Monthly Archives: November 2016

Shoring up Our Modern Hebrew Programs (Part 2)

Posted on by
Reply

You can read Part 1, “Why We Need To Legitimize Modern Hebrew,” here.

Since Hebrew programs offered in seven area public high schools are experiencing a crisis of enrollment and qualified/certified Hebrew teachers, the community response, with its best intentions, has been to advocate for saving their programs at school board meetings.

The more I explore, though, the clearer it becomes that Hebrew teacher and student shortages are a symptom of a bigger dilemma that no amount of clamoring will resolve.  If we’re able to save a high school Hebrew program from the chopping block for one more year, this temporary solution will only delay the next crisis, and the program will soon end up at-risk again.  Why are we having these Hebrew program stability issues?

screen-shot-2016-11-22-at-10-10-35-pm

THE CRITIQUE:    Because from what I’ve seen and heard so far, the quality & consistency of these high school Hebrew offerings varies widely.  And these variations aren’t unique to public high school Hebrew programs; they are, unfortunately, ubiquitous.

Some high school programs relegate the fundamental input job to a Hebrew online computer course.  Some rely on a dry, grammar-heavy & outmoded text book.  Some are so stretched and strained that they don’t allow a teaching setup that meets the needs of individual students and levels; still others focus on Israeli culture and Jewish identity (delivered in English), punting on their stated goal: Hebrew language proficiency.  Many teachers dedicate their precious instructional minutes to teaching Hebrew linguistics – grammatical and syntactical features of the language, with a heavy emphasis on accuracy over meaning – at the expense of copious Hebrew input to build acquisition for real communication.  Most don’t scaffold the language enough for the novice to comprehend messages, or map meaning of individual words.  The strongest tool in the Second Language Acquisition box, READING, isn’t leveraged effectively.  No Hebrew curriculum that I know of focuses on students acquiring a corpus of the highest frequency words, to afford greatest coverage.  This last strategy eluded me for the first two decades of my Spanish teaching career 😳 !

THE PROPOSED SOLUTION:  With the kind of material and community support we have at our disposal, we can, no doubt! shore up our Hebrew offerings.  Not just the public high school programs, but all our programs.  We want the highest quality early start – long sequence learning (acquiring), so let’s start thinking about coordinating the entire progression.  Let’s create pre-K to 8th grade programs so effective and enjoyable that a considerable number of students will elect to continue taking Modern Hebrew in high school, and beyond!  It’s not too great or too difficult a goal to fathom or accomplish.  It will take energy and will, but, speaking from my experience, it’s definitely doable! 

screen-shot-2016-11-22-at-8-58-24-pm

Here’s my first draft Road Map to Improving Modern Hebrew Instruction:

A.  TRAIN/RE-TRAIN TEACHERS:

I was a veteran Spanish language teacher for nearly 20 years before I retooled my teaching with Comprehensible Input (T/CI).  I attended workshops, got support from my administration and department colleagues (we all retrained together), and tinkered in my classroom.  I read, watched demonstration videos, went to conferences, was coached by master teachers, and participated in two Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).  I also visited CI-based classrooms for the best training of all – live observation and debriefing with the teacher.  All these teacher-to-teacher experiences knit me into a network of inspired and inspiring colleagues, from whom I continue to learn.

I propose an 8-10 hour (total) beginners’ workshop (3-5 hours per day?) with sessions in Rationale (Second Language Acquisition) and Comprehensible Input strategies, coached skills practice, and resource assessment & development, for all stakeholders – teachers, administrators, Hebrew camp counselors & directors, etc.  Such groundwork will get us ‘all on the same page,’ ready to dive into CI strategies in our classrooms/learning environments.  (Read about the 8-hour Hebrew teacher training I led this summer.)

I hope to organize and lead broader Hebrew trainings this academic year, aimed at any Hebrew language teachers/levels and attended by all aforementioned stakeholders, as the basic principles (for absolute beginners through intermediate level students of any age) are the same.  It would be wonderful to bring different area institutions together to host a regional training, thereby building teacher and administrator networks!

Once we are all enlightened on how the brain acquires language, and we can discern which strategies we need to dump, keep or add, we’ll be ready to…

B.  ORGANIZE FOR ONGOING SUPPORT:

This step is part & parcel to training, and helps insure shared vision, consistency, and a common language experience for our students, as well as resources & materials for teachers.   As we train, we group Hebrew teachers by the grade/level they teach, to build networks of colleagues across the area/country/world:
screen-shot-2016-11-24-at-8-57-47-am*Elementary Pre-K to 2nd grade &  3rd to 5th grade sub-groups

*Middle school to junior high, 6th-8th grade

*High school & adult learners

(We can combine above groupings for many aspects of training.)

Next we form and/or participate in online users’ groups (i.e., moreTPRS Yahoo! group, Facebook ifltntprsciteaching, shared Google docs, more blogs and such,) so that teachers can support each other, sharing documents, questions and reflections in user-friendly, archive-able and searchable platforms.  A YouTube channel of Hebrew teacher demonstration videos could be a tremendous resource!  I’m happy to start building a repository on my blog, but let’s hope we bust out and need a different ‘file cabinet,’ because my blog can’t handle the volume!

Broad, effective, ongoing training, plus support and mentorship, will set us on the path toward reclaiming real Hebrew proficiency-oriented classrooms.  My (day-job) grades 1-8 World Language department was able to completely shift our teaching, and re-invigorate our classrooms, in a matter of months!  Most of us felt the earth move, as our students leaned in, and our administrators/evaluators basked in the positive feedback streaming in from their parents.  Best of all, with such enjoyable strategies as collaborative story-asking, dramatization, and drawing, our teachers were eager to improve our CI delivery skills, experiment with different formats, and mine students’ ideas and preferences while building scenes and stories together.  Now, work is more fun for all of us, and we email and text each other regularly, sharing funny incidents and ideas from our classroom story-spinning. (After the Big Cubs Win, my students seeded the idea, and we collaborated on a Spanish re-telling of the ‘Three Bears,’ called, ‘The 3 Chicago Cubs,’ aka, ‘Los Tres Cachorros de Chicago.’)

Ongoing support also means regularly sending our teachers to training (meetings, workshops, conferences) for sessions in additional CI strategies, networking and coaching.  Our field is dynamic and exciting!  Some sessions may focus on integrating video or electronic text activities (i.e., Textivate), others on incorporating authentic literature, art and music; still others may focus on working with pre- and emergent literacy learners.

 C.  RECRUIT HEBREW-SPEAKING TEACHERS:
Since this is a grass-roots teacher movement, it’s highly unlikely that Hebrew candidates would be trained in T/CI strategies, as university prep programs aren’t teaching them yet!  (See this open letter to university World Language departments from SLA expert Dr. Bill VanPatten, pleading for upper level language instructors who are well-versed in Second Language Acquisition Theory).
But as long as teachers have an open mind and are willing to learn,  יאללה!! (Let’s go!)
 We MUST assertively recruit Hebrew teachers (including from universities) and train them in CI strategies, as well as retrain current teachers, who will, if they’re anything like the thousands of other WL teachers I meet at regional and (inter)national conferences every year, feel energized, and, finally, effective and successful in their Hebrew classrooms.  This first cohort of Hebrew T/CI teachers will enthusiastically spread the word to potential Hebrew colleagues.  This is precisely what happened in my department.  We continue to mentor, model lessons, and host observers – both newbies and veterans –  willing and wanting to shift their instructional strategies and improve their students’ proficiency.
This recommendation addresses the effectiveness of appropriately trained Hebrew teachers, but not the hardship in finding and hiring qualified, credentialed candidates.  One obstacle to hiring qualified Hebrew teachers is the difficulty in passing English language exams for native Hebrew candidates.  Clearly we must also recruit native English speakers and bilingual Hebrew candidates, and not only Hebrew dominant teachers, in order to expand the Hebrew teacher corps.
D.  INCREASE THE NUMBER OF HIGH SCHOOL HEBREW STUDENTS:
 To address the irregular flow of students into the high school Hebrew pipeline, we need to create an expectation in the Hebrew supplementary school, by:
*Exploiting & creating opportunities, beginning in the early years, to promote our public high school Hebrew programs.  To do this we must integrate a powerful and consistent message early on, and, of course, have a great program worthy of endorsing, to kids and parents alike;
*Ensuring parents hear our well-planned high school Hebrew presentations; inviting current high school Hebrew student testimonials for 8th graders, when it’s most critical – before January of 8th grade, when kids elect their high school language;
*Preparing our supplementary school students for high school Hebrew 2.  We do this through excellent & optimized programming and instruction from Pre-K to 8th, and coordination with the high school, for a smooth transition.  Entering at Hebrew level 2 insures that Hebrew doesn’t feel inferior to the Spanish/French option.
There you have it:  My first draft Road Map to Improving Modern Hebrew Instruction.
The single, most powerful step to improving the quality, reputation and outcomes of our Hebrew programs is teacher (re-) training.
If you are interested in reimagining your Hebrew offering and starting down the path toward Hebrew proficiency for your students, please contact me and let’s plan a training in your area!

Leveraging Leining

Posted on by
Reply

A friend recently asked for my advice on the following:  His friends, two successful professionals who speak English as a Second Language, wish to learn to decode in Hebrew for the purpose of following along in temple during the holidays.  They aren’t really interested in learning to speak or understand Hebrew, I gathered; they just want to feel competent among their temple community by reading/chanting the prayers.  A noble goal that many a Jewish institution has dedicated considerable resources to fulfilling!

Here’s where, for me and many other language educators, though, it starts to get very dicey.  From a language educator’s point of view, deciphering and articulating lines and dots on the page is a precursor to reading; it does not constitute reading.  Reading means comprehending written words.  Pairing letters and their sounds is decoding – often the first step towards reading.screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-11-39-16-am

So the tens of thousands of us who attended a traditional supplementary Hebrew school (or cheder in my dad’s case), and who spent countless hours learning the letter/sound correspondences, and then tediously practiced repeating their sounds with vowel pointing (i.e., nikkud), didn’t really learn to read Hebrew in the full sense.  We learned isolated phonemes and nonsense words, (and some real words, without knowing what they meant).  This is how many modern-day Hebrew basal readers are still set up!  (See sample below from Shalom Ivrit 1, Behrman House)screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-3-08-55-pm

One  problem with this decoding approach is that it’s tedious, boring, and worst of all, it’s devoid of meaning.  Very discouraging for many students, especially youngsters, at 5:00pm on a Wednesday evening.  For religious or Hebrew day-school students, it’s usually a short phase on the path to more satisfying, meaningful reading, as there’s the promise of comprehension during the considerable time spent on content-based literacy.  For the rest of the temple-based Hebrew school students, with very limited Hebrew instructional time, not so much.

On the rare occasion that I go to shul with my siblings, as when they came to my son’s Bar Mitzvah this past May, I know that my experience during the service is wholly different than theirs – or from most of the attendees who can decode the prayers and readings in the prayer book.  Those who retained their ability to decode but do not comprehend (like my sibs), may spend their mental energies merely tracking the text, perhaps occasionally checking the translation or commentary during liturgy transitions or English recitations.  I, on the other hand, often understand the general meaning of the prayers as I read them, though biblical Hebrew is stilted. (Some compare it to Shakespearean English.  I remember relying on footnotes, how about you?)  All this to say, or rather to ask, how much time should we dedicate to decoding if it doesn’t get us meaning in the synagogue?

For my friend’s purposes, I responded like this:

As far as Second Language Acquisition theory goes, reading usually follows tons of comprehensible, contextualized and compelling aural input, so that the reader knows both what the words mean and how they’re supposed to sound, before sitting down to read a block of text.  This is particularly important when the target language alphabet is so radically different, as in the case of Hebrew.
But that’s for acquiring the language; not for simply cracking the written code.  It’s kind of unusual in world language teaching circles to have the goal be just the decoding and not mental mapping of the meaning, but hey, we’re Jews.  We’ve been doing it this way (unwittingly?) for generations.
[There are prolly plenty of people who want to be able to read along in Hebrew, without worrying what the words actually mean (they have the English translation in the margin and commentary below!)….
Then there are tons who resent all the time spent decoding words they don’t comprehend.  (You saw the Coen Brothers’ movie, A Serious Man?)]
I guess the best way for your friends to learn would be the way that so many of us and our parents did – by learning the sound/letter correspondence, together with  the predictable melody that the prayers are wrapped in.  But the order is important – learning it as a song FIRST will make the task, IMO, infinitely easier.
screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-3-43-56-pm
I would, then, after they know the short songs, use the simplest  kid’s prayer book or Hebrew school workbook to look at the words in the most common blessings to start learning to decode.  If they learn the first 6 words to most general prayers – 
ברוך אתה __ אלוהינו מלך העולם
then they’d have several high-frequency prayerbook words under their belt, plus nearly half the letters in the Alef bet.
Before we start teaching discreet letter/sound correspondence, I’d see if they could do some “cold character reading” after they committed some of the short musical prayers to memory.  Here’s a link to a brief video about Cold Character Reading, developed by Mandarin teacher Terry Waltz, PhD  – again the technique rests on comprehension – which is very different from what your friends are looking for:
If they get a friend who’s willing to sit and teach them say, the 3 (short version) shabbat blessings (candles, wine, challah) to a melody (supports memory) – and they have a backup via a weblink with music – so they can commit it to automatic memory – then after several of those are slotted in, the letter/sound mapping will proceed more smoothly.
Here is one resource I just googled – it might be helpful:
There are more – you can find them at: prayer-eoke
Here’s a blogpost I wrote on Hebrew literacy, though again, it’s centers on attaching meaning.  Still you may be interested!
https://cmovan.edublogs.org/2016/09/  called,  “Demystifying Hebrew Literacy:  Part 1.”
  I see I’ll need to get cracking on Part 2 soon!
Best,
Alisa
Do you understand the Hebrew prayers you read in synagogue?  How did you (Or did you?) learn to decode, then read in Hebrew?
Any advice for this couple?  Thanks in advance for posting a response and sharing your thoughts, experiences and advice!

An Open Invitation

Posted on by
3

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-11-47-16-amI sent this letter of invitation below, explaining my Hebrew educational reform project to family, friends, acquaintances, teachers, administrators, and organizations.  If you know anyone interested in improving the Hebrew learning (acquiring) experience and outcomes for students of all ages, please read and forward this letter!

I hope to get more teachers and decision-makers to explore and subscribe to my blog, become familiar with the tenets of Second Language Acquisition theory, read about Teaching with Comprehensible Input, engage in enlightening conversations, and seek (re-)training for our Hebrew teachers.  Once I have a group of interested ‘stake-holders,’ I’d love to organize a conference and/or workshops to present and train, like I did at my temple this summer.  For more on my temple training, start reading here.

I also plan to submit proposals to present at Jewish educator conferences, and, if accepted, seek sponsorship to attend and share my work.  I am aware of the NewCAJE conference in San Francisco in August – please email me with information on other relevant conferences!screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-10-38-46-amHere’s the letter to circulate, and thanks in advance for helping get the word out on improving Hebrew instruction:

October, 2016

Dear Friends,

This summer, I embarked on a new project that I want to share with you.  In a nutshell, I am reimagining Modern Hebrew language instruction.  I believe my vision is timely, and doable with community support.

With the goal of improving our kids’ Hebrew learning experience, I received a grant through the Community Foundation for Jewish Education (CFJE), which allowed me to start training Hebrew teachers in teaching with comprehensible input (T/CI).  Comprehensible Input (CI) refers to brain-friendly language instruction that is understandable to the learner, and focuses on meaning and interest.  Aimed at beginning-through-intermediate-level students, classes are conducted almost exclusively in conversational Hebrew.  T/CI is engaging, fun and effective, employing collaborative ‘story spinning,’ improvisation and acting, and exploits Hebrew’s most practical, high- frequency words.  

I’ve started a blog to share my instructional resources and reflections at cmovan.edublogs.org.     I invite you to follow and join the conversation by posting responses and questions!   Also, please forward this letter to as many friends, acquaintances and contacts you may know who are involved or interested in Hebrew instruction, whether they are affiliated with temple-based supplementary school, day school, ulpan, university or adult conversational classes. This list may include rabbis, classroom teachers, educational directors, administrators and students, etc.   

I hope to foster enlightening discussions around Modern Hebrew language instruction, through this platform, wherever my readers reside, and whatever native language they speak.

In the few short weeks I’ve been teaching Hebrew classes to 3rd through 7thgraders at my temple, the response has been overwhelmingly positive from kids, parents, teachers and the community.  I’ll continue to model teacher lessons, until our faculty feels sufficiently confident to take over.  I will also coach and mentor our faculty throughout the year.

I hope to train additional groups of Hebrew teachers who are interested in learning to teach with comprehensible input in the coming months, hopefully in a workshop or conference setting.

Thanks in advance for your support in helping me spread the word, and feel free to contact me directly at this special email address:  cmovanhebrew@gmail.com.

 

Sincerely,

Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg

Comprehensible Hebrew, כמובן

cmovan.edublogs.org

cmovanhebrew@gmail.com

Why We Need to Legitimize Modern Hebrew (Part 1)

Posted on by
5

We need to legitimize Modern Hebrew and then advocate the heck out of teaching it, the sooner the better.

Maybe this should have been my very first ‘cornerstone’ blogpost, but as a Jew, Hebrew speaker and lover of language, I needed no convincing of the value of improving and supporting Hebrew instruction.

screen-shot-2016-11-10-at-12-35-53-amPlus, I really wasn’t aware of the turmoil swirling around the Hebrew programs in my own back yard!

There are urgent issues particular to Modern Hebrew in the Diaspora that are worthy of our attention.  One such challenge regarding Hebrew’s legitimacy is, does it qualify as a World Language?

This is an important question as it establishes a raisons d’être for Modern Hebrew instruction in and beyond the supplementary (synagogue-based) or Jewish day-school setting, for example, in public high school World Language Departments.  (Where I live, several public high schools offer Modern Hebrew; my son is a student in one of them.)

I first heard this concern about Hebrew’s legitimacy as a World Language (like Spanish, French or Mandarin), from a dear friend and champion of my recent foray into Hebrew instructional reform.  Her beef is that Modern Hebrew is the national language of only one small country, Israel.  Furthermore, she argues, you don’t really need Hebrew there, as so many Israelis are fluent in English.  International diplomacy and business could survive without it, she claims; not so with the other more widely-spoken languages.screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-10-07-34-pm

Well, here’s my take.  Yes, Modern Hebrew most definitely is a World Language, though technically it’s only the national language of Israel.  (See:  ACTFL position on ‘What Is A World Language?’)  It’s a special case, though, since it’s widely studied and spoken by (mostly) Jews in the Diaspora, plus the many Israelis who travel and live across the four corners of the earth.  Professor Wikipedia claims there are over 9 million Hebrew speakers worldwide, with over 5 million residing in Israel.    Modern Hebrew lives in rich, robust, and widely appreciated literature, song, poetry, film, and journalism.  Perhaps interest in it and devotion to it propel Hebrew to World Language status, despite it’s limited geographical imperative.  The opposite is also true; if interest in and devotion to Hebrew flags, so will its status in the minds of potential teachers and their students.  We’ve observed this inverse corollary on Chicago’s North Shore over the past few years, as several of the public high school Hebrew programs face cuts due to a dearth of certified Hebrew teachers, and insufficient numbers of interested Hebrew students.

screen-shot-2016-11-10-at-12-12-34-amLamentably, it looks as though Evanston Township High School, the first public high school in the area to offer Hebrew, may phase out its almost 50-year-old Hebrew program at the end of this academic year.  (Read article here.)

The reasons for the decline of its pioneer program and others are numerous, including, for teachers:

*Onerous English language exams for teacher certification are discouraging to potential native-Hebrew candidates;

*Hebrew teaching positions are often part-time (no benefits) and/or require travel between schools due to low enrollment, making the positions less appealing;

*Hebrew teachers are singletons in their buildings or districts, with no opportunity for collegial support or collaboration;

*Since they don’t yet exist, teachers can’t rely on Hebrew-specific teaching standards, proficiency guidelines, and articulated curricula (from level to level) to guide and buttress their program. (Existing curricula/textbooks don’t reflect SLA research, are uninspired and unappealing;)

screen-shot-2016-11-13-at-8-30-08-amscreen-shot-2016-11-13-at-8-30-34-am*Since they don’t yet exist, teachers can’t rely on Hebrew-specific teaching support networks,  for coordination of Hebrew pedagogy and instruction;

*Since they don’t yet exist, teachers can’t rely on Hebrew-specific or (to the best of my knowledge) electronic resources such as listservs (like the moreTPRS yahoo users’ group, or, say, a Hebrew teachers’ Facebook group), blogs, PLCs, or teacher demonstration videos (See my exemplar here!)  Mine is the only Hebrew-as-a-foreign-language teachers’ resource blog I know of so far.

*Teachers receive inadequate (or NO) training in Second Language Acquisition theory and have few, if any, professional development opportunities (workshops, conferences, peer observations, etc.) to network and learn Hebrew best-practice instructional strategies.

* Teacher preparation for Hebrew instruction at the university level is outmoded/substandard;

*Teachers are discouraged by unremarkable student outcomes and near flat progress, after an inordinate amount of time and energy invested.

Sounds dismal, I know, but read on and don’t be dismayed.

For students, here are some of the high school Hebrew hurdles:screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-10-31-56-pm

*Most junior high school students (here and in many suburban districts) have already taken two years of World Language (often Spanish or French) by the time they enter high school, enabling incoming freshman to place into level 2 language classes.  It’s hard to pass up this accelerated status, and parents often encourage their kids to ‘continue with what you’ve already started,’ rather than switch to Hebrew;

*It takes devotion to Hebrew, the willingness to step down a level, as well as to step away from your peers, to elect Hebrew 1 as a freshman (Hebrew 2 in some cases, depending on supplementary Hebrew school programming or receiving teacher’s differing expectations);

*Many students perceive Hebrew as more difficult than, say, Spanish or French, because of its non-Romanized alphabet.  This lowers their expectations for progress and proficiency;
*Many students are advised and/or believe that the more widely spoken languages (i.e., Spanish, French, Mandarin) are more practical for the job market.

*Students’ prior experience with Hebrew is tedious, boring and unproductive;

*Students are discouraged by their unremarkable outcomes and near flat progress, after an inordinate amount of time and energy invested.
screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-10-53-03-pm

So what can we do to staunch the flow of at-risk high school Hebrew programs and reinvigorate ALL our programs?  I don’t believe that merely reminding 8th graders of their high school Hebrew option, or inviting them on an unforgettable Israel trip are the answer, though both of these measures may help our cause.  Instead, I believe,

THERE’S NO SUBSTITUTE FOR EXCELLENT INSTRUCTION.

Exceptional, pedagogically sound, engaging, early start-long sequence Hebrew language programs delivered by highly trained, competent, passionate and networked teachers will save the day.  

How will this seemingly simplistic approach address the many and diverse challenges delineated above?   Let me count the ways!  (And yes, ‘How to go about it’ will be the subject of my next loooong blog post!)

With a little bit of soul searching and earnest examination of the lessons learned so far, we can drastically improve our Hebrew offerings and outcomes, thereby boosting the appeal of teaching and learning (acquiring) Modern Hebrew, for teachers and students alike.

GREAT TEACHING INSPIRES GREAT LEARNING…

INSPIRES GREAT TEACHING.

Imagine a pre-K through 7th/8th grade supplementary Hebrew program of such caliber that our kids could readily place into Hebrew 2 (or beyond?!?) in 9th grade, as in the case of French & Spanish….Once we address these considerable challenges by creating coordinated, effective, well documented and ENJOYABLE programs, we’ll undoubtedly have the interested and engaged Hebrew students and an enthusiastic network of teachers to fill them.  It will constitute another Hebrew revival to make Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew, proud, if only we follow his advice:

“We have to unshackle the feet of Hebrew speakers…. If not, our language will never have a complete life.”