A paraphrase of the beginning of chapter 18 in “Anne of Green Gables” by L.M. Montgomery, one of my favorite books as a child, speaks to our moment in time.

“All things great are wound up with all things little.” At first glance it might not seem that a coronavirus that was spreading in a far-flung place called Wuhan, China, could have much or anything to do with the fortunes of students and teachers at Rabbi Pesach Raymon Yeshiva in Edison. But it had.

Who could have imagined that a microscopic virus halfway across the world would affect the lives of Jewish families in New Jersey? Although there were creative novelists and real-world epidemiologists who simulated certain possibilities, none of us had a true inkling of how quickly our quiet, routine world could be upended. COVID-19 has completely transformed our lives.

Emotional Impact Is
Greater When We Are Young

When we are children and young adults, the times when world events affect our daily lives make a very deep impression on our psyches. Although the brain always evidences plasticity, it is certainly greatest when young, and all events possess the ability to impress a child’s development more than an adult. That is why books or television shows read or watched by children remain assimilated in their memories much more than anything absorbed as an adult. Our dear students are living during a historic and unprecedented moment, where schooling and many aspects of ordinary life are interrupted and plans are filled with uncertainty.

Choosing Life Is Courageous

During this unusual time, certain themes permeate my thinking, some related to psychological wellbeing and others related to the deep-seated nature of learning. I recall the pasuk in the Torah that encourages us to make good choices and live by our Torah-true values. We constantly need to make choices that are aligned with our Torah values and when we make mistakes, we have to reassess and correct ourselves and try again. Hashem tells us in Parshat Acharei Mot, 18:6, וחי בהם, “by which one should live.” Choosing life is courageous.

The Role of the Influencer

Another leitmotif in my conversations with many students over the years has always been the fact that each and every person is a leader and an influencer. In a time of masking, I keep thinking of Mr. Hooper, the minister in Hawthorne’s famous short story, who covers his face with a black veil, and how it disrupts all of his social relationships. Each person is important and influences others.

Learning Is Primarily a Social Transaction

Another fundamental theme that keeps resonating is that true learning is a social transaction that occurs between an expert teacher transmitting cognitive tools to a novice learner. All learning is mediated through a person—even students who learn well from reading books or using online programs are still essentially learning from another person! A person wrote the book and a person programmed and developed the online program (including AI-supported programs, which were still developed by a person). It is just that the person is at a one- or two-step remove in these situations, and that is a strength area of some learners and does not work at all or is more limited for others.

Genuine Learning Is Transformational

From early childhood through eighth grade, children develop the foundation for being lifelong learners. These cognitive tools refer not to content knowledge but rather to thinking skills and ways to approach information, particularly as related to strategies for memory, perception and attention. These fundamental building blocks of learning include developing representational and symbolic thought (including sound-symbol and number-symbol correspondence), perspective-taking/role playing, categorization, patterning, number sense, logical memory and attention controls. The metacognitive elements include goal-setting, self-monitoring, and self-reflection. Children must master the fundamentals of reading instruction, which include decoding, fluency, prosody, making meaning from text, connecting text to other domains, and analyzing text.

Crucial Criteria for a Thoughtful School Administration

During distance learning, we were not looking to entirely replicate the in-person school experience. Rather, we were seeking novel ways to reach similar goals. In this unprecedented and unforeseen environment, we built our program meticulously, thoroughly and with intentionality, with attention to students’ emotional and social wellbeing in addition to their academic progress. This “building blocks” approach ensured a more uniform transition for both students and teachers. Just like we implement in our building, a flexible approach is key to success with children by ongoing adjustment of their instruction.

Our program was informed by research-based best practices in educational pedagogy. Below are a few key elements that we consider in order to design all of our learning programs with intentionality, care and concern.

Synchronous sessions are important. From an emotional perspective, children must feel safe and secure in order to genuinely process and learn. If families and children are stressed, fearful or overwhelmed, learning will be more limited. Promoting regular routines and a positive and structured educational environment—no matter the location—will support growth. Opportunities for children to process their emotions should be embedded within their instructional time. To that end, we encouraged teachers to use a calm and soothing tone of voice, to model dealing with technological glitches with aplomb and to carefully weave social and emotional snippets into their sessions. Brick-and-mortar school is a social environment, and the Zoom sessions needed to incorporate this aspect as well.

As Julia Sklar explains in her National Geographic article, Zoom is an intense medium. Children and adults must marshal great effort to concentrate and have an “attentive meeting participant face.” Typically, most people’s ability to maintain that level of intensity is about 15 minutes.

To maximize their ability to concentrate and minimize “Zoom fatigue,” we purposely designed a mix of Zoom sessions and independent work time. Zoom impairs people’s ability to judge non-verbal cues, especially facial cues, and requires intense attention to words in a different way from live interactions. Prolonged eye contact becomes the most readily available facial cue, and this is not always comfortable. Gallery View instead of Speaker View can overly tax the brain’s central vision and reduce concentration on the speaker. Continuous partial attention impacts learning. For some children, there may be sensory triggers to Zoom sessions. We have tried to adapt this information to create a program that provides balance for the students.

Asynchronous work plays an important role. The primacy of promoting passionate, lifelong, independent learners through building crucial skill foundations continues to influence the instructional and activities choices of administrators and teachers. Whether assignments are review activities, writing prompts or project-based, the fundamentals of our metacognitive educational philosophy continued to inform teacher practices.

Reflections of a Principal

This time and space represents an area of emotional challenge for me, as well. I miss my students and my teachers. To the extent possible, I interact daily with students and teachers by visiting Zoom sessions and scheduling regular Zoom meetings. I strive to be as supportive as I can to the many families and children who are suffering and struggling for a wide variety of reasons. May we all be zoche to refuot and besurot tovot in the future.

Chana Luchins is the principal of general studies at Rabbi Pesach Raymon Yeshiva in Edison.