"This is Your Brain on Summer"

An article in the NY Times today addresses the major problem of what happens to learning over the summer (i.e. it disappears, or rather, gets backtracked).  The title of the article is 'This is Your Brain on Summer," and it specifically challenges the notion of a 9- or 10-month school year and 2-3 months of nothing but fun and R&R.  While I love the idea that kids need a couple months a year to re-group (as do teachers!), I also recognize as an educator that summer break significantly (and detrimentally) impacts student learning and achievement.  I call this phenomenon, "This is your (Jewish) Brain on Summer." In Religious School, the learning drop is particularly significant with Hebrew.  We spend the school-year trying to help all our kids reach a certain baseline knowledge of Hebrew (or rather, we help them learn to 'decode' Hebrew, to sound out words by identifying letter and vowel combinations).  It's an educational challenge all year long, but by the end of the year, we do see significant improvement.  Most of our kids feel reasonably comfortable with Hebrew decoding by May.  However, we then go on break for the summer, and when they come back in September (almost 4 months later!), many kids have lost much - if not all- of what they learned the previous year.  One of the main reasons for this is that a large percentage of our kids do not see or encounter Hebrew at all over the summer.  If they do not attend services, go to a Jewish summer camp, visit Israel, or have Hebrew books at home, then they are in a Hebrew-poor environment (i.e. one that lacks any connection to Hebrew).  It's parallel to the kids from less affluent backgrounds described in the NY Times article, who spend their summers in environments without a lot of academic / reading enrichment.  For our kids, without an environment over the summer that supports ongoing Hebrew or Jewish learning, they backpedal significantly.  I'm not sure how to address this problem, but I do think it's something to consider when we take a look at our goals for Hebrew education and what's reasonable to accomplish in a supplementary educational setting!

What makes a good teacher?

I'm finally back!  I planned to re-start a blog last year, but then never got around to it.  So, here we go again, hopefully with more success this time... :)

A significant component of my role as Director of Education at Temple Isaiah is to spend time thinking about what makes a good teacher.  How can we find, train, and keep outstanding teachers in our program?  I like to say that there are three key things I look for when I'm hiring someone to teach in our community:

• Jewish background & commitment - Does this person have a strong Jewish / Jewish educational background?  Does this person have a strong Jewish knowledge base?  Does this person live a committed Jewish life?  How does this person express his/her Jewish identity? 
• Pedagogical skills - How will this person deal with classroom management?  How does this person plan lessons and implement them?  How might this person create differentiated instruction so that it meets the needs of all our children?
• Personality - Is this person a mentsch?  Is s/he loving, kind, fun, energetic, engaging, and warm-hearted?  Will our parents and kids love this person?

Of course, there are all kinds of other things I look for, but these are the basics, and I have to say that it's incredibly challenging to find Religious School teachers who are strong in all three categories.  It's more common to find people who are strong in two of these three areas and significantly weaker in one of them (the area of weakness varies from person to person).  So then the question for me is... can I help this person improve in the areas where s/he may be weak?  Or connect the teacher to resources or mentors who will help him or her grow?  Sometimes the answer is 'yes' and sometimes the answer is 'no.'

The question of what makes a good teacher is a hot topic in the world of (secular) education right now.  What kinds of programs train people to be the best teachers they can be?  What skills do people need to learn / develop to be outstanding teachers?  Can educational schools really provide those skills, or are the ed schools themselves falling short?  There's a movement underfoot to make significant changes in the way that teachers are trained, and an interesting article in the NY Times this week examined some of the new teacher training programs.  I'm always curious to find out what's happening in the broader world of education so that we can adapt from best practices to make our teaching staff as strong as it can be. I wonder how professional development at Temple Isaiah can give our teachers the skills they need to do their best in our setting, which is admittedly different (and with different goals) than a public school setting...

Do any of you have thoughts on what makes a good teacher for your children?  What kind of Religious School teacher do you want for your children?