entrepreneurship (GlobalKids.org and its student designers). 

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I enter this field as a technologist, not as a traditional “educator.” I am the volunteer lead developer of the Open Siddur Project, where we are building a web-based platform that will include a database of Jewish liturgical texts and related materials (such as commentaries), in addition to an application for choosing texts and compiling them into a customized, printable siddur. While the Open Siddur and similar resources have an obvious function as an online reference volume, its most important feature will be to allow its users to share their customized texts so that they may be found, reviewed, and built upon by other users. The aspects of sharing, peer review, and iterative development open up a new model of teaching and learning that is not limited by geographic boundaries or by a single institution’s limited resources. This essay intends to discuss briefly what role projects such as mine have in the larger Jewish educational ecosystem.

The Internet has long offered many resources that provide materials suitable for use in Jewish learning. However, the promise of currently emerging technologies is in the expansion of the Internet from a read-only resource (“Web 1.0”) to a read-write, participatory resource (“Web 2.0”): a multi-directional communications medium that has the potential to facilitate simultaneous interaction between teacher and student, and each student with other students. It also enables connection and communication between disparate real-world communities. 

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Last fall, something extremely unexpected happened. I was approached to lead a small religious school. As a new Director with a social work background, I was advised to sit back and learn the culture. Often times, this was difficult, and often I was criticized for taking this “hands off” approach. I assumed my post after school already was in session. During the search prior to my being hired, the school was kept afloat by lay leaders. There had been no evidence of a clear and consistent education model being utilized. The curriculum had been used as a resource by the educators, if used at all.

Programs existed without an underlying structure of what the vision of the future of the religious school looked like. Not having a formal background in education, I initially did not know how to begin creating a vision. I learned in a local young professional development leadership program that, when in doubt, look at what is working and build a support structure to complement it. This was the perfect approach for this community, who had a vocal contingent that had a hard and fast preference for what had been done and how it had been done. After all, my predecessor had been in the position for twenty years. The families in the religious school were hungry for change.

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An education director of a large supplementary school, with enrollment numbers that have been increasing consistently each year, sits down for an annual budget presentation with the congregation’s finance committee. The meeting, which last three hours, involves picking apart pieces of the school’s program, from the textbook costs to the reason why payroll costs went up slightly after the state raised the minimum wage by ten cents per hour. The education director went into the meeting feeling optimistic and prepared, with a narrative prepared with research on trends in Jewish education and plans to include Jewish educator conferences in the upcoming budget. The director left the meeting feeling frustrated and unheard.

The scene is probably familiar to many education directors at supplementary schools across the country. The annual budgeting process seems to conflict directly with the mission of the school. Educators fight for every penny of their budgets, while the finance committee attempts to keep the organizational fiscally stable, let alone keep the doors open. The challenge is deeper than matching figures to forecasts on a spreadsheet. The supplementary school, as part of a congregation, has many stakeholders. Rarely do the stakeholders come together on their visions, with each shaving different ideas about the purpose of the religious school.

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