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Some 80 percent of Jewish day school students in the United States come from the Orthodox sector, but the research on the meaning and impact of Jewish education, even day school education itself, focuses primarily (though not exclusively) on people and institutions that are not a part of it. But new research at Yeshiva University’s Azrieli School of Jewish Education is changing the picture.

Rabbi Aaron Ross tells of a special seventh grade PBL Torah project. Student groups of his class at Yavneh Academy researched the laws of Kashrut and presented them to peer class groups at Denver Christian Academy.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) is pleased to announce the first annual Jewish Education and Technology (JET) Institute. A week-long conference (Aug 5 – Aug 9, 2013) for Jewish day school educators held at the CJM in San Francisco, JET supports Jewish day school teachers to leverage technology to create more dynamic, effective, and relevant learning environments.

Hannah Katsman, Israeli social blogger, in honor of Israel’s 65th anniversary, asked immigrant parents to share their experiences — whether exasperating or inspiring — about raising children in our wonderful country. Here is the list.

The writers recount some of the findings of the first evaluation report on the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s Nadiv Initiative, an experiment designed to create new connections between Jewish camps and schools, leveraging unique professional knowledge and best practices for the benefit of both which was conducted by BTW informing change.

We just completed two blended online learning courses in which we trained 30 education directors of Jewish complementary schools in the US and Mexico to create online Communities of Practice for their teachers and other members of the school community. The results of these two web courses demonstrate that flipping the classroom methods can be used to improve the professional practices of school administrators and instructional leaders in the delivery of staff development to their teachers.

The Yad VaShem International Holocaust Research Institute has launched the Hebrew online edition of the Ghetto Encyclopedia, containing over 1,100 entries, encompassing the history of all Jewish ghettos across Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII. The English edition of the encyclopedia, written by Prof. Gai Miron and Shlomit Shulhani of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, was published in October 2009 and was later translated into Hebrew.

This paper is based on findings of a study of the changes in Talmud instruction in high-school level yeshivot and ulpanot (religious schools for boys and girls, respectively) in Israel. The research question was: How do Talmud teachers perceive the changes that the subject has been undergoing in institutes that combine both Jewish studies with general and scientific studies.

Using portraiture, this study describes and analyzes the aims of rabbinic teaching of adults in a synagogue setting. The findings suggest that regularly facilitating learners' intellectual and religious development, democratically guiding their communities' evolution through an emphasis on learning, and collaboratively joining their congregants in shaping the construction of personal and communal Jewish narratives are central aims of congregational rabbinic teaching of adults.

The Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) has unveiled key findings from a survey and in-depth interviews mapping current, potential, and desired services available to children with emotional, intellectual, and physical disabilities at nonprofit Jewish overnight camps across North America. It found that while the field is making progress in the types and amounts of services offered, there is still more to be done.

In this article, Sharon Avni argues that educators need to understand the construct of belongingness and how it is enacted in the practice of Jewish education. She then presents an extended analysis of a 7th grade Bible lesson to show how linguistic features “enact the social construct of communal identification.” She views the teaching of Bible as a social activity, and analyzes how a teacher's discourse in the classroom creates a sense of belongingness among her students.