Early childhood
Sep 9, 2022
Three years ago the Miami Jewish community embarked on the JRS pilot program as a way of addressing how we can impact families of young children to connect and stay connected to the Jewish community.
Aug 26, 2022
For Jews, 13 is a very lucky number indeed — the number associated with becoming a Bar Mitzvah! CAJE is proud to report that the 2022-2023 Miami Jewish Day School Robotics program is back and better than ever with 13 schools joining our cohort this year!
Aug 19, 2022
Wait, what does this mean? Aren’t teachers in schools to teach and students in schools to learn? Actually, no. If schools are to meet the needs of all children, then it is everyone’s job, including the adults, to learn.
Jun 17, 2022
In the coming school year, every (funded) Jewish day school in Miami-Dade County have agreed to put up placards or signs in private areas within their middle and high schools that lists a dedicated phone number that teens can call or text for anonymous and confidential assistance.
Jun 10, 2022
The best complement I think I’ve ever heard about a teacher was when one of their students said: “It doesn’t matter to me what she’s teaching -- the biology of worms, the history of clouds, or the phone book -- I would still take her class, because I know that she would make it completely fascinating.”
Jun 3, 2022
After a two-year hiatus, CAJE has brought back its 4th Annual Miami Jewish Day School Robotics Festival! In mid-May, 150 students from 8 schools gathered at Scheck Hillel Community School to compete in various challenges and showcase what they’ve learned throughout the year.
May 27, 2022
If you’ve been reading our previous articles this year, you are well aware of the Jewish teacher shortage, both in the day school and early childhood education sectors. The same is true in the congregational education (CE) sector, commonly known as religious school, Hebrew school, Sunday school, among other names.
Apr 29, 2022
"Kol Yisrael Arevim Ze La Zeh – All of Israel is Responsible for One Another"
You’ve probably heard this saying before, maybe even learned it as a song in school. But what does it really mean when we say that all Jews are responsible for one another? It means that all Jews have made this unspoken commitment to something larger than ourselves.
Apr 1, 2022
How can we build a Marshall Plan for Jewish education writ large so that we do not destroy the one factor that has enabled our people to thrive in Diaspora life over centuries of difficulties and joys?
Mar 25, 2022
The Eleanor Meyerhoff Katz z”l Teacher Initiative Awards are grants provided to exceptional Jewish day school teachers to implement new and creative classroom initiatives. Funded by the Eleanor M. and Herbert D. Katz Foundation and administered by the Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE), a subsidiary agency of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, the Katz Teacher Initiative Awards are now in their 7th year.
Mar 4, 2022
Teachers play an essential role in student development in two central ways: first, they broaden and deepen student knowledge; second, they promote the skills students need to become purposeful and motivated, resourceful and knowledgeable, strategic and goal-directed—what Universal Design for Learning (UDL) calls “Expert Learners.”
Feb 18, 2022
With the influx of new families moving down from the Northeast in particular, Miami Jewish day schools are scrambling to find teachers to fill open positions. But our cost of living in the Greater Miami area coupled with steeply increasing prices for houses in safe neighborhoods has made it difficult to attract new teachers.
Feb 11, 2022
Congregational Education programs are, in many Jewish communities across the country, the mainstay of Jewish learning for children. More children and teens attend congregational education than Jewish day schools.
Jan 14, 2022
ECE teachers are educators. They are not merely playing with children.
They work with curricula, follow developmental standards, plan the day’s activities with intention and purpose.... It is the same work that every professional teacher does. Yet, for some reason, ECE teachers earn far less than teachers in elementary, junior high or high school, even when they have the exact same professional credentials.
Dec 24, 2021
Caring for children’s wellbeing has always been an essential goal of the many different kinds of child care options, from children being taken care of by family members to children going to child care centers. In fact, Head Start[1] was founded in 1965 to give comprehensive care to children living in poverty. At that time, only 10% of children 0 – 5 years old were enrolled in “nursery schools” or child care centers!
Dec 10, 2021
What do Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Heads of school have in common? Believe it or not, quite a lot! They are all part of CAJE’s Principals and Administrators Council (PAC) network that convenes the principals and heads of school from all of our 10 Federation funded schools with the principals and heads of school from the non-funded Jewish day schools located in Miami-Dade.
Nov 26, 2021
After nearly two years in which their lives were upended, students are finally beginning to return to some normalcy this school year. Yet, the effects of learning online, the anxiety of missing major life milestones, and the isolation from peers and extended family have all taken their toll.
Nov 12, 2021
This week, as the “virtual curtain” fell on our final Torahtron performance, the co-creators of Words From Our Hearts: A Prayer Exploration for Early Childhood, Evelyn Goldfinger and Joy Schandler, had an opportunity to reflect on what they learned throughout the yearlong program.
Nov 5, 2021
As the authors from Rosov Consulting described in a white paper published by CASJE in 2020 “Beginning with the work of Bellah and his colleagues, in their landmark study Habits of the Heart, sociologists have distinguished people’s relationships to their work as jobs, careers and callings.”
Oct 29, 2021
Our Jewish community, and others around North America, are experiencing a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. To education veterans and Jewish communal professionals, this is, of course, nothing new. What is new is that this summer the first systematic effort in more than 10 years to collect data about the Jewish education workforce was published based on a four-part research study led by Rosov Consulting and the Greenberg Team.
