Preparing Jewish Educators: The Research We Have, the Research We Need

Abstract

This article discusses the research we have and the research we need in both general and Jewish teacher education. First, I discuss three recent efforts to synthesize and assess existing research in teacher education and to identify needed research. Next I review a handful of recent studies in Jewish teacher education which illustrate various research genres and provide a taste of what more coordinated studies could generate in the way of usable knowledge. I conclude by proposing three programs of research on the education of Jewish educators.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Gail Dorph for her insightful comments on an earlier draft and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.

Notes

¹ Some programs like DeLeT and the Pardes Educators Program have persisted for more than a decade, Others, like the Jewish Teacher Corps and Ha’sha’ar, were short lived. The only other time such interest in preparing teachers for Jewish schools surfaced in the American Jewish community was the early 20th century when the emergence of communal Talmud Torahs led to the establishment of the Hebrew teachers colleges. See Feiman-Nemser (2011) for a discussion of how these two developments in Jewish teacher education relate to broader developments in teaching and teacher education.

² There are 3.3 million teachers in U.S. public schools. There are 1,200 colleges or schools of education that still prepare the majority of teachers, but the number of alternate route programs sponsored by various for-profit and not-for-profit organizations has grown tremendously in the past 20 years. Teacher education programs are regulated by professional and state accrediting bodies.

³ In l984, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) created a new division called “Teaching and Teacher Education.” Today Division K is the largest division in the association.

⁴ For handbooks on research in teacher education, see Cochran-Smith, Feiman-Nemser, and McIntyre (2008); Cochran-Smith and Zeichner (2005); Houston (1990); (1996); Sikula, Buttery, and Guyton (1996).

⁵ For reviews of research in teacher education in handbooks of research on teaching, see Lanier and Little (1986) and Richardson and Placier (2001). A new edition of the Handbook of Research on Teaching will be published in 2015 with a substantial chapter on research in teacher education.

⁶ See, for example, Darling-Hammond and Bransford (2005), the National Research Council (2010), and Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy (2001).

⁷ My own research helped frame teacher education as a learning problem and continues to plow this furrow. See Feiman-Nemser (2012).

⁸ This national debate has influenced policy decisions in Jewish teacher education where a deregulated and decentralized approach to teacher education prevails and the marketplace determines who gets to teach.

⁹ For a discussion of these agendas, see Cochran-Smith and Fries (2005). While condensed programs like Teach for America (TFA) may attract academically talented candidates, I question the wisdom of assigning the least prepared teachers to teach the most neglected students. In the world of Jewish philanthropy, TFA has cachet and some funders have been interested in creating fast-track programs for day school teachers. Ironically, many day schools are reluctant to hire even well-trained novices, so why would they be open to hiring people with minimal preparation?

¹⁰ In their chapter, Borko et al. (2008) discuss the purposes, intellectual roots, and central features of each genre, describe a study that exemplifies its key features, and analyze the genre’s contributions and limitations.

¹¹ To learn more about these projects, go to the Mandel Center website at (http://www.brandeis.edu/mandel).

¹² I scanned the tables of content in the Journal of Jewish Education since 1970 and did not find a single empirical study of Jewish teacher education before 2000.

¹³ Initially supported by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation, the survey is currently supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation.

¹⁴ DeLeT is a 13-month, post-BA program that prepares general and/or Jewish studies teachers for the elementary grades in Jewish day schools. The program consists of two summers of study and a yearlong, mentored internship in a partner day school.

¹⁵ Some survey items were developed for this purpose; others were inspired by and borrowed from various sources—including UCLA’s Center X, the Pathways to Teaching Study in New York City, the National School and Staffing Survey; previous surveys of teachers in Jewish schools (e.g., Gamoran, Goldring, Robinson, Tammivaara, & Goodman, 1998; Ben-Avie & Kress, 2008), and a survey by Bethamie Horowitz on teacher identity.

¹⁶ The survey of alumni from JNTP will include both new teachers served and their mentors.

¹⁷ I was struck by the usage of the term “graduate school” by both Ingall and the teachers, a term which implies an academic rather than a professional paradigm. No one would call medical school or law school “graduate school.” Perhaps “graduate school” carries more prestige, as Eran Tamir pointed out to me, or perhaps it reflects the absence of a professional orientation in some masters programs in Jewish education.

¹⁸ Besides the DeLeT program at Brandeis, the study examined the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) program at the University of Notre Dame and the Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP) at the University of Chicago along with 10 graduates from each program.

¹⁹ DeLeT students spend four days a week in a local day school classroom for an entire school year (September through June).

²⁰ The Teacher Induction Partnership was mainly funded by the Mandel Foundation with partial support from the Covenant Foundation. It unfolded in two phases: an initial phase of working with five local day schools and a second phase of working with three distant day schools. In the second phase we renamed the project, the Teacher Learning Project, to signal the fact that making day schools good places for new teachers makes them good places for all teachers to teach and learn.

²¹ The elements of comprehensive induction include committed school leadership; information-rich hiring; summer preparation and orientation to school policies; complete curricula; opportunities to learn with and from colleagues; and ongoing assessment of practice and a transparent rehiring process. These elements are bolstered by a set of assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning to teach and the power of professional cultures to promote or inhibit teacher development. For a discussion of these elements and the guiding ideas, see Birkeland and Feiman-Nemser (2012).

²² We developed and piloted the toolkit by working with three distant day schools in order to learn about the combination of online and on-site support that school leaders needed to create a supportive culture and structures for teacher learning. The toolkit is available at (http://www.teacherlearningproject.com).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharon Feiman-Nemser

Sharon Feiman-Nemser is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Professor of Jewish Education and the founding Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University. E-mail: [email protected]