Strategy For Developing a Jewish Open Source Curriculum Project

In this blog I'd like to lay out my vision as to how we might go about creating an open source curriculum. As always, I would love to hear alternate viewpoints or what you like about this plan.

For starters, I think it would be best to start small. Although the ultimate goal is to develop a Chumash curriculum which would develop literacy skills, that project would presumably be complex in nature. As such, it might be best to start with something simpler in order to work out any bumps in the system. I would suggest starting with a Dinim curriculum mainly revolving around the chagim. It could be a curriculum for one chag at one grade level or it could be a curriculum for all chagim at all grade levels depending on the amount of participants. If we can do this successfully, we can then consider moving on to Chumash or other areas.

Ideally, I envision groups of educators organized by grade level with each group being led by a master educator who would facilitate. Thus, suppose you are a fourth grade teacher, you would join the fourth grade group. If you were an eight grade teacher you would join the eight grade group. This way you can target you curriculum development towards an audience you know well and can experiment with. Also, you might be able to glean insights from other participants that might help you in your own classroom teaching at your grade level.

Stage One:

Stage one would be to research what existing curriculum is out there already. No need to reinvent the wheel. Perhaps there is an already suitable set of standards out there. Even if a perfectly suitable curriculum does not exists, any existing curriculum would provide a nice reference point. Also, whenever you develop curriculum you want to make sure schools will find it suitable. Thus, in stage one (or even prior to it), I would ask schools if they would mind faxing or emailing a detailed dinim curriculum if they have one. After looking at what is available, we could break down the topics according to grade level.

Stage Two

Educators at each grade level determine if the aforementioned topics are appropriate for their grade level. Are some topics missing? Should some topics be deleted?

After the topics are selected, next comes the task of defining the actual standards associated with each topic. For example, if one topic is "Chodesh Elul", then subtopics would describe what we want students to know about the month of Elul including any skills or values we would like them to acquire. Thus, an appropriate standard might be "students will know what the word Elul stands for" (Ani L'dodi etc). Although now is now is not the time to go into detail as to how standards are selected and developed, basically each topic is examined and the question is asked, what do students need to know about this topic? What skills should they acquire when learning this topic? What values should they acquire?

Stage Three

After identifying standards, assessments are created. Although it might seem counter intuitive to create an assessment prior to creating the actual lesson, nonetheless creating the assessment before the actuall lesson ensures that the assessment targets the actual standards. It also brings into focus the learning opportunities that need to be provided in order to ensure that students can master the assessment and ultimately the selected standards. It should be pointed out that assessments need not be quizzes or standard "spit back" questions. For example, an assessment could mean students make a project of some sort, write a paper etc. As assessment is just a way for a teacher to receive feedback as to whether or not his or her students understand what was being taught.

Stage Four

Create the actual curricular materials. The materials will be aligned to the standards and initially will be created for print. Once print materials are in place the task of designing a digital curriculum to support the written curriculum could also be developed e.g. Smartboard lessons, PowerPoints, webcourses, videos etc. The goal would be to produce materials which are engaging and educational. Ideally, we should try to move up the ladder on Bloom's taxanomy when possible.

Obviously, the success of such a project hinges on having a community of collaborators. Without that we don't get anywhere. How to develop this community is a good question which will need to be explored.

Again, this is just my vision of how things might be run. If you disagree or have other ways of improving on what I wrote, please feel free to express your thoughts.

Revolutionizing Jewish Education

This is my first entry into the blogoshpere world. I never imagined myself sitting down to write a blog because first of all, who would read it? Second, in my educational training I was taught to avoid "frontal teaching" methodologies when at all possible. On the surface blogging would appear to be the most frontal teaching method ever invented. However, in time I hope this platform will evolve into a forum of collaboration as opposed to a platform in isolation.

The Problem

The problem I wish to address is the lack of professionally developed curricular materials which are available in the field of Jewish day school education. If you look inside the knapsack of the average day school student, you will probably find a slew of photocopied sheets flying about in every direction. Hmm. Underneath those sheets you will probably find a professionally designed science book, social studies book etc. Even if you do find a commercial Judaic Studies workbook of some sort, how does it compare in professional terms to the science or math book? Needless to say, the materials created for secular studies subjects have huge amounts of resources which go into their professional development which make them enticing, engaging and effective. The same can't be said for photocopied sheets or a workbook made by a teacher working on a project in his or her spare time.

Why is this important? For starters, don't we want our students to have a strong desire to learn Torah? Today's student is surrounded by so much professionally developed media, that to them these sheets must seem to have been printed before the flood. Wouldn't Torah be that much more desirable if it were visually appealing as well?

More importantly however, the lack of professionally developed materials really impairs the ability of our students to comprehend Torah. This is because our day school system is relying on a system of instruction which has practically no methodology to it. To explain, the average Jewish day school teacher is told when hired to "teach x perakim of sefer y" over the course of the year. There is no guidance as to which skills should be focused on, which vocabulary words should be stressed, how do the skills taught in fourth grade build on what was taught in third grade etc? In effect teachers are toiling to teach without any methodology or professionally developed material to work with. This leads to confusion on the part of the student as well. Everything just seems so random and confusing.

This is the problem I would like to address. How can we go about creating a professionally developed system to guide teachers and students alike which will be creative, engaging and enticing? How can we develop a system which will help our students acquire the skills they so desperately need to read our cherished texts? I don't mean to limit this to printed materials. Can we create digital media which will enhance student skills and understanding?

I have some ideas which I hope to outlay in the future, however most of all I would love to hear from others. Feel free to comment below and if this sounds like a project you actively wished to involved with, please join my Facebook group so we can connect and do some real collaboration. Is anybody out there?