The Aaron A. Gold Scholars:

A Reflection on a Long-Term Professional Development Partnership that focused on a Meaning-Centered Prayer Curriculum for Jewish Supplementary Schools

by Dr. Bonnie Botel-Sheppard, Rabbi Marc Margolius, Mrs. Helene Tigay, Rabbi Phil Warmflash, Dr. Cathy Cohen, Ms. Deborah Baer Mozes, Mr. Rob Russock & Mrs. Randen Seitchick

Overview/Update:

Since l996, the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Literacy Network, the Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education (ACAJE), the Gold Family Foundation and approximately 80-l00 educators (20-30 school directors and teachers per year) formed a partnership to improve the teaching and learning of prayer: The Aaron A. Gold Scholars Program. One of the purposes of the year-long professional development course(s) was to investigate and adapt “best practices” from secular schools to infuse a thematic, meaning-centered approach to the teaching and learning of prayer.

At the beginning of the program, the major focus was on literacy-based learning experiences to enhance the prayer curriculum, but as the last two years of the program took shape, our team included more drama, writing, art and music strategies to enhance the core learning experiences for students in the participating teachers’ classrooms.

The purpose of this retrospective article is to hear from some of the program’s key players and to learn from them about the impact of this program : the ACAJE executive director, two of our faculty members, our Rabbinic faculty, a school director and a teacher.

Mrs. Helene Tigay, Executive Director of Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education in Melrose Park, PA:

The Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s “Penn Literacy Network” program. The purpose of our partnership was to create an intensive training program for Jewish educators (teams of educational directors and teachers). The best practices in secular education were integrated into Jewish subject matter, (in our case, Tefillah/prayer) in order to create meaning-centered approaches to teaching. This model enabled the participants to grapple with Tefillah in an attempt to find personal meaning. It has energized teams of educational directors and their teachers, and has become a model for teaching students. Many of our schools have taken this approach to prayer and generalized it to their entire school curriculum, energizing their entire school.

This 30 hour course has worked because of its creative approach to learning, and its ongoing and intensive nature. Between sessions our educators were asked to try out the new approaches in their classrooms and to reflect on these efforts with the group. Additionally, the intensity and the ongoing nature of the sessions was important because it gave the participants opportunities for self discovery and personal development in the context of a regularly recurring, safe setting. The combination of all of these factors set the stage for significant change in the educators who participated in this program and their schools.

The Role of the Arts: Deborah Baer Mozes (drama facilitator) and Cathy Cohen (writing and art facilitator) share some applications of PLN’s work in synagogues:

Deborah:

As a theatre artist I have always found this saying to be the perfect description of our craft: “You don’t know a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.” (A Native American saying.) We devote our work to walking in the moccasins, sandals or boots of the character to be portrayed—to walk in and inhabit the text. Prayer comes alive when we walk in the text; when we weave our bodies and our stories through the text. We can breathe life into our texts and prayers through creative movement, bibliodrama and improvisation creating a meaningful relationship with the text itself.

Picture this scene: a sunny, tiny room. Moms and dads and their 7 & 8 year old children are attending a prayer service (minyan). The parents are in a circle facing outward and their children are encircling them, turning inward. Each child stands in front of his parent, looking deeply into each other’s eyes. The school director slowly reads the prayer. As we come to key words such as love, command, hearts, etc., each parent (having been instructed to do so) embodies that word—shaping themselves or creating a gesture to symbolize the chanted word. The child mirrors the image back to his parent. It was so moving and powerful to see this prayer come to life—to see the beautiful and poignant movements passing from parent to child and from child to parent.

Cathy:

I had worked for 10 years in secular schools as a poet-in-residence. Association with the Aaron A.Gold Scholars program expanded my focus to include Jewish poetry and prayer, and opened up a new career and passion for me. After taking course work and building up a library of Jewish poetry (still building) , I teach as a poet-in -residence in local synagogues and community centers, including teacher training as part of the work.

For three years I have focused on creating lessons that link prayer and children's personal responses through poetry in elementary through high school classes, adult education classes, and family poetry workshops. Students have developed their own poetic voices, explored spiritual and political issues, and felt proud of their work. We even have hopes of developing an Internet poetry newsletter at our own synagogue next year.

Reading and writing poetry has been particularly well suited to a meaning-centered approach to Jewish prayer. One approach that the participating educators implemented included poetry writing as creative midrash: a personal exploration and response to prayers. The act of writing produced a creative personal response to prayer. Students and families have read and discussed traditional prayers with a focus on meaning, then they became actively engaged as they wrote their own poems or prayers.

Rob Russock, Director of Keneseth Israel’s school in Elkins Park, PA submitted this on behalf of some of his participating teachers:

Penn Literacy Network has given us the tools to allow our students to contribute their rhythms and insights to prayer. Their ability to write poetry based on their feelings about the Aleinu or the Amidah, for instance, awakens an interest that was not there before and thereby deepens their connection to Judaism. Being invited to be a part of PLN’s educational program enhanced our ability to guide KI’s students through a personalized exploration of their Jewish community. The result: our students feel more energized in the classroom and are looking forward to this coming September’s program. PLN is a life-changing exploration that no educator should miss.

Randen E. Seitchick, 4^th grade teacher at Ohev Shalom, Bucks County, PA during the course (and currently the board president of Beth El ‘s school in Yardley, PA) reflects on her experiences in this program:

I often dreaded the challenge of teaching prayer to my students. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the text. I was uncomfortable with the text. I was taught prayer by repetition. In my traditional background, prayers were mostly in Hebrew. Whether the prayers were in Hebrew, or even English, I doubt I would have had the ability to comprehend their meaning from the prayer book interpretation alone.

My inability as a child to connect the prayers to personal meaning made my job as an educator difficult. I wanted prayer to touch the heart and soul of my students and me.

It is hard to imagine that the tools I needed to make a meaningful text connection were found in the Penn Literacy Network course. I remember in graduate school, a professor telling us that the best way to learn about anything is to teach it. The truth of this statement became evident to me as I applied the tools and methods given to us to open up the text and inspire our students to make personal connections. I too was making personal text connections.

The Penn Literacy Network magic extended beyond my personal experience and changed the dynamics of my class. A kehillah emerged from twenty very unique individuals at the end of my final project. During the project I left my role as the “sage on the stage” and became the facilitator of twenty teachers. When we studied the prayer Sim Shalom (Grant Us Peace), students explored their personal obligation to obtain peace in their world.

We moved from holding hands in the beginning of our study to discuss what we knew about achieving peace to teaching one another midrashim to gain insight into what we did not know about achieving peace. Students ascended to the artistic level by working with one another to transform their handprints into symbols of peace. Together as a class we learned the prayer Sim Shalom but we learned much more. We learned of our personal responsibility to achieve peace in our personal lives.

The Aaron A. Gold Scholars Approach as described by one of the program’s original developers and instructors: Rabbi Marc Margolius from Beth Am Israel in Penn Valley, PA:

The theory of teaching and learning that has been at the core of this program rests on the following: assumption: the meaning of text lies both in the text itself and in the readers’ interpretation of the text. The active processes of learning involve a productive transaction between readers and text to create a richer, more textured interpretation, where readers have greater ownership of the text itself.

In the Aaron A. Gold Scholars program, we examined Jewish prayer as an attempt to express the ineffable: not through theological abstractions, but through the structured recollection and interpretation of primary communal and personal experience. This involved studying different genres of Jewish literature as describing and interpreting universal human experience. We operated on the premise that individuals can more easily locate meaning in fixed prayer if they understand the experience underlying it and can relate it to their own personal experience—that is, if the “pray-er” is able to transact with the prayer text.

We examined different types of Jewish literature, describing and “unpacking” the experience described by the prayers: the primary text, the literary narrative (midrashic embellishments of the primary text), dramatic expression, poetry writing, decoding investigations and song. By relating prayer to the narrative from which it derives, participants could more easily understand and relate to the experience which it intended to recall.

Final comments and a peak into the future:

The Aaron A. Gold Scholars program has provided a comprehensive and successful model for university partnerships that link schools, foundations and local agencies with the goal of enriching the lives of our children and our communities. The program is now moving into an alumni and intensive school program in order to support directors and teachers who are still implementing the meaning-centered approaches across the curriculum. In addition, other foundations have contacted PLN in order to explore the possibility of funding similar university-linked partnerships in other states.

As we stated in our initial article, “we live in a society that depends on ‘quick fixes’, where people are time-deprived and unable to be reflective about their lives and practices. This professional development opportunity gave us a very important gift: time to think and talk deeply as we explored our teaching approaches in the context of a supportive collegial community.”

For more information about Penn Literacy Network and/or The Aaron A. Gold Scholars program, email us at: pln_@gse.upenn.edu