Parenting Through A Jewish Lens: Teacher Edition!

Over the past two weeks the Children’s Center team has been hard at work getting the classrooms ready and spending time together in teams to prepare for the start of the school year. In addition to beautifying our physical spaces, we have taken a bit of time to do some learning ourselves. This year our staff has the incredible opportunity to study with Ronit Ziv-Kreger, a warm and knowledgeable instructor from Hebrew College, and participate in a pilot teacher version of the course, “Parenting through a Jewish Lens.” I was curious about what it meant to take a parenting course, and how that would relate to my life as a teacher. So far, I have found the experience to be incredibly enriching and I am curious to learn more as we continue the course throughout the year. 

What I find fascinating about the course is that Ronit gives us tools to enrich our classroom that are grounded in traditional Jewish texts. The first day we discussed new beginnings and we took a close look at the prayer, Modeh Ani. Since this discussion I have added a morning ritual into my own life of doing stretches when I wake up to the tune of this song, we will see if teachers decide to incorporate something similar into their classrooms! We also talked about  the end of the day and evening prayers and how those themes can translate into some of the literary for going to bed.  By looking at the text we are ale to find meaning in words that our thousands of years old that still bring meaning to our lives both in and out of the classroom.

On the second day we discussed the power of words in our text to critically analyze how teachers and students use words in the classroom. We broke up into three groups, lashron hara (gossip), critical feedback/reprove, and praise. We read many texts that linked the ancient ways to our modern society and Ronit helped us apply these to our everyday lives. I am inspired to continue learning throughout this year and I hope that others, both teachers and parents,  will continue to be inspired by this course throughout the year.