Regosin photo by George McLean
Zaitchik photo by Ben Harmon

Hesed—kindness. Hachnasset orhim—hospitality. Tzedakah—justice. These are values simple enough to teach a young child. But what makes a value Jewish? How can Jewish values be applied in the preschool classroom—or exemplified in everyday life?

Providing preschool teachers with the Jewish knowledge and educational practices to explore these challenges is the focus of a grant from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and an innovative distance learning program being introduced to the western Massachusetts community this fall.

A collaboration between Hebrew College Online and the Shoolman Graduate School of Jewish Education's Early Childhood Institute (ECI), funded by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, the Online Early Childhood Institute combines Internet classes, videoconferencing and traditional classroom instruction to deliver ECI courses to a select group of educators in the Springfield area. Local partners in the initiative include Bay Path College, which hosts the classroom and videoconference sessions at its Longmeadow campus; the Resource Center for Jewish Education in Longmeadow, which assists Hebrew College in recruiting and clarifying the needs of educators in the community; and the Springfield JCC Department of Early Childhood Education.

An expansion of the College's established online-learning program, the ECI Online provides instructors and students with a greater degree of personal contact. In meeting together, students can more easily bond with their instructor and classmates. Videoconferencing allows for one-on-one tutorials and the visual demonstration of creative classroom activities, such as using music or puppetry to enact Jewish values. "The class, as it coheres as a whole, becomes a pool for new ideas." says Ina Regosin, the ECI's founding director and dean of students at Hebrew College. "The Harold Grinspoon Foundation, in making this training possible, is enhancing the early educator profession."

The Online Early Childhood Institute combines Internet classes, videoconferencing and traditional classroom instruction to deliver ECI courses to a select group of educators in the Springfield area.

The program began on September 26, with Teaching Jewish Values to Young Children, and continues with Creating a Developmentally Appropriate Curriculum for Early Childhood Jewish Education in the spring. As with all ECI offerings, the classes integrate the best pedagogic practices in general early childhood education with the study of Judaism.

A hybrid graduate-level course in Jewish studies is also being offered this spring. By then, a fourth component will have been added to the distance-learning model for western Massachusetts—desktop voice conferencing. According to Dr. Alan Zaitchik, director of Hebrew College Online, this technology will augment the online-learning sessions of the program, optimizing verbal communication while allowing the instructor to share his or her computer screen with students as a kind of interactive whiteboard.

"One of the key benefits of this hybrid model is that it can be continually expanded and duplicated for other Hebrew College programs," says Zaitchik. "Ultimately, our goal is to create a network of virtual campuses across the country."

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