Category Archives: Upper Elementary

What The Avi Chai Hebrew Report Tells Us (And What It Doesn’t)

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The long awaited Avi Chai Foundation Hebrew report, Hebrew For What? Hebrew at the Heart of Jewish Day Schools, was released this month, and is enjoying broad discussion and commentary among Hebrew educators and administrators.

While I read it closely and with great interest, I was left scratching my head, surprised both by its content, and by what failed to make its way into the hefty 64-page volume.

On this Pesach 5777, our season of fundamental questions, let’s start with the report’s Executive Summary, which, right off the bat, outlines some of my concerns.   As the summary opens, its researcher/authors lament the difficult and complex task of teaching Hebrew, due to the multiple purposes that the Hebrew curriculum serves (studying both classical sacred texts, and acquiring modern Hebrew communication skills) in a day school setting.  The authors seem to be seeking readers’ leniency by describing a nearly impossible feat, relating that Hebrew faculty is hard to find; instructional minutes are hard to come by; parental demands add stress; maintaining older students’ interest is challenging; and my personal favorite, the non-Romanized alphabet makes Hebrew harder to learn than other commonly taught world languages, such as Spanish and French.

Before we continue, I say we need to come to some common understanding about what it is we are trying to accomplish with Hebrew in the day school classroom, refine and articulate our goals regarding Hebrew instruction, and align our teaching with our goals.  I believe that a better handle on Second Languages Acquisition (SLA) research, which is, lamentably, all but absent from the Avi Chai report, will aid our grasp of the issues above, and how to address them.

Big Idea #1:  Humans acquire language one way only –  by understanding messages (Chomsky/Krashen).  If we want our students to acquire Hebrew for any purpose, sacred or secular, conversational or literary, then we must begin by delivering comprehensible input, aural/oral and written messages that they can understand and that are so compelling that they attend to them effortlessly and automatically.

The Avi Chai report researchers uncover a curious trend in their surveys.  The day school kids, they report, seem to be losing their Hebrew ability after fifth grade!   Interestingly, this deterioration of skill in not found elsewhere in the literature among students of other languages, nor is the Hebrew phenomenon explained in the report within any SLA framework.  So I offer these fundamental questions:

Could it be that after 5th grade, many Hebrew programs shift from a more experiential, conversational, compelling comprehensible input (CCI)-rich communicative model, to a high-stakes grammar and vocabulary-heavy memorize-and-test grind (unsupported by any SLA research)?

Could it be that after 5th grade, Hebrew is no longer used as the lingua franca of the classroom, but that upper level teachers talk (in English) about how Hebrew’s grammar and syntax, morphology and phonology work?  Such a focus on the surface of the language in lieu of language as a tool for communication is also unsupported by any of the best-practice research, and would come at the expense of CCI and its attendant student comfort and engagement.  As the amount of CCI, overall program interest and therefore quality decline, so do student outcomes.

Could it be that some programs abandon communicating in modern Hebrew altogether after 5th grade, instead shifting their limited instructional minutes to classical sacred texts – using mostly English?  This possibility would most certainly render the class less conducive to Hebrew language acquisition.

Recommendations:  Create and defend an early start-long sequence modern Hebrew language program, rich in CCI, that broadens students’ linguistic foundation from year to year.  Insure that the content is compelling by incorporating student interests and ideas.  Integrate lots more reading into the program from an early age, with literacy materials connected to and based on the acquired aural/oral language.  Reading compounds language gains, and can be leveraged for the study of sacred texts.  The handicap of a non-Romanized alphabet can be overcome if students are exposed to appropriate reading materials over the long haul.  Protect the time dedicated to modern Hebrew instruction; it is different from sacred text study, and should not be substituted at the beginner-to-intermediate levels. Educate faculty, parents and students about your new (department-wide!) approach.  Demonstrate CCI lessons at go-to-school-night, which is sure to create a buzz.  Parents will be more likely to support you if their children are happy and successfully learning, and they understand the framework and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Watch student enthusiasm take off and soar, alongside acquisition.  While face to face modern Hebrew communication will grow proportionately with the amount of quality CCI, it will not keep pace with the complex concepts, parables, allegories and commentaries contained in the Hebrew sacred texts.  Either these will have to be adapted for beginner to intermediate Hebrew learners’ needs, or their study will have to take place in English, or in combination of Hebrew and English, whichever arrangement best meets the linguistic needs of the students.  We cannot hope to teach beginners’ basic modern Hebrew for daily communication, and Talmud Torah as it appears in its original form, on the same day.  It’s like reading a high school social studies textbook to a kindergartner!  We must adapt our Hebrew texts to meet the needs of our learners, insure our students are engaged and comfortable – NOT STRESSED OUT or made to feel inadequate.  A high affective filter can be a major obstacle to language acquisition, so we must be vigilant that we aren’t freaking out our kids, or they will tune out and turn off.  And researchers will conclude that they are ‘losing their Hebrew language,’ when it’s really the program, itself, that has lost its way.

If it’s not clear by now, I am advocating for two (or more) entirely separate classes: modern Hebrew, and ‘Judaics’/sacred texts.  Let’s treat modern Hebrew like the secular subject it is – like Spanish or French – and inform our instruction with both the tenets of Second Language Acquisition research and the intuitive strategies that have been embraced by thousands of world language teachers over the past 20+ years.  Of course we’ll apply and enjoy the strong modern Hebrew literacy skills our students develop over in their classical Judaics/Talmud & Torah classroom, where they’ll also benefit from the linguistic knowledge they’ve gained in modern Hebrew class (general vocabulary, familiar verb forms, prefixes, transition words, etc.)  The sounds and meanings are already in their heads!  By starting with language for meaning – modern Ivrit –  we will build capacity for the more intellectual pursuit of classical text analysis by prioritizing and insuring the development of comprehension, literacy skills, interest and confidence.

Big Idea #2:  Listening comprehension and reading, the receptive/input skills, precede writing and speaking, the productive/output skills (Read this blog post).

Among other benefits, familiarity with this basic tenet of SLA research helps manage student, parent, teacher, administrator (and researcher) expectations. Students require copious amounts of CCI before they are able to produce the target language at the discourse level.  “A flood of input for a trickle of output,” according to linguistics Professor Wynn Wong.  And yet, according to the Avi Chai report researchers,
           “At a few, although not all, of the schools we visited, we observed classes in which students’ speaking proficiency was evidently poorer in the higher grades than in lower ones.  While elementary school students responded in Hebrew to their teachers’ promptings, and seemed able to express themselves quite fluently in Israeli-accented Hebrew, by the time they reached the higher grades students struggled to express themselves. They groped to find the vocabulary to convey their thoughts.  Even where the rule in class was to speak only in Hebrew, students would often opt to find the right phrase in English before reverting to Hebrew.” (p. 29)
Could it be that the elementary teacher-prompted responses required only a perfunctory one word or short answer, demonstrating the students’ listening comprehension, whereas the upper school request demanded Hebrew speaking above the students’ level of acquisition, and at the discourse level?  Is the latter task reasonable, and does it reflect understanding of the SLA research?  Rather than bemoaning their students’ low interpersonal Hebrew proficiency, teachers (and researchers) must instead learn how students acquire, appreciate the natural stages of language emergence (not forced output), discern what kind of production is typical for the amount of CCI they’ve received, and ascertain how to continuously engage students in a Hebrew language-rich atmosphere.  Expectations are lower in the lower school, but then, suddenly, at the higher levels, students are expected to make a developmental leap, even as the quantity and quality of language input is diminished.
Recommendations:  Teachers and researchers are encouraged to master the theoretical underpinnings of SLA as well as the pedagogy that aligns with it, to get a better grasp of appropriate expectations for language output.  Continued high quality CCI, the driver of language acquisition, is as important as ever in the upper grades.
Big Ideas #3 & #4:  When the classroom messages are compelling, listening and engagement are greater; By personalizing and customizing comprehensible messages through class-elicited scenes, stories and images, interest skyrockets, and we optimize the input.
It’s hard to tell from the Avi Chai report just how interesting (or not) the general content of modern Hebrew classes is (at the places they studied), though stakeholders’ complaints seem to suggest a general disinterest in Hebrew class particularly at the upper levels.  Either the content or the instruction (or both) are souring students’ attitude.
What can we do about it?
Recommendation:  We need to take a sober look at our content.  Many schools embrace a pre-fabricated all inclusive curriculum that blends modern Hebrew with Judaics and prayerbook Hebrew, killing many proverbial birds with a single stone.  But they are, regrettably, also killing student (and teacher) interest and engagement, because the set curriculum is…OK I’ll say it:  mind-numbingly boring.   Set curricula often ‘covers’ static and humorless topics about which the students are not interested or passionate; nor do many of the themes incorporate the highest frequency words for greatest linguistic coverage.
So how can we insure that all students will be interested and remain engaged in the banter of our daily classes?  By involving them in the creation of the content!  By including their hobbies and passions in class stories and conversations!  By surveying their interests, and intentionally inserting this personalized information into the ‘curriculum!’  By, once knowing our students well, finding stories, video clips, commercials, poetry and songs, etc. that appeal to our group!   Once we accept that modern Hebrew is separate from Judaics/sacred texts, we are free to converse on an endless array of fiction/real topics, so long as our messages are compelling and comprehensible, and contribute to an ever-widening linguistic foundation.  By starting with student interest rather than imposing a prefab or teacher-driven curriculum, we guarantee broader relevance and authenticity, we build a community where individuals feel known and recognized, and we engage in pleasant conversation, in which all students have a foothold.
We democratize the language classroom!
Whew.  Perhaps those are enough big ideas to chew on for one blog post.
The Avi Chai report sheds light on stakeholders’ negative attitudes about Hebrew instruction, informing the quagmire in which we find ourselves.  I contend (with no blame) that often vague and contradictory instructional goals, poor and/or spotty Hebrew language teacher training, limited support and quality materials, all uninformed by SLA research, have landed us in this predicament.
The good news is, we can address our dire situation immediately and to great effect.  If my own teaching experiment is any indication, stakeholders are all eager to learn a better way.  The light and humorous beginners’ Hebrew scenes and stories are a welcome respite from the drudgery of grammar paradigms and vocabulary lists, nonsense words both spoken and copied into מחברות (notebooks).  Teachers, students and parents all report renewed enthusiasm for Comprehensible Hebrew, and kids look forward to class.
Recommendations:  Let’s re-think what we’re doing – but through the lens of Second Language Acquisition research.  Acquiring language isn’t like learning chemistry or social studies.  It’s an unconscious process.  It’s driven by compelling, comprehensible input.  Let’s rebuild our community’s confidence in Hebrew instruction as a worthwhile endeavor by demonstrating success after success.  What constitutes that success?  Our students will have a joyful experience in effective Hebrew classes; they will feel capable and successful at acquiring, comprehending and utilizing Hebrew, and they will embrace it as their own.

Shoring up Our Modern Hebrew Programs (Part 2)

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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?

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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! 

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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!

An Open Invitation

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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

Hebrew School and Religious School: 2 Parts of a Harmonious Whole

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screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-10-36-23-pmHumans acquire languages one way only:  By understanding messages, aka, Comprehensible Input  (Krashen, Foreign Language Education The Easy Way).

By the time they’re 5 years old, most kids have racked up around 15,000 hours of quality comprehensible language input.  So our 200-400 hour total, after 5 years of supplementary Hebrew school programming, is paltry to say the least.  All this suggests that we must be clear and realistic about our language-outcome expectations.

What kinds of student results can we anticipate from our twice-weekly Hebrew program in grades 3 through 7 (about an hour or so total per week)?  Unlike World Language classes in public school, our kids do get some additional Hebrew input through literacy (reading & writing) instruction as part of the liturgical/lifecycle curricula, which together with Modern Hebrew, makes up the Hebrew supplementary school offering.  Though our supplementary schools have traditionally seen these two domains – Modern Hebrew and Religious Hebrew instruction –  as mutually exclusive, I argue that they can and ought to purposefully inform each other, to fortify the overall program.

screen-shot-2016-10-07-at-4-07-15-pmOur rich and diverse liturgical/lifecycle/holiday curricula – hereafter called religious school – explores prayers, songs, religious artifacts, images, communities (including Israel), food, customs, and some texts.  Let’s discuss the texts.

Until now, when our children first formally learn prayers at religious school, they do so by rote memorization, often with the support of predictable melodies.  The prayers are reinforced in temple music class, through assemblies and special events in the sanctuary, through attending services outside of religious school, and perhaps at home or summer camp, as well.  But we can easily put the written Hebrew words into our students’ hands right away and help them develop at the very least, a right-to-left concept of print, as they didscreen-shot-2016-10-07-at-3-52-52-pm as pre-schoolers (or even earlier these days!) with their native English.

Consider Pat the Bunny or Good Night Moon.  Kids who heard these early favorites on their loved-ones’ laps eventually came to predict and recite the tender words, and many kids began to develop letter-sound correspondences, too!  If they didn’t begin to decode the words by discreet sounds, then they often learned them as sight words, recognizing the combined letter shapes and contours as a whole chunk.

I contend that even with the first 6 words of most standard Hebrew prayers, (ברוך אתה __אלוהינו מלך העולם) our kids could be internalizing nearly half the Hebrew alphabet’s letter-sound correspondences!   After all, these 6 words contain 12 distinct Hebrew letters, including some final-letter forms.  And, BONUS!  One of the words is mega-hi-frequency (conversationally):

אתה means you!

Once the kids are literate in English, we ought to matter-of-factly present the additional modality of Hebrew reading to support and fortify our instruction, specifically AFTER our kids have had ample aural Hebrew comprehensible input of the words in question:   Students’ Hebrew names (a very personal and therefore powerful way to recognize letters and their sounds); prayers and song lyrics; the names of religious objects being studied, etc.  It’s a missed opportunity to refer to such Hebrew words as Shabbat or challah, or תפוחים ודבש  (i.e., apples & honey) screen-shot-2016-10-07-at-4-00-13-pmwithout simultaneously presenting their written Hebrew counterparts in context.  But I’m not advocating for isolated word labelling, like we used to see in so many bilingual classrooms in the 80’s – 90’s.  I’m talking about contextualized chunks of written Hebrew language, chunks that will be repeated orally throughout the normal course of class.

My original question was, “What can we expect our kids to be able to do with Hebrew after 3rd through 7th grade supplementary Hebrew & religious school?”  I just explained how the religious/liturgical/lifecycle studies can reinforce our kids’ Modern Hebrew acumen through increased exposure to contextualized Hebrew text, the more comprehensible & compelling, the better.

As I wrote in my manifesto (here) to our temple’s Education Director, Lori Sagarin, back in November, when I first embarked on this mission to reform Modern Hebrew language education, “By the end of 7th grade, we could realistically hope to graduate students with a strong ear for Hebrew, a great Hebrew accent, resulting from copious auditory input, excellent listening, decoding and reading comprehension within the limited high-frequency Hebrew corpus in which they’ve been immersed, discourse at the paragraph level…, and, in the upper grades, some writing skill beyond simple sentences.  Most importantly, we will bring our students to a proficiency level at which they can seek more language input independently.  We call this early but impressive skill set, ‘micro-fluency.’ (term coined by Terry Waltz, PhD).”

If, by 7th grade, our kids feel that their Hebrew journey thus far has been enjoyable and worthwhile, if they feel confident in their growing Hebrew communication skill set, in their ability to understand and produce comprehensible messages, then they’ll be more inclined to continue their Hebrew trajectory.  In high school, college, travel, ulpan…wherever.screen-shot-2016-10-09-at-9-00-44-am

And we know that mutual understanding is the foundation of trust and peace.

!יאללה    Let’s get going!  There’s work to do in 5777!

Personalizing and Customizing the Comprehensible Hebrew Classroom

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You may wonder, dear reader, “Where can I get my hands on a curriculum and/or pacing guide for teaching Comprehensible Hebrew?”  The quick answer to your query is unpopular but true.  A Comprehensible Input-based curriculum is a moving target, and a very personal one at that.  Personal to the teacher’s style and imagination, and personalized to meet the developmental, individual, social and cultural needs of her students.  In short a Comprehensible Input-based curriculum is emergent – generated from the interests and ideas of the group/s you’re teaching.  (Though I am noodling the idea of creating a Hebrew supplementary school articulated curriculum….stay tuned!?!)

Take for example the story seeds I was sowing in my 6th-7th grade group on Wednesday night.  I don’t really know these 25 kids yet (it was only our 3rd meeting), so I still rely on name tags to identify them.  I certainly don’t know what their interests and passions are yet, though I’m beginning to explore this in an effort to build relationships and create a positive classroom community.  I knew I wanted to start exposing the group to some of the highest frequency verbs, so I decided to get started with a safe crowd-pleaser topic, food, using the verbs ‘likes/loves’ and ‘(doesn’t) have.’  (i.e., איו, יש, אוהב)  This was the basis for my Wednesday lesson plan.

I pre-selected some Hebrew cognate food props from my vault of amazing plastic facsimiles, then, I printed out some local restaurant logos from Google images, to match the food choices, and made colorful posters of these locales to hang throughout the classroom.  (I heard the kids mention some of the restaurants during our last class together).  A local Italian place, two burger joints (so I could get some compare/contrast language in – more on that another time), and a Middle Eastern spot, all within minutes of the temple.  Class runs from 5:30 – 6:00pm, so I knew that dinner fare would play well.

Already I had several ingredients for a customized experience:  Familiar kid-friendly foods that they were likely to have opinions about, from local places that most kids would know first-hand.  The evening menu then became an exploration of food/restaurant preferences, within a simple and repetitive story framework.

Like all stories, mine had a central problem that emerged when my student, Leah volunteered that she loves felafel.screen-shot-2016-09-17-at-4-51-58-pm  For nearly 25 minutes we spent time in Hebrew trying to track down felafel for our hungry protagonist.  First she went to Maggiano’s, our Italian venue, hungrily seeking felafel.  I accompanied her across the classroom toward the Maggiano’s poster, where a Maggiano’s representative/classmate was waiting, a luscious slice of (plastic) pizza in one fist, a rubbery beige disc of coiled pasta in the other.  I did the talking while my actors silently brought our drama to life.  As dramatic director, I coached Leah to rub her stomach, stating that she loves felafel, while the class confirmed that no, unfortunately Maggiano’s doesn’t have felafel.  It has pizza, and it has spaghetti.

ME:  “Do you like pizza?”

LEAH:  “No.”

“Class, Leah doesn’t like pizza!”screen-shot-2016-09-17-at-4-59-06-pm

“Oh, No!”

Do you like spaghetti?”

No.”

“Class!  Leah doesn’t like spaghetti!”

“Oh, no!”

“Leah, what do you like?”

“Felafel!”

Class, what does she like?”

“Felafel!”

“Does Maggiano’s have felafel?”

“No!”

“Class, Maggiano’s doesn’t have felafel!”

“Oh, no!  Oh, no!”

“Maggiano’s doesn’t have felafel!  Who has felafel?  Does Portillo’s have felafel?”

Our conversation continued in this way, punctuated by student rejoinders – (אוי ואבוי = Oh, no!) –  as Leah sought hunger relief at Portillo’s and Poochie’s.  By the end of class she had trekked around the room from eatery to eatery, rejecting (plastic) pizza, spaghetti, burgers and fries (with ketchup – also a cognate!)  Finally, she stood face to face with a classmate/employee at Pita Inn.  “Does Pita Inn have felafel?”  Everyone was ready to escape this onerous predicament.  “Yes!” they all chimed in.  “Pita Inn HAS felafel!”

At the end of class Leah received a plastic pita bread (aka felafel sandwich) and pretended to hungrily dig in.  We applauded her perseverance and drama skills, and we all went home to dinner.

Day 3 for this group (+-90 cumulative minutes of instruction) – and they just co-spun their first Hebrew story.

Comprehensible Hebrew on Opening Day!

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Chicagoland is sweltering under a September heat wave this week.  It was nearly 90 degrees in my (day job) classroom with similar humidity (no A/C).  I taught in that before coming to teach my first ever (air conditioned!) class at TBI.  The afternoon’s festivities kept me jittery, and amid the sweaty freak-out lead-up, I realized that 30 minutes for absolute newbies would go by in a flash.  I had waaaaay over lesson-planned, so I chose to prune & snip, thereby shedding some anxiety.

screen-shot-2016-09-13-at-10-58-46-pmI wanted our kids to walk away feeling encouraged.  And successful.  And smiling.   Those were my ‘curricular goals’ from which I decided to backwards-plan.  No worries about hi-frequency structures, circling, repetitions, or the like… yet.  Just a fun, informal meeting & intro with some back-and-forth Hebrew communication.

The first group of 20+ 3rd & 4th graders included my own daughter (and #1 Hebrew cheerleader!)  I started by introducing myself to the group in Hebrew:  .אני עליזה.  אני מורה לעברית.  I wrote nearly everything I said, as it came up.  On the dry erase board in cursive/no vowels, in black, and with the English translation in red below it.  I went back to slowly pause ‘n point at it frequently.  I will be experimenting with Cold Character Reading (CCR), but these kids have also had exposure to the Alef Bet starting in 2nd grade.  So I was getting a baseline on their decoding skills.  Some were stronger than others, but it looked as though many could read the short Hebrew words and phrases on the board, when repeated, prompted and in context.  

Next, I distributed their lanyard name tags.  Most kids recognized their Hebrew names orally, but their English first & last names were pencilled on the back, just in case.  I jotted, ‘אני פה’ [‘I’m here’] on the board, and after a few repetitions, they got the hang of responding, ‘אני פה’  when they heard their name.  I modeled courtesy with ‘תודה’ [‘Thank you’], and I could feel the excitement rise as the kids could readily produce these short and appropriate utterances upon hearing their name and taking their tag!  They were proud to share what they knew.  By the time all the tags were distributed, we were nearly halfway through class!  The remainder was spent doing Total Physical Response (TPR) – the kids responded to my commands, demonstrating comprehension (or not) by doing as I requested:

Stand up/sit down.  Boys stand up.  Girls sit down.  Boys sit down, girls stand up.

Next I folded in ‘slowly’ and ‘quickly.’  Boys stand up quickly;  Girls sit down slowly…  This side [of the room] stands up; the other [side] sits down….  Just as the kids were about to ease back slowly into their chairs, I commanded them to quickly stand up!  We played unpredictably like this for a few short minutes…and they LOVED it!

When time was almost up, I asked them to reflect in English about how it felt to hear Hebrew this way.  The kids pointed out that the gestures and acting supported their understanding, that they relied on the gestures.  This was a great place to teach them the ‘stop signal’ – one fist pounding the opposite palm noise that tells me, “the meaning is not clear.”

The 5th-6th-7th grade class (50+ kids) was WAY TOO BIG.  I had a challenging ‘lift-off’ due to the sheer numbers.  Passing out  nametags and meeting the students felt long and boring, and allowed English chit-chat to erupt.  Once the Comprehensible Input got going though, we steadily got our craft aloft.  During the last several minutes of this class (from +- 5:30-6:00pm), I acknowledged how hungry we all were (patting my belly and gesturing eating).  We launched into a mini-scene with one boy walking (running?) quickly to Poochie’s (local burger joint) – I’d posted a mini poster with the restaurant’s logo on one wall – while a girl walked slowly to Portillo’s (a competing local burger joint).  I asked those who liked Poochie’s to run to that classroom location s-l-o-w-l-y; and the Portillo’s-lovers to walk to theirs quickly.  Much narrated walking and running between restaurants ensued.  By the end of class, the kids were standing in their respective restaurant zones, stimulated, energized and, well, HUNGRY!

Just before the bigger kids left, I asked them to reflect on today’s Hebrew class:

“All the gestures and acting helped me understand what you were saying.”

“I understood all your Hebrew words!”screen-shot-2016-10-11-at-11-33-25-am

“I could read the words on the board.”

“That was really fun!”

Encouraged, successful and smiling.  Not a bad way to end the workday.

PS:  I will try to edit and post parts of the videos of these classes soon.

PSS:  Here’s the link to the video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn7rsc7xDNA

Ways and Means

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Beginning of the School Year Logistics

Here’s our Hebrew & Religious School schedule:screen-shot-2016-09-13-at-11-13-07-pm

Wednesdays, 4:15 – 6:00pm

Sundays, 9:00 – 12:10 (of which the last hour, 11:10 – 12:10 is dedicated to Hebrew instruction)

Wednesday, September 7 is opening day.   The 3rd-4th grade group (29 kids total), hereafter referred to as Group A, will come see me right away, from 4:20-4:50, then return to their classroom with their teacher for liturgical Hebrew & religious studies.  Then Group B (53 kids, grades 5, 6, and 7)*, who started with liturgical Hebrew/religious studies in their classroom, will visit me from 4:55-5:25.  Eventually, (say, after 2 or 3 sessions?) the 30-minute Hebrew slots will increase to 45 minutes, with each group getting around 15 minutes of literacy extension after the 30 minutes of oral work.  This will eventually fill the Wednesday session.

It will take some coordinated practice (and wrangling) to get everyone settled for a punctual startup and transition between groups.

Class Lists/Hebrew Names:

I have asked the school office for class lists by grade, in the form of a 3-column table, with each student’s full English name in the first column, his/her Hebrew first name in the center (hand-written is fine), and then an empty column to the right.  This will serve as a excellent template for some early personalization and (onscreen?) class survey activities, allowing us to get to know each other as we build our playful community.

We’re also ordering name tags – the reusable vinyl sleeve kind on a lanyard – and will have kids wear their Hebrew name (written in cursive Hebrew) while attending class, until we all learn each others’ Hebrew names.  These will be collected and stored in the Hebrew Room.  If a student doesn’t have a family-given Hebrew name, I believe assigning one is a good idea.  Why?  It’s a great way to:  Establish/reinforce that this is a Hebrew-speaking zone; Practice decoding (the names) in Hebrew – very high interest!;  and introduce common Hebrew/Israeli names, which are part of Israeli culture.  Click here for a list of popular Israeli Hebrew names.

Classroom Environment:

Before opening day, I’ll set up my teaching space, making sure that it’s inviting and appealing, but also posting some of the most basic language I know I’ll need right away.  To start, I’ll probably only hang a few question words, (‘Who?’ ‘What?’ and ‘Where?’) from my printable mini-poster collection of hi-frequency verbs and interrogatives, the Hebrew Word Wall 2016.  (The Word Wall can also be found on the Novice Hebrew Corpus page.)  The walls will start relatively bare, but they’ll grow increasingly text-rich as more Hebrew is acquired and needed in context.  I don’t want to overwhelm the kids with a bunch of words they don’t know yet!  I’ll also make sure the large dry-erase whiteboard & markers are in place, and that my props are sorted in bins for easy access.

I wear a wireless headset microphone when I teach (move over, JLo)- indispensable for those of us who teach multiple daily classes using Comprehensible Input.  It really spares our voices!

My laptop computer will be connected to the overhead projector, and can toggle with the document camera to project images from paper and computer, plus videos etc. onscreen.

We’ll have a chair for each student, arranged in a horseshoe or herringbone configuration (not sure – haven’t worked in that space yet.)  No desks or tables.  This set-up frees up space for dramatization and movement, and affords general flexibility, plus writing will mostly be done on dry-erase lap boards, which can also be used as lap tables when kids write in their notebooks.

I’ll post a separate article/s on writing once we get rolling, and will also upload photos of my new Hebrew classroom digs.

I plan to upload links to video footage of our classes with reflection/commentary after class.  As soon as we figure out the tech requirements to do so, I’ll create a space on this blog where you’ll be able to view and comment on our novice Hebrew classes, both Group A (the 3rd-4th grade group) and Group B (the 5th – 7th graders.)

Please feel free to post questions about my before-opening-day prep or anything else on the blog, or email me at cmovanhebrew@gmail.com!

*ADDENDUM:  With over 50 kids, the 5th through 7th grade group is waaaaay too big and unwieldy to teach all together.  To address this challenge, I will break out the 5th grade group and teach them separately.  So I’ll teach 3x 30-minute sections on Wednesdays, and 3x 20-minute sections on Sundays.  Also, to save time, Hebrew teachers will distribute and collect their students’ name tags and store them in plastic baggies in their classrooms.