Educator Training: The Past, Present, and Future
As the Foundation marks our 20th anniversary in 2025, we are pleased to elevate some of the individuals, organizations, and research that have left an indelible mark on the field over the last two decades.
Supporting educator training has been a focus of the Foundation’s investments since our earliest days. Over the last two decades, educator professional development programs in the field have proliferated and evolved significantly. In this feature, Dr. Arielle Levites of CASJE and Shuki Taylor of M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education share their insights on efforts to train Jewish educators. What are best practices today? How does research inform this work? What are the challenges and opportunities moving forward? We’re grateful they took the time to discuss their perspectives. (photo credit above: Yonit Schiller)
Evolution of Educator Training
When M² was founded in 2016 it became clear how many Jewish educators were still waiting for more accessible and meaningful opportunities for professional development. Together with the support of the Foundation, we began to innovate—exploring different topics, reaching new segments of the field, and offering educators a wider range of opportunities to grow and deepen their work throughout their careers. It reflected a broader shift in the field: a growing understanding that educator development must be ongoing, intentional, and expansive.
One of the most significant changes over the past two decades has been the normalization of professional development as a standard part of an educator’s experience. Earlier in my work directing a training program for experiential Jewish education at Yeshiva University, many educators had to take vacation days and pay program fees out of pocket in order to participate. Today, that is no longer the case. Organizations recognize the value of investing in their talent—the impact on retention, on professional growth, and on career trajectory and mobility. The field has matured and come to understand itself more. - Shuki Taylor
People are much more adaptive to change and are willing to learn about and try new models in educator training. For a long time, professional development was done in house by each organization. Now, independent programs enable cross-field pollination as people from different organizations come together to learn.
I think the field has become much more sophisticated over the last 20 years. We’ve seen robust efforts to collect data and understand the landscape of learning for educators. There are new and important insights that help us understand where we’re succeeding and where we are not quite hitting the mark. Many people understand the value of professional learning for improving teaching, retaining teachers, and improving student outcomes. People who run professional programs have a body of research that validates their work and provides guideposts to aim for in building the highest quality programs.
In fact we’ve partnered with M² in the past to ensure that individuals designing educator professional development experiences are well grounded in the research on most effective practices. We want them to have the right tools in this regard, especially in enhancing student outcomes. - Arielle Levites (photo credit above: Yonit Schiller)
The Power of Research to Move the Field Forward
Research has been vital in helping advance the field's approach to educator training. Arielle credits the 2008 Educator in Jewish School study from JESNA as the first comprehensive look at the pipeline of Jewish educators. Fast forward to 2021 when CASJE's own multi-part study, conducted with Rosov Consulting, offered new findings and insights on the career trajectories of Jewish educators—and the interventions that can have a positive influence on those careers.
Arielle highlights three key learnings among many from that research:
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Ongoing Over One-Time
We learned that one-time workshops were more common in professional learning, but research suggests that more effective programs are ongoing. They provide opportunities for follow up, to test things out, ask questions, get feedback, and change practice. We emphasize this in our interactions with program providers.
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Grounded in Real-World Context
The most effective programs account for the real word context in which educators work. These programs are responsive to what’s happening in their educational settings—whether at camp, after school, around the kitchen table, or elsewhere. They’re grounded in the populations they serve, subject matters they address, and skills they try to embed. So, rather than being general, training programs need to address what educators need to know to do their jobs well and fill the roles they’ve been assigned.
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Opportunity to Elevate Teacher-leaders
In Jewish education, we can do a better job of honoring teacher-leaders. The general education field identifies and leverages teachers who have a lot to offer to their colleagues and novice teachers, and who want a leading role in professional development. This continues to be an important and exciting opportunity our field should pursue more.
Research today plays a far more applied and practical role than it once did. In the past, much of the research funding was tied to measuring success: program providers were expected to prove outcomes against specific metrics. While this helped establish important standards, it often came at the expense of creativity, innovation, and intuition—the very drivers that allow educators to adapt to emerging needs, imagine new approaches, and take meaningful risks. Without space for experimentation, the field risked stagnation rather than growth.
Today, program providers turn to research not just to validate past work, but to guide future decisions. Research has become more responsive to the field’s needs—offering insights that are instructive, usable, and directly connected to practice. CASJE’s 2021 study on the career trajectories of Jewish educators marked a major turning point, demonstrating how research can illuminate the real challenges educators face and help the field focus its investments and innovations. This shift toward more applied, practitioner-centered research has strengthened the entire ecosystem, allowing creativity and data to work in partnership rather than in tension.
Approaching Our Work Today
There is such a strong connection now between program providers and researchers. I mentioned our collaboration with M², along with other providers, to design a workshop at George Washington University. We came together to make sense of new research in Jewish and general education. We looked at what data said about existing efforts in the field and where else new learnings could be applied. We highlighted key findings that inform providers' ability to design high quality professional learning, like making programs ongoing and addressing real world questions and problems of teachers. The organizations told us how much they valued learning together and making sure their work is aligned with best practices and research knowledge.
We can use research and data to help us imagine more effective professional learning for educators and to understand if current programs have the outcomes that we want. Look no further than general education to see how a robust body of research informs professional learning programs and directly correlates with better outcomes for learners.
Today, there is a much deeper recognition across the field that the personal is professional. Professional development is not just about building discrete skills; it shapes who educators are and how they show up in their work. Educators are role models and mentors. Their effectiveness depends on their own self-awareness, emotional capacity, and ability to navigate complexity. Strengthening an educator’s professional practice means nurturing their identity, investing in their growth as individuals, and helping them develop the empathy, insight, and presence needed to lead others.
At the same time the events of October 7th revealed a new and urgent expectation of educators: the need not only to connect, but to lead. In a moment of fear and confusion, people turned to educators seeking not just community, but answers—clarity, perspective, and a sense of direction. Jewish education cannot rely on relational engagement alone; it must be grounded in substance, conviction, and moral responsibility. Training programs today must prepare educators to meet this demand: to hold complexity, to speak with courage, and to offer both meaningful connection and meaningful leadership. (photo credit: Yonit Schiller)
What the Future Holds
Many educators in the field say they fell into this work, that they bypassed a lot of the traditional onboarding experiences for teachers and educators. Let's make sure we build training for them to ensure they have the necessary, formal pre-service programs. Whether a teacher is a novice or veteran, we ask so much of them today. Jewish education spaces are places where children, teens, parents, and entire families come together to make sense of an increasingly troubling world. We want educators to address big questions, to engage and inspire people, and to work on multiple platforms. We want them to support the mental health and well being of learners and to honor the diversity and changing nature of the American Jewish population. Of course we also we want them to instill the content knowledge—to teach Hebrew, Jewish music, complex and important aspects of Jewish history, and so much more that is critical to the ongoing vitality and continuation of world Jewry and the American Jewish community. Nobody is born naturally knowing how to do any of those things. Teachers need to learn too and they want to succeed. We can help them grow to meet the needs of learners and our community by investing in high quality professional learning. This investment is really investing in our youth and vibrant Jewish future.
Judaism holds extraordinary resources—wisdom, values, practices, ideas, and a vision for people, community, place, and God. Today, there is an urgent thirst for meaning, belonging, guidance, and hope—needs that Judaism can powerfully address. Educators stand at the vital intersection between what Judaism offers and what people are seeking. Their role is not simply to transmit knowledge, but to open access to the depth and richness of Jewish life. The opportunity before us is enormous: more people than ever are turning to Jewish spaces looking for purpose and direction. The challenge is equally great: educators themselves must be deeply connected to the full breadth of what Judaism offers. It is up to us to ensure that educators have the opportunities to learn, experience, and internalize this richness—so that they can share it with clarity, confidence, and inspiration.