Developing Jewish Habits of Mind

By Stephanie Fine Maroun

At Schechter, we develop Jewish habits of mind in our students. This sounds like—and is—a worthy and unique way of thinking and working, but what does this mean exactly and why is it important?

The core concept of learning in hevruta (“partnership”) refers to partnership among two people and a Jewish text, each being an equal contributor. From classroom to classroom, one subject area to the next, Schechter teachers turn to and develop this method among their students. Students practice offering opinions in a meaningful way, listening openly even if they disagree, and remaining active thought partners by sharing and respecting others’ perspectives. We recognize hevruta learning as a dynamic paradigm that is broadly and beautifully applicable to virtually any academic discipline and, beyond that, to real-life situations.

Two seventh-graders wrestle with conflicting interpretations of a Jewish text in front of them. Two fourth-graders turn and talk to each other. They listen and respond with, “I hear what you are saying, ” or “I think I heard you say this…” or “Can you explain that differently?” Kindergartners puzzle through arranging brightly colored plastic blocks into mathematical patterns. Each of these scenes reflects hevruta partnerships and is deeply Jewish in approach. With the guidance of teachers and mutual support of classmates, students hone strong, portable interpersonal skills by learning to ask questions and leaving space for constructive dialogue.

One day, our alumni will turn to their own students or colleagues or teammates and say, “OK, folks, let’s break into hevruta now.” Can you imagine that? We can.

The environment of a Jewish day school is uniquely positioned to support such sophisticated practices in the classroom.

In 2018, Schechter was one of four day schools nationwide chosen to participate in Pedagogy of Partnership (PoP), a groundbreaking two-year professional development fellowship through a grant from the AVI CHAI, Kohelet and Mayberg Foundations. Through PoP, participating faculty members received intense, comprehensive training designed to enable learners of all ages to develop the habits of wonder, empathy and responsibility toward others and toward Torah. Since that time, Schechter faculty members across all grades and disciplines, Jewish and secular, have incorporated these principles into their teaching and practice. Teachers cultivate concrete tools among students to improve their communication and interpretive skills. In fact, the environment of a Jewish day school is uniquely positioned to support such sophisticated practices in the classroom.

Interpersonal skills are an essential and powerful component of hevruta learning. Director of Jewish Life and Learning Rabbi Ravid Tilles shares that “hevruta learning is so important because it gives you the opportunity to hear other people’s perspectives that you may not have thought about. Sometimes students would prefer to have their own thoughts and just have their voices be heard, but it can be very isolating to sit with your own thoughts only about an idea. Saying your perspective out loud to somebody else helps you articulate it. That’s when hevruta learning works best: students are asking questions of each other and saying, ‘Tell me more about that. What do you mean when you say that? Here’s another way that I could think about it.’”

Beginning in the fall, fourth-grade students in Jewish Studies plunge into the Book of Shemot, beginning with an extended unit on Perek Aleph, the first chapter. They tap into their experience in hevruta as they develop foundational skills for translating, engaging in textual analysis, and studying text with peers. Under the gentle, encouraging tutelage of Grades 4-5 Jewish Studies Teacher Lindsay Flammey ’07, students roll up their sleeves and persevere. “I tell my students that they might not always agree with their hevruta, and that’s a beautiful thing! It’s going to be hard and you might not always feel like the other person hears you, but that’s how we grow, by doing hard things. I frame it this way: this is a very Jewish thing to be doing, and it’s also a very hard thing to be doing, but that’s because it’s worth your while, and it’s going to help you grow. It’s a lifelong skill.”

Rabbi Tilles notes that hevruta learning forces participants to articulate their position in an effective way. “It’s not about changing perspectives, but about furthering and either strengthening a position or adopting a new position. At the very least, it teaches the important skill of listening. We hope that our students will be emphatic, compassionate and kind to one another. Creating and leaving space for other people to be their truest selves is a skill we want students to have inside and outside of the classroom if they are discussing a deep idea or just talking about what everybody did over the weekend. So, yes, hevruta helps students go deeper into textual ideas while strengthening interpersonal relationships and building community.”

Hevruta learning begins in the earliest grades. Grade 1 General Studies Teacher Michelle Prizand sits on the floor in a circle with her class as she explains a new nonfiction writing project. Students choose a subject they know well, such as football or dogs, beginning by counting off five facts on their fingers that they already know. Michelle encourages them to think about what questions their readers might have once they start writing. As she instructs the class to “turn and talk,” each student eagerly pivots and faces his or her partner. Purposeful, animated chatter immediately fills the air in the classroom. “I match up the kids and they ask each other questions which prompts them to consider their topic more deeply.”

While this scene might not first appear to be what is commonly conceived as hevruta learning, it is highly intentional, not only for the purpose of training students to include detail and depth in their writing, but as one of the first carefully crafted iterations of hevruta learning at Schechter.

“We start with reading specifically at the beginning of the year,” Michelle explains. “What are three things we do when we’re reading? How do we find good learning spots? What is the type of spot where we are quiet and read to ourselves? After that, we work on partner reading, which is the start of group or hevruta work. How do we share our time, and how do we share our space as well? We practice these skills throughout the year in different scenarios working with each other. It could be worksheets, reading, projects. It translates into everything we do.”

Michelle notes that hevruta actually fosters independence. “Hevruta learning is about teaching students to apply the skills they already have and to be OK with making a mistake. That's when they learn from each other.” Michelle tells her students, “Ask three before me. I’ll correct and help in the end, but if students are working with someone and they make a mistake, one of their peers can help them.”

Grade 8 Jewish Studies Teacher Amy Newman relies on hevruta learning as a core way of structuring student learning. Walking into Amy’s class, which meets in the school’s library so that students can spread out, students sit in pairs around the room, huddled over the piece of text they are learning. “Hevruta learning isn’t easy,” Amy says. “Diving into a rabbinic text requires grit, collaboration and persistence.” Amy explains that to support her students in learning how to unravel a Jewish text together, she created visual flow charts that show how the conversation should unfold. It begins by one partner slowly reading the text aloud in the original Hebrew or Aramaic. Students identify the words they already know and use dictionaries or translations to piece together the rest.

But learning in hevruta is not just about gaining text skills. Students in Amy’s class use the texts as a jumping off point to engage with the most important questions humans face. In one unit, students explore different Jewish perspectives on the question, “Why do bad things happen?” They study texts that focus on episodes in the life of Rabbi Akiva, who first tells his students that “everything that happens, happens for a good reason.” Ultimately, Rabbi Akiva dies as a martyr at the hands of the Romans, which challenges him to confront his belief in divine purpose. Students are left to make sense of real issues that do not have straightforward answers all while working in partnership with each other and with sources from the Jewish tradition.

The phrases “What do you notice?” and “What do you wonder?” are commonly heard in Schechter classrooms from the library to the lab. Earlier this year in science, sixthgraders were presented with a question from their teacher, Grade 6 Science Teacher and STEAM Team Lead Ferris Unni: do the type of rocks underground have an impact on the severity of earthquakes above ground? In order to develop hypotheses about earthquakes, classroom activities focused on why the surface of the earth is dynamic. Science classes are structured so that students look at a phenomenon, the data that is derived from it, and then develop questions that will drive their curiosity to explain it.

Ferris shares that her goal is always to turn the learning over to the students. “At the core, we know—and research tells us—that students learn best in groups and from each other, in collegial environments. I focus on infusing agency and control into how students are learning, what they’re learning and where the work takes them next. They can only do that by talking to one another to make sense of what they see.”

Sixth-grade science work is investigative by nature and not bound to textbooks. Students are presented with small, complex texts rather than a list of facts or vocabulary to memorize. “They really have to dig their teeth into the texts,” Ferris explains. “Students spend three or four days engaging in some sort of investigation using online simulations, curated storyboards and student websites after which they make scientific points about what they saw, and then provide scientific evidence to support their claims.” Students assemble into pairs to create Notice & Wonder Charts, graphic organizers or data tables to collect their information. “Depending on how meaty a topic is,” Ferris says, “we might break something up, then come back to make sure there are no holes in students’ research.”

Ferris explains “[t]exts have to be challenging, but how do you create learning experiences in which students look at texts, but the texts meet them where they are? I believe texts have to be dealt with more than one time. Students have to go back and look at them again through different lenses and different degrees of sophistication. I give them time to make whatever sense they can initially and independently before reevaluating the same text in pairs with a larger objective.

That way, they can learn from each other in conversation and see things they might have missed in their initial review. They then work as an entire class.”

Earthquakes, reading groups and the Book of Shemot certainly seem like odd bedfellows. These subjects, along with virtually any unit or lesson, however, are all the more accessible and nuanced for Schechter students because of their hevruta work. Beyond aiding comprehension and students’ ability to grasp the material itself, the value of instilling an appreciation for dialogue and a comfort with partnership, are equally critical dividends.

Director of Learning and Teaching Dr. Jonah Hassenfeld emphasizes that the singularly Jewish method of hevruta becomes a portable, go-to skill throughout a person’s life. “What does it actually mean to work with another person? Close reading and challenging yourself to go beyond a surface level meaning, including and beyond Jewish text study, is really a kind of intense literary criticism. We often don’t really read texts that carefully and, yet, in life, being able to read a text in a very close way becomes useful for everything from understanding a message you get on your phone to understanding a contract that you have to read, understanding the news that you encounter, or reading Jewish texts as an adult,” he says.

Student success is never a series of standalone buckets. Academic growth, social and emotional health, positive relationships with friends and with the larger school community are all the inextricable components of each student’s experience at Schechter. Nourishing and cultivating all of these measures of growth is a daily goal that is again supported and well served by hevruta learning. Jonah suggests that “the kind of interaction with a text that we see in hevruta is a uniquely deep kind of engagement because it has to be active. Nobody is telling you what a text means. You’re figuring it out for yourself and you’re doing that with another person. So, it becomes this perfect way of hitting on all these different aspects of learning.”

Grade 2 General Studies Teacher Marisa Keller explains that hevruta and group work “[t]each students how to cooperate with others and compromise. A lot of the time, kids will just want to do things the way they want to. I talk a lot about taking turns or letting each of them suggest their idea. Sometimes, they realize, ‘Oh! We have the same idea!’ They have to try to work together even if they all have different ideas,” she says.

Marisa also notes the benefits of students’ figuring out how to combine their ideas. She explains to her class that “[i]f we go with one idea, how would we choose that one idea? I really stress that everyone is going to have his or her own way or strategy for doing something like in math, for instance, but it’s important to be able to learn from someone else’s approach.” Marisa roleplays for her class so that they can see good examples of give and take, and what it looks like when two people both want to share their way of solving a problem.

listening to another person’s idea and then also going back and forth to sharpen both ideas to make them as good as they can be. It includes learning how to relate to another person, so there’s an interpersonal, collaborative and social/emotional piece.”

listening to another person’s idea and then also going back and forth to sharpen both ideas to make them as good as they can be. It includes learning how to relate to another person, so there’s an interpersonal, collaborative and social/emotional piece.”

If the end goal of hevruta is indeed more than just the immediate lesson, but also the synthesis of a variety of skills that will apply to almost any situation in life, students must find significance in their work. Lindsay explains that students wrestle with the big questions in the texts they are reading. “In the Passover story, which the kids know well, we think deeply about Moshe’s mother, Moshe’s sister and Bat Pharaoh. It’s important to make the text as relevant as possible.” Hevruta pairs debate and reflect on the role and responsibility of a leader by examining these three women.

“We think about their actions and bravery. What should a leader do? Is the leader part of a community or separate from the community? What were these women feeling?” Lindsay posits. Ultimately, students designed an award for one of these women in honor of her courage. “The students have to be specific about which action they find brave, in which pasuk [verse] and why.

Each occasion when students come together represents another layer of practice and another opportunity to flex the mental muscles that lead to healthy cooperation and personal growth. All of this then is the ongoing formation and sustaining of Jewish habits of mind. Schechter students are quick to respond when asked why they like hevruta learning. Over and over, students express feeling supported by their classmates or being proud to help someone else. They speak about the realization that there is more than one way to think about a topic or that listening to a partner’s ideas is often productive and eye-opening. Students recognize that the Jewish custom of hevruta is a special amalgam of Jewish study, respectful collaboration, problem solving and lively analysis.

Students might not realize, though, that these skills are theirs to keep and use, long after they graduate from Schechter.

Spring/Summer 2022 | Schechter Stories