This is the tale of a new initiative within one of the oldest day schools in the United States.
It began with three separate conversations stemming from three distinct but related goals. The result: one unified idea for a new initiative. This is how we, at Maimonides School in Brookline, Massachusetts, began a journey towards crafting what is now our Maimonides Fellowship program for aspiring Jewish educators.
We began with a goal-setting conversation with a parent board member about the need for us to inject more life, ruach, role-modeling, and personal relationships into the student experience. Coming out of the pandemic, our students needed inspiration and warmth more than ever—and more than we had been providing even before COVID. Could we devise a plan to create a more inspirational environment for our students within the school milieu instead of relying too heavily on youth groups and synagogue life outside of school hours to provide the necessary inspiration?
Our second conversation was initiated by our Upper School Principal. Too often, the difficulty of finding the right staff for our Judaic Studies positions was leaving him scrambling, feeling desperate and dismayed, and worried about how we could create the best atmosphere to inspire and grow our students’ love for Torah, when we could not attract the necessary educators. He wondered aloud where the applicants for our faculty positions were; why there weren’t more of the best, brightest, and most inspiring men and women stepping up; and why the few teachers out there were so increasingly unwilling to even consider working and living in a school community outside of the New York tri-state area. From this concern, emerged the question: how could we encourage talented educators to join our ranks here at our beloved and historic day school?
I launched the third conversation. For quite some time, I have felt the need for a much more strategic approach towards tackling the teacher crisis in day schools. What could we do differently as an educational and religious community to encourage young men and women to step up and enter the field of education? I didn’t envision entering this professional world; I thought I was going to be a lawyer. Our Upper School Principal thought he would be an actuary. Borrowing from the playbook of Chabad and the State of Israel, what might we do to encourage a spirit of shlichut, an emissarial spirit, that would inspire others to join this most sacred of Jewish causes?
These conversations coalesced into one larger discussion. As we all spoke, a new vision was born. Through learning from other fields that include practicums and residencies as well as from other day schools that have pursued similar initiatives, we envisioned a program that could bring a select handful of undergraduate and graduate students to our hallowed halls at Maimonides School. These Fellows would form a cohort, and over the course of several long weekends–six to be exact–the Fellows would enter into a paid student teaching experience in both formal and informal Jewish education.
To be fair, there are other day schools that have done similar things in the past, and there are even those that are currently trying comparable initiatives. Yet we feel that we have struck a chord with perhaps our own particular flavor, weaving in experience and training in both the formal and informal educational realms. We are finding that the specifics of our program are generating eagerness and excitement among our targeted demographic of undergraduate and graduate students.
The cohort arrives each Thursday afternoon and joins our Middle School and Upper School students for an after-school mishmar, preparing sources and topics and sitting and learning with our students in small groups, something that will hone the Fellows’ informal educational skill-set, while they infuse the sessions with energy, connectivity, ruach, and role-modeling. Afterwards, the cohort gathers together to learn as a team from a variety of world-class educators, college professors, and former heads of school who reside in and around the greater Boston area.
On Friday, our Fellows engage in developing their formal educational chops. Each Fellow is encouraged to observe classroom teaching and learning in all the divisions of our school and then they embed in a classroom with a master educator. The Fellow observes lessons and debriefs with their individual mentor. They then prepare and teach their own lessons, are observed, and receive immediate and meaningful feedback on those lessons from their mentors.
Over Shabbat, the Fellows help lead and facilitate school Shabbatonim—again honing their informal educational talents while strengthening their relational connections with our students, with each other, and with the professional staff.
Our vision for the Fellowship is, in part, to pay homage to the legacy of Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik z”tl and the impact he made on the world through founding our school, a flagship school for the Modern Orthodox community. We envision a future professional pathway for excellence: young women and men will seek out our Fellowship, and employers will seek out our trained Fellows, thereby creating a path towards developing the ranks of teachers through the Maimonides School. We also aim to encourage the possibility that some of these Fellows will consider future employment in the Rav’s z”tl legacy school.
Is our Fellowship initiative working? We are one year in, and we have already learned a great deal about what worked and what needs tweaking. We discovered first-hand how important pre-organizing each weekend was for our Fellows, especially the travel to the Boston area and getting to our school in a timely fashion on Thursdays. We learned how valuable the classroom experience was to each Fellow; this was cited as a standout highlight, with our Fellows remaining eager and asking for more such opportunities.
We have seen our Fellows grow in their practice, come together as a team, and inspire our students. We recently heard from one Fellow that because of what she learned this past year and the confidence she gained as a direct result of the Fellowship, she has taken on a new job for this coming school year teaching in a Jewish day school local to her, while finishing her degree.
We call that a win for the field and a win for our people’s future.
Kein Yirbu–may we see much more arise from this endeavor!