Journal of Jewish Education, 75:304–309, 2009Copyright © Network for Research in Jewish EducationISSN: 1524-4113 print / 1554-611X onlineDOI: 10.1080/15244110903079292

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UJJE1524-41131554-611XJournal of Jewish Education, Vol. 75, No. 3, July 2009: pp. 1–9Journal of Jewish Education

Making Choices: Teachers’ Beliefs and Teachers’ Reasons

Making ChoicesJournal of Jewish Education

BARRY W. HOLTZ

Edward Greenstein’s article (this issue) reminds us of the impor-tant contributions that academic scholars of subject matter canmake to the discourse of Jewish education. This response highlightssome of Greenstein’s argument and explores an area that his articledoes not examine in depth: the role of teachers’ beliefs in the peda-gogic decisions that they make. Greenstein’s article might suggestthat teachers’ educational choices are determined by their trainingand by rational decision making. This response suggests that sucha view underestimates the important role that beliefs—of varioussorts—play in the teaching that we see in classrooms.

Edward Greenstein’s article, “A Pragmatic Pedagogy of Bible,” (this issue) isan excellent example of how scholars of subject matter can contribute to theways that educators conceptualize their work. Let me highlight a few significantdimensions of Greenstein’s contribution.

First, this article offers a very nuanced discussion of the relationshipbetween the methodology of interpretation and the outcomes of interpretation.Greenstein reminds us that as much as our interpretations of Bible flow outof our approaches, any choice of approach will determine—or perhapseven predetermine—the interpretations that we get. This is something thatwe tend to forget—perhaps even choose to forget—both as readers of theBible and as teachers.

Greenstein demonstrates this dynamic in a very practical way byexploring the Tower of Babel story in Genesis. By taking us through multiplereadings of this familiar story, he opens up both the specific implications ofbringing to bear a given methodology upon a text, and the ways in whichthe methodology we employ has a profound impact on the type of resultsour analysis will generate.

Barry W. Holtz is Dean of the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education and theTheodore and Florence Baumritter Professor of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary ofAmerica. E-mail: baholtz@jtsa.edu

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We also find in this article a deep lesson about the nature of pedagogy.The meta-lesson of Greenstein’s article, again particularly in the section inwhich he walks us through each reading of the Babel text, is that any specificreading of a text is always and essentially incomplete. Rather than sayingthat this should bother us, Greenstein urges us to accept the inevitableincompleteness of our readings and to see the reading of the text as a kindof multi-valent opportunity to enter into the Bible, and to understand fromthe outset that we are never going to have the one “right” reading. Such aperspective can be helpful to us as teachers when we think about the variousresponses that students give in their encounters with texts and our inevitabledesire to see them get the “right” answer. Greenstein would have usdevelop our tolerance for the notion that there may be many right answers.

One interesting dimension of Greenstein’s article (this issue) is that itallows us to see the often surprising overlap of the way that scholars thinkand the way that teachers think. To me this came out particularly strongly inthe section of his article in which he discusses the way that interpreters oftexts choose their methodological approaches. Reading texts, according toGreenstein, is essentially a pragmatic enterprise. As he puts it the scholarviews “the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The results of our tryingout this or that solution to our problem or question are tested by a practicalcriterion: does the solution work or not?” Teachers also are interested in thepragmatic results of their efforts. “Does it work?” is a key question for any-one thinking about any pedagogic moment.

In a similar vein of connection between scholars and teachers, Greensteinstates, “When we begin an interpretative effort, it is worth asking first: Whatis important to bring out at this moment?” In other words the question ofgoals or outcomes is at the center of the scholar’s concern, as it is for theteacher in his or her domain. This is an idea that I tried to capture elsewherewhen I wrote that teachers need to always have in mind the question:“What’s worth learning here?” As I put it then:

In asking, What’s worth learning here? I mean the following: for thesestudents, in this setting, with these particular constraints of time andcontext—what should be taught? Not: what could be taught, not what isthe sum total about this subject area that I the teacher know, but whatshould be taught? (Holtz, 2003, p. 159)

Thus, we see the connection between what scholars do and whatteachers are involved with. But Greenstein does more than focus in on the“commonplace”1 of the teacher and the commonplace of the subject matter.

1Commonplaces, a technical term associated with Joseph Schwab (1964), are “those foci of attentionwithin an area of interest which fulfill two conditions: a) They demand the attention of serious investigators;b) their scrutiny generates diverse investigations and consequent diversities of definitions, doctrines, andemphases” (pp. 5–6).

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In this article, Greenstein also raises matters of concern from the perspectiveof the learner. Certainly, concern for students and how they think about thesubject matter is one of the primary things that teachers need to have.Teachers have to translate subject matter in the light of their sense of theirown particular students. Looking at Greenstein’s article from the point of viewof the learner, we might consider that offering a wide range of readings of thetext is not only about representing the subject matter in all its multiplicityand depth, but also about allowing students to come to the text with theirown interests, their own abilities, and their own inclinations.

In other words, as teachers presenting a range of approaches to thebiblical text, we are also implicitly responding to the fact that some studentswill never be excited by a particular reading, but may be energized by adifferent reading or approach to the same text. We can’t always anticipatewhat our students are going to find meaningful, and offering alternativescan be a way of being responsive to students, with results that we may findsurprising. Ultimately, we should always be aware that we have a variety ofstudents in our classrooms and we are not always able to predict what willstrike them most powerfully.

One final issue raised by Greenstein’s article merits exploration. He dis-cusses the results when a teacher “choose[s]” or “select[s]” a given interpretiveapproach to the biblical text or a particular passage. This language maymask or underestimate the complexity of the real life situation of teachers,and of what influences the decisions that they make and approaches theyuse. In discussing these choices, Greenstein uses a term from my bookTextual Knowledge: Teaching the Bible in Theory and Practice (Holtz,2003): “orientation.” It is not a term I invented, but is borrowed from thework of Lee Shulman and some of his former students, in particularPamela Grossman (1990; see also Grossman, Wilson, & Shulman, 1989).An “orientation” represents a kind of methodological approach to any givensubject matter. In Greenstein’s article, we see examples of different orienta-tions in each of the particular readings that he offers. A person like the lateBible scholar Nahum Sarna (1966) who wants to set the Bible in the contextof the Ancient Near East is different from, for example, Nechama Leibowitz(1974) in her reading of the text through the eyes of traditional Jewish com-mentators, or Robert Alter (1981), or for that matter Ed Greenstein, utilizinga more literary reading of the text.

Here, I want to emphasize something that Greenstein mentions onlybriefly, but deserves more attention: There is an element in the concept oforientations that is not just about the deliberate application of the teacher’sparticular subject matter knowledge, but also about the teacher’s beliefsabout the subject matter. In a certain sense, one might say that the impor-tant innovation in the notion of “orientations” was a revision of Schwab’s(1978) old distinction between the “syntactic” and “substantive” elements ofthe subject matter.

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In looking at the nature of academic disciplines, Schwab (1978)adduced two important elements of one’s approach to a subject: the lenses aperson brings to the subject matter (the “substantive” structures in Schwab’slanguage) and the tools the person brings to exploring the subject matter(“syntactic” structures). Hence, a scholar of history might study his or herdiscipline through the lens of intellectual history or through the lens ofsocial history. The results would be very different depending on the sub-stantive structures chosen. In addition, various substantive structures call fordifferent tools to be applied. A social historian would be interested in thediaries and letters of ordinary people; an intellectual historian would beinterested in the writings of major thinkers. A biblical scholar using the sub-stantive structure that viewed the Bible as a product of the Ancient NearEast would use tools such as archeology or comparative Semitics, while ascholar using the structure of literary criticism would likely be less interestedin those tools.

But the focus on orientations, while still accepting Schwab’s (1978) cat-egories, adds an important new element: the discovery that teachers havepowerful beliefs about subject matter and the enterprise of teaching. Thosebeliefs are in a certain sense not entirely in the realm of the rational and theconscious. They include, among other things, beliefs about children (oradults) and how they learn. Those beliefs may come from years of experi-ence, but they may also come from how the teachers themselves best learn.They are often held very deeply by teachers, beyond rational consideration.

I knew a teacher several years ago who was teaching Hebrew to fourthgraders in a day school setting. She would give the students a list of wordsto memorize before they encountered the story that they were going toread. I said to her, “Maybe that’s not the best way to do it; those words arecompletely without context for these kids. Maybe it would work better tolearn the words in the context of the story.” She rejected my suggestion,saying that her way was the way that children learn best.

At the time, I was actually not sure of what the “correct” answer to thisquestion was. I know a little bit about research on learning a second lan-guage, and I thought that my contextual approach was more in line withcurrent thinking, but I don’t know the field terribly well and I wasn’t surewhat to say back to her after she rejected my suggestion. But it did strikeme at the time that this was a teacher with a belief about the way childrenlearned languages. Maybe she herself learns this way; maybe some childrenhave learned this way in her classes. But it felt clear that this was an exam-ple of teachers having very deeply held beliefs that may not be expressionsof either substantive or syntactic knowledge.

Teachers also hold beliefs (again, often very deeply) about the natureof the subject matter and why it is worth learning a particular subject matter.Greenstein presents a somewhat idealized notion of the way teachers plan:rational decisions are made resulting in the use of a particular approach,

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and good teachers will ideally have alternative approaches ready and available.In the picture painted by Greenstein, when teachers are thinking about aparticular text, they should say to themselves: “This is the approach thatmost fits this text, or this is the approach that best fits these students, and I’lljust pull the particular methodological arrow out of the quiver and use it.”While I am fully in support of Greenstein’s viewpoint prescriptively, in prac-tice it does not always work this way, because of the inhibiting (or at leastinfluential) power of teachers’ beliefs—beliefs that teachers may not be fullyaware of either having or actualizing in their teaching.

Belief is a very loaded term beyond the realm of pedagogic orientations.In the realm of Jewish education, the word “belief” has another connotationentirely. I first started thinking about this some years ago, thanks to GailDorph’s (1993) doctoral dissertation. Her work, looking at students as theywere preparing for careers in Jewish education, showed how certain foun-dational beliefs went beyond views about the best way to learn and teachany particular subject matter. We might, in fact, distinguish between beliefswith a small “b” and Beliefs with a capital “B”; in the field of Jewish education,people are walking around with some really big capital-B Beliefs. Theseinclude matters such as the nature and authority of Torah, the authorship ofthe Bible, and the nature of revelation.

This is a different kind of belief from that of the teacher who said that itis better to learn the Hebrew word list before the text of the story. In thatcase, we might say, “What if I brought you 16 studies from empiricalresearch that show that good language learning does not work like that?” Insuch a situation, she might very well change her mind about her practice.But if I came to a teacher and said, “You know, you should set the Torah inthe context of the Ancient Near East” or, “You should use source criticism toexplain problematic passages in the Torah,” the teacher might well say, “No,I reject such approaches as religiously wrong, as damaging the sacrednature of our relationship with the Torah.”

In such a case, we are entering into a realm of formative beliefs aboutreligion that complicates Greenstein’s clear, rational model of choice. This isone of the things that those of us who work with teachers have to thinkabout as we help them continue to grow in their teaching practice: In whatsense is any belief a capital-B Belief, and how do we approach thosebeliefs—and people with those beliefs?

I am tempted to say that the situation regarding beliefs is different inJewish education from what we would find in general education. There, wemight like to imagine, we wouldn’t have to confront such deeply held, non-rational commitments that inform the practice of teaching. Some years ago,I made this distinction between Jewish and general education to my friendand colleague Deborah Ball, now the dean of the School of Education atUniversity of Michigan, who is well known for her work with mathematicsteachers. When I finished making my point, Deborah looked at me dryly

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and said, “I guess you haven’t met many math teachers!” Whether our situa-tion in Jewish education is unique or whether (and to what extent) weshare the problem of “belief” with those in general education, becomingmore aware of the powerful influence of beliefs in our own teaching and inthat of others will help us take fullest advantage of the approach to interpre-tive and pedagogic strategies that Greenstein has laid out for us.

REFERENCES

Alter, R. (1981). The art of biblical narrative. New York: Basic Books.Dorph, G. Z. (1993). Conceptions and preconceptions: A study of prospective Jewish

educators’ knowledge and beliefs about Torah. Ph.D. dissertation, JewishTheological Seminary.

Grossman, P. L. (1990). The making of a teacher: Teacher knowledge and teachereducation. New York: Teachers College Press.

Grossman, P. L., Wilson, S. M., & Shulman, L. S. (1989). Teachers of substance:Subject-matter knowledge for teaching. In M. Reynolds (Ed.), Knowledge basefor the beginning teacher (pp. 23–36). New York: Pergamon.

Holtz, B. W. (2003). Textual knowledge: Teaching the bible in theory and in practice.New York: Jewish Theological Seminary Press.

Leibowitz, N. (1974). Studies in Bereshit (Genesis) in the context of ancient andmodern Jewish bible commentary. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization.

Sarna, N. M. (1966). Understanding Genesis. New York: Melton Research Centerand Schocken Books.

Schwab, J. (1964). Problems, topics, and issues. In S. Elam (Ed.), Education and thestructure of knowledge (pp. 4–47). Chicago: Rand, McNally.

Schwab, J. J. (1978). Education and the structure of the disciplines. In I. Westbury &N. J. Wilkof (Eds.), Science, curriculum, and liberal education (pp. 229–272).Chicago: University of Chicago Press.