The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah’s religious school is implementing a new vision where students will go through their school day in four different physical spaces. The spaces will correspond with the themes: Israel — past, present and future; a Jewish home — featuring Judaica from the Michael Klein Collection; a mitzvot workshop for learning, planning, practicing and doing mitzvot; learning from Torah and Judaism’s greatest thought leaders.
This new programming is starting with Sunday morning classes for students in pre-K through sixth grade, with hopes of expanding it gradually to classes for other grades.
This new experiential and immersive learning approach is called Yalla! It’s an Arabic word that means “Let’s go!” and is commonly used in Israel and other Middle Eastern countries.
Using the name for the new learning program reflects its organizers’ enthusiasm for bringing several years of planning to fruition, said Dayna Gershon, B’nai Jehudah’s director of formal and informal education.
That planning started in 2016 when Tamara Lawson Schuster led a new task force to explore ways to “reimagine our religious school,” Gershon said. The task force participated in a community of practice through the Union of Reform Judaism. B’nai Jehudah was one of 16 participating congregations.
The task force comprised B’nai Jehudah parents, a teacher and a variety of other community members with an investment in the religious school. It included a family who had participated in the Machane Jehudah program, a two-week summer camp and family program that is one of the religious school’s options for students in second through fifth grades.
Through the task force’s work, “we created a vision for the future of our religious school,” Gershon said. During the task force’s two-year effort, B’nai Jehudah made incremental changes to its religious school program, experimenting with different techniques and teacher training.
“We did this to see what works and fits in our community, what’s going to propel our school into the modern age to what our goals and intentions are for our religious school,” she said.
During renovation of B’nai Jehudah’s building to accommodate the new teaching method, the religious school conducted classes at Kehilath Israel Synagogue for about a year. Gershon said the time at Kehilath Israel “was a great way to model and demonstrate what we wanted to do when we moved back into our building.”
They moved back in late 2019 but the pandemic soon hit, and they had to put development of the new program on hold.
Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff supported the vision for Yalla! He retired in 2020. Rabbi Stephanie Kramer, B’nai Jehudah’s new senior rabbi, also supported the vision.
The school’s education team helped Gershon bring the task force’s results to fruition. The team comprises Rabbi Sarah Smiley; Rabbi Josh Leighton; Assistant Director of Education Emily Williams; Abby Magariel, educator-curator for the Klein Collection at B’nai Jehudah; and Gershon.
Gerson said the pandemic helped persuade her and the others working on Yalla! to acknowledge that “the way our kids are learning is changing,” and their social and emotional needs were also changing. The staff responded by trying to “meet students where they are to bring them into Judaism and give them experiences that will stick with them.”
“My biggest frustration with how we do religious schools is I think it’s really hard to sit in a classroom and talk about Shabbat and expect a kid to grow up and want to celebrate Shabbat,” she said. “It’s completely disconnected to the actual experience of Shabbat. We want to experience our Judaism together, as a community.”
Class time is restructured to give morning processing time to prepare for the day’s studies, “so they can name it and walk out the door with it,” Gershon said.
The thinking behind the new program is based on an educational philosophy called KDBB, which stands for knowing, doing, believing and belonging, Gershon said. The four immersive spaces embody KDBB.
Reva Friedman has put much thought into education for the past 44 years. She is an associate professor in curriculum and teaching at the University of Kansas, a member of B’nai Jehudah and an Overland Park resident.
She described her role with Yalla! as the “designated volunteer this year to provide formative input” on the program, which aims to produce “a committed, literate Jewish citizenry.”
“They wrote about three different kinds of outcomes: heads, hearts and hands,” Friedman said. This fosters students’ cognitive growth and learning about themselves, their attitudes and “where they fit in.”
“Kids learn by doing,” Friedman said. “It’s the joy of discovery that often withers in religious curriculum. Dayna’s taking a bold move…The seeds are in our students, and we need to provide the right environment so they will flower.”
Friedman has used experiential work in education using simulations, games and role playing for students. This immersive learning is very powerful, she said.
Teachers sometimes feel resistant to switch methods when their approaches have worked well.
“To say, ‘We’d like you to build on it’ — sometimes it takes them a while to see that the building on it needs to happen,” Friedman said. “Religious education tends to be less experiential, more talking at kids. This is a different way of thinking.”
When the teachers received orientation for the program, Rabbi Josh Leighton asked, “Where is the front of the room?” Friedman said, “Everywhere.”
“It’s not a hierarchy,” she said. “The teacher arranges the environment in a way that provokes children’s natural, innate sense of curiosity and creativity and provokes their original thinking.”
The approach involves teachers asking open-ended questions, partnering with kids, stepping back and using a teaching technique called guided discovery.
“It will enhance kids’ learning because they’re doing something that, as far as I know, no other congregation is doing,” Friedman said. “You’re teaching their minds and their hearts.”
By Jerry LaMartina,
Contributing Writer
