•
How to integrate personal religious reflec-
tion and growth into all that we do?
•
What new modes of teaching and assess-
ment should we consider?
At each campus meeting, we also included
local rabbinical alumni in the discussions.
At the same time, our National Clinical
Education Advisory Committee, chaired by
Rabbi Sam Joseph and made up of represen-
tatives of our stateside campuses, held
ongoing discussions about the clinical educa-
tional components of our curriculum. The
Committee grappled with the goals, content,
and sequencing of the training of four key
rabbinical roles: educational, pastoral, liturgi-
cal, and communal/organizational. It was
recommended that each of these areas have a
required in-field mentored experience to
complement the didactic in-class experiences,
and that many of the skills involved with
these roles can be honed in various settings.
All of their recommendations were channeled
into the core curriculum planning process.
What resulted from this extensive planning
was both a list of all the areas and issues upon
which there was agreement in the
Committee, as well as those areas that needed
additional review. Over time, it was also
decided to recommend the switch to a
quadmester (7 weeks) system, which would:
•
encourage faculty to think about how they
structure and present material in their fields;
•
provide added opportunities for integration
between learning areas;
•
suggest the use of shorter learning inten-
sives for some subjects.
At the second all-faculty retreat in June
2000,
which was attended by 74 HUC-JIR
professors and academic administrators, the
Core Curriculum Committee presented the
vision, essential goals and framework for the
curriculum. The overriding goal of the new
curriculum is to help students develop their
ability to formulate responses to enduring
questions of meaning, which, in turn, are
essential to the students’ ability to articulate
to congregants a clear vision for Jewish life.
The Committee identified a series of these
questions that would require the student, in
formulating a response, to hone conceptual-
ization skills. Among these questions were:
•
How does Judaism provide meaning to
human existence?
•
Is there meaning to Jewish history?
•
What is the nature of the ongoing relation-
ships between God and the Jewish people?
During the Fall 2000 semester, members of
the Core Curriculum Committee traveled to
each stateside campus to hear the reactions
and suggestions of faculty; related issues of
assessment also were discussed. A curricular
matrix for each year of the proposed three-
year core curriculum was then developed,
noting goals for student learning and levels of
proficiency by discipline, skills to be acquired,
and personal characteristics to be developed.
B. Developing New Assessment Protocols
In order to develop our new, integrative core
curriculum for the first three years of the
rabbinical program, we also had to consider
new models of assessment. While student
evaluation has always been conducted
through the completion of academic
courses, supervised clinical internships and
participation in cocurricular experiences,
most of this evaluation reinforces the
separation between students’ academic,
professional, and religious formation. The
new model of assessment, proposed by a
national task force chaired by Professor
Michael Zeldin and the Core Curriculum
Planning Committee and educational con-
sultants, focuses on and deepens students’
capacity to synthesize these areas of growth.
As a result of the work of the Task Force on
Assessment, it was agreed that the new proto-
cols for assessment should both:
•
guide students toward making connections
among their academic studies, professional
development, and spiritual growth by
encouraging them to articulate meaningful
statements about Judaism (Formative
Assessment).
•
make a judgment about the students’
readiness to continue towards rabbinical
ordination (Summative Assessment).
The Task Force underscored the relationship
of assessment to teaching, learning, and the
goals of the new curriculum:
•
HUC-JIR should only assess what it val-
ues most.
(
continued on page 8)
2003
ISSUE 62
7
Dr. Marc Bregman and students, HUC-JIR/Jerusalem.
Dr. Eugene B. Borowitz and students, HUC-JIR/New York.