Richard D. Solomon's Blog on Mentoring Jewish Students and Teachers

Our hope is that this blog will become a forum in which people can exchange ideas on how to recruit, develop and retain exceptional Jewish educators through mentoring and e-mentoring students, teaching candidates, and teachers in our day and supplemental schools. The present focus of this blog is to empower Jewish teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, consultants, and staff developers to integrate web technology (i.e. web tools and apps) into their teaching and teacher training.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

My Jewish Star: A Community Building Activity that Can Transform the Traditional Classroom into a Jewish Community of Cooperative Learners

When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices. Accordingly, our mentees should know about (a) the importance of transforming the traditional classroom into a Jewish community of cooperative learners and (b) specific learning activities for community building. Toward this end, we are sharing *My Jewish Star A Community Building Activity that can help transform the classroom into a caring Jewish learning community.

Note: Refer to the procedure explained in the post for implementing My Jewish Joys.

* Gold, S., Solomon, R. & Solomon, E. (1988). The Jewish Handbook for Group Discussion. Columbia, MD: National Institute for Relationship Training, Inc.

On the next post we will begin our discussion of how to empower students to create acceptable classroom rules or expectations that the community of learners including the teacher and the students can honor and follow.