The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Psalm 118; v.22
I have spent the better part of a quarter century picking up discarded stones and looking for ways to fit them into the mosaic of Jewish and secular education. Although this work fostering inclusive education is rewarding by itself, in recent years I have come to understand the deeper lesson of the above quote from Psalms. Namely, those “discarded stones” not only can fit into our educational structures, but should become their fundamental building blocks. Put another way, reconceiving our pedagogical philosophy to provide educational opportunities for non-traditional learners yields an approach that is best-suited for all of our students.
In this article, I’d like to provide several concrete examples of how we at MetroWest Jewish Day School in Framingham have structured our school to enhance the learning opportunities for all its students. My hope in doing this is to paint a picture of our approach to education and how that approach translates into practice.
Orientation and grouping
At MWJDS, we start with the assumption that every child can be helped to navigate a developmental path with proper pedagogical pushes along the way. As Lev Vygotsky would claim, through motivated intervention by skilled teachers, children can move through their “Zones of Proximal Development” to the next conceptual plateau.
Part of the way we implement this approach is by eschewing traditional grade levels in our core academic areas in favor of grouping by academic achievement level and learning style. We do this in math, English and Hebrew, subjects we believe are necessary for advanced STEM, humanities and Judaics pursuits. Our students and their parents come to understand that each child will be in the “just right” level for their academic development. Given how common multi-age learning is within our school, there is little stigma or ego investment in class placements. These achievement-based cohorts are balanced by more age-based cohorts in other subjects such as art, music, science and Jewish studies.
Pre-K & Kindergarten
A broad example of this flexibility in classroom assignments is our Pre-K/K cohort. We purposely combine our Pre-K (4-year-olds) with our Kindergarten, but we differentiate the academic work given to those students. If we happen to have a mathematically precocious 4-year-old, we can place her in the Kindergarten math class (or even first grade), but still maintain most of her socialization time with age-matched peers. For parents who are contemplating whether their child needs another year of Pre-K or is ready for Kindergarten, this arrangement is helpful and allays many of their concerns.
Task Sheets and Enrichment
There are many strategies experienced teachers use to provide an individualized approach to education. One of our middle school teachers, Avraham Wachs-Cashman, has for years utilized “task sheets” which help reach the goals of both individualization and independence. The system is deceptively simple: Each student receives a separate individualized task sheet with different assignments specifically targeting skills they are working on. The task sheet includes instructions, a supplies list, and a small calendar where students mark when they worked on an assignment. The decision of when they work on which assignment is given over to the students, who are not obligated to complete the assignments in a given time, but only when they do so and can show mastery are they allowed to move on. The approach also allows for a significant increase in one-on-one teacher time with each student, and helps to grow a student’s ability to organize, problem solve, and take ownership of their learning.
An argument often targeted at individualized education is that the approach works well for students with academic challenge, but can divert resources from students with more advanced skills. This is not the case at our school; individualized instruction benefits everyone at MWJDS. As an example, three of our strong, highly motivated math learners (one sixth grader, one seventh grader and one eighth grader) each started out the school year working individually, with significant one-to-one instruction by our talented math teacher, Dr. Francene Sokol. Not surprisingly, they progressed very quickly through Algebra I. By February, they were all ready for High School Geometry, but this is where the story took an interesting turn. In order to facilitate/accelerate their progress, the students self-organized a math group, utilizing our end-of-the-day “O-block” (which is a short school-wide block devoted to building organization skills) to join together collaboratively as a hevruta group. These students propel each other and work hard to stay synchronized despite spending most of their time in different classrooms. Remarkably, last week two of them asked to skip their snack/recess period to continue to work on math. In all likelihood they will each complete geometry this term, and may possibly even begin Algebra 2. With less constrained curricular assumptions, the sky’s the limit with how far their learning may take them.
Educational Technology
These days differentiation and individualization of academic content is greatly enhanced by educational technology, a burgeoning field that goes far beyond blended learning. Among other applications, educational software allows students multiple means of input and output, capitalizing on a student’s modality strengths, and compensating when needed for a student’s vulnerabilities. We have been very fortunate at MWJDS to have Karen Janowski, a leading expert in the field of educational technology, consulting to our school. Karen originally came to us through the generous support of a family in our school, but once their students graduated, we were able to maintain Karen’s services through a targeted grant from a Boston-based philanthropic foundation.
Karen provides many technological solutions to our students, but equally importantly consults with our teachers on ways to even the playing field. For example, read aloud technologies (text-to-speech), enable students to listen to the content and follow along in the text, promoting visual tracking and enhancing decoding, fluency and reading comprehension. But what about the student who doesn’t want to appear to be taking in reading material in a way that is different from his peers? One solution suggested by Karen was Newsela, a computer program that enables two students on different reading levels to access the same educational content. These are just a couple of examples of ways in which educational technology helps us individualize pedagogy and content for all our students.
Tefillah
Individualization of education in Jewish day schools must of course also include Jewish studies and Jewish praxis, especially prayer. As the Mishnah teaches, “do not let your prayer become fixed,” and so at MWJDS we have constructed a tefillah curriculum that teaches core content and skills, but also provides individual choice 1-2 times per week to allow students multiple opportunities for spiritual expression.
Some of the recent offerings have included Tefillah Drum Circles, Bar/Bat-Mitzvah Workshop, Meditative Tefillah, Spirituality and Stories, Tefillah in Motion, 3D Tefillah Creative Arts, Questions about God, and Issues of Evil in Purim and Passover, to name a few. As with other areas of our curriculum, greater choice is given to older students at our school, although with the younger students we still provide many modalities for prayer to keep up interest and engagement.
Leadership
One of the most extraordinary experiences I have had in my years at MWJDS is co-developing and co-teaching a class with our Hebrew coordinator, Einat Efroni, that we term Leadership. The class is for our oldest students, and is really more about identity formation than leadership per se. The class is designed to give students basic tools to elevate their capacities in communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution and general task completion. It exposes them to new perspectives, challenging them to go beyond what they typically see as limitations or obstacles to accomplish their vision and goals. In the process, the students learn about themselves on a deep level including understanding their personal gifts and qualities.
The Leadership class builds skills in highly specific ways through experiential exercises, written reflections on models of leadership, and specific projects within the community. Though designed to enhance self-reflection and identity formation, the class also requires students to interact in meaningful ways with one another to create an environment of cooperative learning. For example, one of the assignments we give towards the end of the year is writing a detailed letter of recommendation for another student, which of course requires them to know one another very well. In many ways, the leadership class is a capstone for our entire individualized approach.
We’ve taught this class for two years now, having begun it in response to the requests of our rising 8th graders at the time, who were looking for more opportunities for leadership within the school. Another reason for initiating the class was to ensure that our individualized education model met the goal of preparing students for the next stage of their educational careers. Over the years many people have questioned how students who come out of such a small school will be able to cope with the larger programs that await them. We have always claimed (deservedly I believe) that our students are better prepared in many ways because of how well they know themselves and what they need to thrive academically and interpersonally. Their capacity for self-advocacy not only prevents them from slipping through the cracks in larger schools, but helps them emerge as leaders in those settings.
Financial Model and Slifka Initiative
MWJDS’ individualized education is expensive, much more so than traditional classroom models. This is in large part due to our purposely small class size and resulting teacher-student ratios, which are enviable but hard to maintain financially. In addition, like most day schools, affordability is an issue for many of our families, and so like many Heads of School, I am always seeking alternative funding models for our program.
Over the years we have received various grants and private donations to support our educational model. Last year we were especially gratified when we were named the initial site for an award through the Alfred and Gilda Slifka Family Day School Inclusion Initiative. This first-of-its-kind opportunity was granted to MWJDS in recognition of its success in providing a wide range of students with an inclusive, yet individualized education. The grant provides ten years of funding to offset especially the costs of supporting students with significant learning challenges. It also provides funds for additional professional development for our teachers to enhance their skills in differentiation and individualization.
Conclusions
Individualizing education for every learner in our schools is not easy. It requires an intimate understanding of the children in our charge, and also requires significant creativity and resources. But what individualized education may lack in ease or efficiency, it gains in the rewards it brings students and teachers alike. When successful, the result is truly God’s handiwork, and marvelous in our eyes.
This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. Psalm 118; v.23