Summer 2025 l Beit Rabban + Pedagogy of Partnership
Director’s Message: Leveraging the “Power of Two” – Pedagogy of Partnership at Beit Rabban
Dr. David Farbman, Project Director, The DEEP Consortium
One of the oft-heard (and justifiable) laments within day schools is that there is just so much to learn. Yet, amidst this eagerness to teach so much content, we may lose sight of the skills our students need to persist in and to deepen their learning.
This issue of The DEEP Dive, which explores the enduring partnership between Beit Rabban Day School in Manhattan and Pedagogy of Partnership (PoP), demonstrates that it is possible to instill both the what and the how in education simultaneously. You’ll read how PoP, powered by The Hadar Institute, trains teachers to help their students develop communication and analytical skills around texts of all kinds in the age-old Jewish tradition of havruta—study pairs.
Beit Rabban takes this model even further in that teachers themselves have formed havrutas to unpack and hone their own instructional practice. Together, students and teachers alike at Beit Rabban use the “power of two” to probe content, from Torah to current events to pedagogical approaches, leveraging different perspectives to derive fresh insights and meaning from the many texts and experiences they encounter.
About Pedagogy of Partnership (PoP)
From the Middle East to the Lower East Side, Jewish students learn sacred texts in havruta, or study pairs. This practice, which has roots dating back more than 2,000 years, is a distinguishing feature of Jewish learning environments from elementary schools to rabbinical schools. In a beit midrash, the give and take of each havruta contributes to the study hall’s characteristic hum, and a discussion l’shem shamayim (“in the name of heaven,” or, loosely, for its own sake) is the ultimate expression of deep engagement in learning. This vibrant model is applicable beyond the beit midrash to texts of all sorts.
To help teachers foster such an atmosphere, Pedagogy of Partnership (PoP) provides curricular materials, coaching, and other resources for explicit instruction in the skills central to a strong havruta relationship.
Living Our School’s Values Through Our Partnership with Pedagogy of Partnership
Stephanie Ives, Head of School, and Lisa Exler, Director of Jewish Studies and Ivrit
Beit Rabban Day School is a non-denominational day school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, serving students in early childhood through eighth grade. We are a home of deep and joyful learning for 145 students, and a community of committed and open-minded Judaism.
Our partnership with Pedagogy of Partnership (known familiarly as “PoP”), which began in 2015, is now baked into the fabric of our identity. Our connection started when one of us (Lisa) joined the staff of Beit Rabban as director of Jewish studies, in a position jointly funded by our school and the Hadar Institute, with the goal of developing and field testing Standards for Fluency in Jewish Text and Practice.
We then connected with PoP through work that we were both doing at Hadar; we felt right away that there was a strong association between PoP and Beit Rabban’s commitment to rigorous text study. PoP, with its approach of active, collaborative learning and special focus on “hearing the voice” of the text, was a logical choice for helping teachers cultivate these skills in their students.
At the time, we were also planning to open our middle school, which later opened in 2019. As part of this process, we identified four pillars that would be the foundation of our middle school: Active Learning, Empowered Judaism, Kind Community, and Boundless Campus. We anticipated that these key pillars would ultimately serve to structure our entire school. To elaborate on the four pillars:
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Through its emphasis on relational learning, critical thinking, and multiple perspectives, PoP aligns closely with these pillars and, as we’ve seen over time, our work with PoP has actually strengthened our teachers’ abilities to enact these values. PoP also advances our capacity to integrate Jewish and secular learning in our effort to develop holistic thinkers because its methodology applies not only to Jewish texts but to any text, as well as other human beings or experiences.
PoP has impacted not just Beit Rabban’s classroom instruction and professional development activities but also our broader school community. Some examples:
1. PoP Coaching
Many of our teachers—as well as Lisa, who has since become the PoP instructional leader—have benefitted from one-on-one coaching from PoP coaches. This year, they also engaged in peer coaching by implementing PoP havruta—a pair of PoP-trained teachers who meet monthly with Lisa to debrief their observations of each other’s teaching, workshop a lesson or analyze student work. This peer and professional coaching translates perfectly to the PoP learning philosophy that emphasizes the particularity of each individual’s learning as supported through learning partnerships. Coaching from PoP professionals has also helped us address the challenge of finding the time for teachers to receive support in implementing PoP in their classrooms.
2. PoP for Parents and Children
Classes at Beit Rabban celebrate milestones in their Jewish learning journeys, such as the fourth grade Brunch with Rashi and the fifth grade Family Mishnah Study. These milestone events have always included a parent-child learning component. Until several years ago, parents and children were given a text with a few guiding questions but no additional structure or scaffolding. When we introduced the use of PoP protocols to structure these child-parent discussions, the impact was significant. Instead of awkward silences or parents doing all of the talking, parents and children had substantive interactions around the texts they were learning. These direct experiences of the power of PoP have helped parents understand and support the investment that Beit Rabban makes in PoP professional development.
3. PoP for School Culture Matters
We have found that PoP’s protocols also help us to navigate tricky social issues. For example, to manage some behavior issues on the school bus, we sent an email home to parents asking that they use the accompanying PoP-style text study about the bus rules to talk with their children about the situation. Students then brought back their text study forms and engaged in a facilitated conversation with administrators based on the “noticing and wonderings” they and their parents articulated. They could then productively identify problems and consider solutions to try out. The PoP methodology thus helped students connect deeply to both the rules and their responsibilities and involved the parents as productive partners.
Over the past ten years, we have invested a lot of staff time (teachers’ and administrators’) and financial resources in professional development with PoP. Both teachers and administrators have worked during the summer and evenings to attend PoP training institutes, in addition to time we have dedicated during the school year. And while we have been able to use title funds for some of our PoP coaching, we have also allocated significant funds to PoP professional development, sometimes at the cost of other professional development opportunities. We see the value of this investment in the impact on students’ learning and on teachers’ experience. Our students’ textual interpretation skills and relational learning skills are growing every year. And teachers consistently express the value of PoP professional development experiences because PoP is responsive to the core issues of teaching and learning that are ever-present in teachers’ experiences:
- How to meet students where they are
- How to get students to take responsibility for their learning
- How to help students work productively on individual tasks
- How to help students work effectively with their peers
- How to structure a lesson
- How to assess student understanding and growth
When teachers feel the immediate relevance of professional development, as they do with PoP, they are eager for more, and we are eager to provide it to them.
How Our Havruta Has Shaped Our Teaching
Meggie Kwait, Humanities and Math Teacher, and Tzachi Posner, Jewish Studies Teacher
As Jewish professionals and as teachers, we see enormous value in the practice of havruta: it links our students to generations of Jewish scholars, allows learners of diverse abilities and backgrounds to access texts by relying on each other’s strengths and skills, and provides practice in collaboration that will serve students in their academic and professional lives. We are one such havruta and we describe our experience as teachers of and as learners in havruta through this framework.
Learning in havruta isn’t always easy. Tzachi recalls that when he studied Jewish texts full-time in Israel, he and his partner spent most of their learning sessions just shouting at one another. With PoP’s emphasis on respectful disagreement, however, students (not to mention, we teachers) are guided toward better collaboration. For example, PoP provides pre-written speech prompts that can be used across subjects, such as, “I don’t understand. Could you explain it in a different way or give me an example?” One of us (Meggie) particularly likes another speech prompt, “Is this idea supported in the text?” which allows a student to respectfully challenge a partner’s interpretation while also underscoring the importance of offering supporting evidence for a claim. Time and again, we’ve seen how students internalize the prompts, applying them throughout their interactions with their havruta and, in turn, leading to richer, more open discussions.
Structuring Collaboration with PoP Protocols
PoP’s library of protocols guide a havruta’s entire interaction, from greetings to analysis to appreciations. Whether students are interacting over a news article, a page of Talmud, or a complicated math problem, PoP has developed an appropriate and flexible protocol, which is easily tweaked to suit any subject or lesson. One of us (Meggie), who has a tendency to dominate conversations, appreciates that the protocols dictate who speaks when and for how long. Just as assigned seats alleviate the social anxiety of choosing which friend to sit with, PoP protocols and routines help students avoid the misunderstandings and social faux pas that can derail a cooperative experience. Perhaps most important, PoP emphasizes the idea that in every havruta, the text itself is a third, equal partner that needs the other partners to make its voice heard.
The PoP protocols and approach are not contained just to student interactions; they also serve to structure our own professional development. In this case, our teaching practice itself is the “text” that we use within our havruta. To generate this text we observe each other’s PoP-style lessons, share feedback and reflections, and discuss our progress toward our professional goals. For example, Meggie observed Tzachi’s lesson about various Torah personalities who use the phrase “Baruch Hashem” (“Praise God”). In the subsequent debrief, Meggie was able to offer insights into how several student havruta pairs worked together during their independent practice time, including that several students struggled with using the same computer screen both to view the text and to fill out their worksheet. She suggested that perhaps having a printed copy of one or the other would both make the process less onerous and encourage more eye contact between partners. One of us (Tzachi) was able to incorporate this feedback in a subsequent lesson that the other also observed, and we both agreed that this tweak had been successful. In observing each other and offering each other feedback we have come to a much better understanding of each other’s curricula, teaching style, and personalities, and it has deepened our relationship as colleagues.
Building a Collaborative Teaching Community
At times, PoP itself presents challenges. While one of us (Meggie) finds the curriculum intuitive, the other (Tzachi) sometimes struggles with how to make PoP’s structured materials work with his more informal teaching style. For example, Tzachi does not usually articulate which speech prompts students should use, and he doesn’t specify whether students should face each other or sit side by side. Meggie, on the other hand, usually lists every step of a havruta session, from rearranging desks to offering compliments. While Tzachi sometimes worries that his lessons aren’t “PoP-y” enough, he also thinks that Meggie’s more structured approach would ring false coming from him. Occasionally, we just agree to disagree; more often, we nudge and encourage and nag each other just enough to push us just a little further outside our comfort zones.
Our teacher havruta is one of several in our school’s PoP cohort, and our monthly meetings when all the havruta pairs debrief together are equally beneficial to our teaching practice. The opportunity to interact with teachers across disciplines and grade levels is all too rare, and these meetings give us a zoomed-out view of how best to serve our students. For example, we are able to coordinate the language and routines we use with students, such as the “noticing and wondering” task. By the time our students reach middle school, this technique requires no explanation with students demonstrating proficiency in its use across the curriculum from solving a tricky word problem in math, parsing a Revolutionary-era primary source in humanities, or watching a video about Israeli customs in Hebrew class.
PoP has a list of foundational principles, known as “stances.” And the true worth of PoP is perhaps best demonstrated by the stance, “If all of the partners work together we will come to learning and insights that we would not have come to on our own, in the same way, or with another set of partners.” In other words: two heads are better than one.
From Toolkit to Transformation: The Potential of the School-PD Provider Partnership
Allison Cook and Dr. Orit Kent, Founders and Directors, Pedagogy of Partnership
Over the years, PoP and Beit Rabban (BR) have worked together through periods of greater and lesser intensity, navigating the practical realities and opportunities for making change. This model of our work together could be described as “organic by design.” It is organic because it grows from realities on the ground—such as the actual teachers each year who have the capacity and inclination to learn and implement PoP successfully and available resources—and, at the same time, the model evolves “by design” because we consistently aim to make strategic choices that will best cultivate high-impact learning and culture-building. In doing so, we continually seek to address questions like: What is the next step in our work together that will elevate student learning and experience? How can we leverage PoP as a unifying framework and set of relational learning practices across the entire school community?
This organic-by-design approach, combined with strong school leadership, has enabled PoP at BR to grow in influence over time. In the early years, PoP functioned like a toolkit available to those teachers who have been trained in PoP. Now, however, PoP’s philosophy and practices are, in the words of Lisa Exler, “woven into the fabric of the school.”
How did this school-PD partnership achieve such a tipping point? We highlight three factors, with special attention to the leadership linchpin.
Building a Critical Mass
Through the years of our partnership, BR has sent a couple of teachers each year to PoP’s introductory training and encourages all of its PoP teachers to take advantage of every opportunity for further PoP professional learning, such as PoP webinars and institutes for experienced PoP educators. Some teachers have also participated in one-on-one coaching to integrate PoP more fully into their curriculum and classroom. BR’s yearly commitment has achieved a critical mass of faculty who share PoP frameworks and tools across the Jewish studies faculty and across the middle school in both Jewish and general studies. This steady stream of PoP-trained BR faculty has enabled the school to weather the inevitable challenges of teacher turnover and inducting new teachers into BR’s educational culture.
Building a PoP Professional Culture
The Beit Rabban PoP cohort that Lisa Exler has formed—a direct result of her participation in PoP’s national school leader cohort, an online community of practice supporting instructional leaders—has been an essential element of the integration of PoP into BR’s culture and educational program. Drawing on their common PoP language and vision of education, they help one another in the practical work of brainstorming ideas, troubleshooting classroom challenges, and making educational decisions with knowledge and purpose.
The cohort meetings have facilitated connections among teachers and their everyday practice that, in turn, directly impacts students. Instead of each teacher working on their own in their respective classrooms trying out a tool here and there, teachers build on the work of their colleagues and reinforce core learning mindsets and skills with their students across grades and subjects as a shared effort. The cohort meeting adds up individual teachers’ professional learning to a communal whole greater than its parts.
Investing in Leadership
Like most school leaders, Lisa has a multitude of responsibilities and she wanted to ensure that her supervision and support of faculty learning through the PoP faculty cohort was maximally effective. Knowing that she had to make the most out of limited time, Lisa (with the full support of the Head of School) decided to work with a PoP coach one-on-one—that is, a once-monthly havruta with PoP expert, Shira—to focus on co-planning and debriefing the monthly cohort meetings so that they achieve their aim as a high-leverage activity.
With Shira’s help, Lisa identified a core question that teachers would investigate together, inviting teachers to bring classroom artifacts to study like “texts” to illuminate the educational question. Lisa videoed each cohort meeting to debrief with Shira in order to refine her own facilitation skills. In essence, Lisa has shaped the teacher cohort to implement the same PoP practices that PoP teaches to students, such that teachers notice, wonder, and interpret each others’ classrooms together.
With Shira, Lisa has also developed a system for teachers to work together increasingly independent of her, releasing responsibility to teachers. This process includes addressing the need for differentiation within the cohort. By grouping teachers, giving them the freedom to set their own goals and a structure for supporting one another and bringing their learning back to the group, teachers drive their own professional growth with Lisa’s oversight.
Leader coaching has generated an exponential and accelerating impact, as Lisa has been able to galvanize PoP professional development efforts by building capacity among her faculty. Rather than a discreet “program,” PoP principles and tools have become integrated into regular supervision cycles, BR classrooms, and even beyond the classroom to parents and community events.
One final note worth mentioning. The partnership between PoP and BR has been mutually informing. We have learned from BR’s creative adaptations of PoP and bring those examples to other schools. Moreover, we continue to draw from this organic-by-design model of a school-PD partnership to our work with many other day schools.
Why We Invest in Bringing the Havruta Model to Life
Manette Mayberg, Trustee, The Mayberg Foundation
I was blessed to have the opportunity to observe a remarkable model, Pedagogy of Partnership, in action in a Washington, DC day school. I was stunned to see middle schoolers pairing up to explore a text and using the brilliant PoP guidelines, parse out the learning while practicing active listening and respectful curiosity. What’s innovative here? Everything! In a culture of growing discord and diminishing civil discourse, we are teaching our kids that disagreement is not the problem – in fact, it is valuable and even desired in our tradition. The key is how disagreements are handled, how opinions are conveyed and how respect for the other’s perspective is developed and appreciated.
In this time when we are experiencing a dramatic level of intolerance of opposing opinions, we can all access Jewish wisdom and values through our tradition’s time-tested method of discussion and arguing. There is no question that Pedagogy of Partnership’s approach transforms this ancient wisdom so that the art of machloket (debate) emerges as supremely relevant with the capability to change the nature of future discourse. Additionally, PoP’s work allows students to understand that they have a voice in interpreting text and finding the meaning in the text for their own lives.
But you cannot just wave a magic wand and wish that PoP’s pedagogical practices will take hold in a school. Training teachers to implement these practices takes time and the expert guidance of PoP coaches. So, if we want our Jewish day schools to deliver on the promise of a high-quality Jewish education, we must invest in our teachers and their continued professional growth. After all, developing teachers results in more meaningful impact on students. We owe it to our children to make sure that they can graduate with the kind of skills in communication and understanding texts that are core to PoP’s approach.
A Few Moments with Students
Lisa Exler, Director of Jewish Studies and Ivrit
Lisa sat down with four middle school students at Beit Rabban Day School to collect their reflections on how Pedagogy of Partnership and havruta learning has deepened their learning and relationships with both text and their classmates. (Students’ names have been changed and language has been edited slightly for clarity and brevity.)
Lisa: How would you describe PoP (Pedagogy of Partnership) to someone who hasn’t heard about it?
Becca: You’re in a havruta doing an assignment together instead of alone, sharing your thoughts, and being an attentive listener.
Judah: Two heads are better than one. PoP helps you realize [that] – it helps you learn with other people.
Lisa: What do you think is the value of learning with other people? How is your learning different when you do it with someone else rather than by yourself?
Reut: [I think I get] more insight [when I hear] other opinions. So it kind of changes how you think about it.
Lisa: Does anybody have an example of how learning something with a havruta changed how you thought about it?
Becca: We were doing math, and we were doing this problem separately, and then we went over it to see how we did it differently. I put the number I needed to solve in decimals and my partner put it in a fraction, and so we saw why each way was helpful for us.
Lisa: How do you think PoP affects your relationship with your classmates, or how you learn with your classmates?
Sam: I think that it definitely affects [my] relationships. You might get a bit closer as friends. It also might impact your learning because when you’re not working together you remember about things that they might ask.
Lisa: Interesting. So are you saying that even if you’re working by yourself, the fact that you worked with someone before means that you have their voice in your head?
Becca: Since I’ve worked with everybody in my class, now I know who learns the most like I do, and at the same speed as me, and so it’s easier to work with them. But also, I was going to say something similar to what Sam was saying. When you learn with a havruta and they give their insights, [that interaction] makes you think [in] a different way. Then when you’re doing independent work, you can remember how they did something and try to do it that way.
Judah: PoP also really helps you with a new partner. If you have a new partner for a week or two, you get to really know the partner and improve your friendship and how you learn together, which is powerful.
Lisa: How do you think using POP affects your relationship with a text?
Becca: If you have an interpretation of a text, and you can’t think of any others, but your partner also has one interpretation, but can’t think of any others. So when you share, you realize that there’s more to it, and then you know that there’s always going to be another way to see it. And it helps you think more deeply.
Lisa: Why do you think Beit Rabban cares so much about PoP? Some of your teachers go to trainings where they learn how to use PoP, and we take time to teach the triangle and the different stances.
Judah: Because PoP is very important. When you’re with a partner, there are so many other things that you could do that you just couldn’t have done by yourself. At Beit Rabban, to be honest, it would be pretty different without PoP anywhere. You wouldn’t have partners, and everything would be independent and a lot of friendships wouldn’t have been made.
Becca: Beit Rabban is very focused on kindness and meeting everybody’s needs for how they learn and respecting them. So with PoP, you’re able to figure out how your classmates learn and also bond with them and build relationships.
Reut: I think probably because Beit Rabban wants you to come in with one idea and if you’re coming out with the same idea, that’s fine, but PoP gives you the chance to experience different thoughts.
Lisa: Meaning that a big piece of Beit Rabban is having a diverse community of people with different ideas, and PoP is a way of helping people to communicate about their different ideas.
Lisa summarizes:
I walked away from this conversation impressed by how students have internalized the PoP stance “The text may have multiple meanings and may need my peers and me to bring them to light” and how much value they place on learning in havruta. I was particularly struck that students expressed how they have come to understand their peers as learners and that this carries over into how they think about texts, even when they are not learning with a havruta. This ability to project other voices and perspectives onto the text is an essential skill for critical thinking and for building bridges across differences.
Pedagogy of Partnership Resources
- PoP Havruta Routines Bookmark: For use with middle school through adults and can be paired with a wide variety of texts for meaningful havruta learning.
- “Moving Relationships to the Center: Five Questions Every Educator Should be Asking”: Elucidates PoP’s Core Relational Building Blocks framework
- Sharing for Imagination: Faculty cohort meeting protocol for building professional culture, shared pedagogical knowledge, and creativity.
We Want to Hear From You
We hope you find The DEEP Dive useful and meaningful. We welcome your feedback about how we might build upon this foray into professional learning for future issues! Email me at [email protected].