Temple collaboration sparks new approach to religious school

With “Midrash Manicures” among their new course offerings, a few Conservative religious schools are hoping to counter student apathy and stem the tide of declining enrollment. The class is part of a new approach developed by the Jewish Learning Community Network (JLCN), a partnership of three Conservative synagogues — Adat Ari El, Shomrei Torah Synagogue (STS) and Temple Beth Am — which recently completed the first year of its new curriculum for kindergarten through seventh grade. 

The network began after Adrianne Pasternak, then director of education at STS in West Hills, became one of 12 recipients of the 2014 PresenTenseLA’s Social Entrepreneur Fellowship from The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. The program provides mentors and resources supporting innovative Jewish ventures in education, social action, environment, philanthropy and the arts.

Although many Conservative synagogues were reforming their religious schools, Pasternak’s vision was different: She proposed working as a collaborative team with other synagogue educators. She reached out to two colleagues whose work she respected — Johannah Sohn (at the time, director of the Jewish Learning Community at Adat Ari El) and Rabbi Yechiel Hoffman (director of youth learning and engagement at Temple Beth Am). She asked them to join her in reinventing the traditional religious school model. Their objective was to create a community that was larger than just one synagogue and to move away from passive learning through books by immersing students in the experience of Judaism. 

“When kids come at 4 o’clock after a full day of school and they are expected to learn about Judaism and a second language — that really they have no connection to — you are setting them up for failure,” said Pasternak, who is now director of the Jewish  Learning Community at STS. “Our goal is to provide more real-time learning and less classroom learning. One day, I put a bunch of teens in my car and went to the shivah for a religious school teacher’s father. You can learn some things in the classroom, but it’s not the same as experiencing it. … Judaism is all experience and ritual.”

At the core of the network is an experiential, ability-level-based Hebrew language curriculum that is taught through a series of hands-on cooperative games and puzzles. Before students can move to the next level, they have to create a game that teaches someone else what they’ve learned. This gives teachers an easy way to assess a student’s understanding of the material, and it supports JLCN’s goal of creating a community where kids understand that everyone has something to teach others and something to learn from others. 

“We are active, and it’s easy to pay attention when you are doing something that is fun — like learning a parasha by drawing on canvas or making a play and pretending to be God or Jacob,” student Eliana Sarrow said of her religious school at STS.

Students in mixed-age groups also engage in cooperative Jewish Learning Lab electives. Teachers and volunteers staff an assortment of classes — including cooking, building with Legos, dancing and art — that teach Jewish life, ritual and Torah in “out of the box” ways. When studying midrash or a parasha, students manicure their nails with images of biblical narratives by using nail-art decals and various nail polish colors. Another popular lab involves students studying Jewish proverbs, then breaking up into small groups and using their interpretations to create a claymation movie, which is later shown to the congregation. 

Pasternak created a fifth-grade curriculum for teaching lifecycle events that follows stuffed bears through life — starting with a baby shower, birth, bar and bat mitzvahs, and ending with marriage. The students first study the traditional rituals and then participate in creative activities. For example, when learning about the ketubah, they are taught calligraphy by a volunteer artist. They also write about how they should treat and take care of themselves, and how they hope to be treated when they marry. The students make up stories about how the bears met, sew wedding dresses for them and build a chuppah. 

The original mandate of the JLCN was that each of the three sites would follow the same curriculum and then come together as a network for retreats and Sunday programming. After reviewing research, tapping into personal experiences and offering adult workshops at their synagogues, the educators determined that two of the most important factors in creating positive Jewish identity were Jewish camps and youth groups. “Consequently, this year, JLCN incorporated two weekend retreats at Camp Ramah in Ojai and five Sundays at American Jewish University’s Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley,” said Sohn, who is now head of school at Adat Ari El. 

This first year of the JLCN involved some trial and error. The educators had to figure out how to merge their individual talents of creativity, organization and spirituality into the combination that worked best together. And the religious schools were not all on the same schedule — two met twice a week and one met once a week — which complicated the planning. “Next year, the learning labs will be based on grade level, in response to parents’ comments that their children didn’t form strong bonds with their peers because there were too many activities in the multiage groups,” Pasternak said.

There were other issues, too. “It was challenging for students from Beth Am to travel for many hours on a bus for a day of camp activities in Simi Valley while for the others, it was just a short car ride. There will be fewer camp days next year in order to add some local excursions, including a tour of local Jewish historical sites, kayaking and community service, such as volunteering at Heal the Bay and food banks,” Sohn said. 

The educators also will incorporate some flexibility into the previously uniform curriculum so they can adapt it to the needs of their own school’s students. “This past year was much more successful than anything else, but it would be irresponsible not to make changes where we needed to change,” Pasternak said.  

The JLCN is thinking big, and the educators plan to continue honing their religious school model so more synagogues can adopt it in the future.

“The puzzle is finding a way to connect the students personally and to make sure that they want to be there,” Sohn said. “We aren’t competing with other religious schools. We are competing with every other aspect of the student’s life. We have to be much more engaging and important, otherwise they are going to go to karate instead.”