Preparing Avocational Teachers: A Model for Small Communities

To recruit, prepare, and support a corps of volunteer teachers for the religious school and to develop a thematic curriculum for the school built around existing materials.

Kehillat Israel has been at the forefront of seeking to provide the best possible Jewish education for the children of Lansing’s Jewish community. In 1991, a group of education leaders from that community proposed a model for solving the problems faced by virtually every supplementary religious school program: finding and retaining quality teachers. The result of their work was this project to create an “Avocational Teacher” training program at the KI Religious School.

More To Consider:

• Teachers are at the Core of Schools
• Teach them diligently to your children: An experiment in avocational teaching
• Parents as religious school teachers: A survey of participants in the avocational teacher project at Congregation Kehillat Israel