Anatomy of a Shiur

Program Description

Take a deep dive into the pedagogy of teaching an interactive, text-centered class! Study the art of crafting and facilitating an interactive text study for adult learners. Learn practical skills, workshop, and teach your newly designed session.

While many fine institutions exist to teach Torah to the next generation of Jewish leaders, rarely are these scholars taught how to teach the Torah that they have learned. Despite the lack of teacher training, Jewish professionals are simply expected to be able to teach Torah well. We believe that a significant increase in the number of highly-trained Torah teachers has the capacity to radically change the Jewish community’s relationship to its spiritual and intellectual heritage. Through this teacher training course, we aim to significantly improve the quality of adult Jewish education in the North American Jewish community.

Participate in “Anatomy of a Shiur” and transform the way you teach Jewish texts! Learn practical skills, such as: designing your shiur with a narrative arc, hooking your participants’ interest, and formulating ‘layered’ questions. This class includes sample text studies from a variety of genres (Torah, Talmud, midrash) and provides you with the opportunity to practice and workshop your new skills as well as design and teach your own newly crafted shiur (text-centered class).

This immersive Summer Program course in Jerusalem is a joint project of Pardes North America and The Pardes Center for Jewish Educators.

We owe a debt of gratitude to our friends at Kevah, who initiated and ran the Kevah Teaching Fellowship for many years, therein creating a cadre of highly-trained teachers of Torah. Pardes’s Anatomy of a Shiur programming was born out of a partnership with Kevah leaders Rabbi David Kasher and Dr. Julie Lieber.

To participate in this summer’s Anatomy of a Shiur course, apply to the Pardes Summer Program.