Photo: Rabbi Shalom Skolnik with a student at Maayan Torah Day School.
Maayan Torah Day School, a Jewish Day School in Portland, offers a learner-centered style that focuses on each student’s needs and progress, creating engaging classrooms and substantive learning for kids in preschool through eighth grade.
Maayan Torah had implemented some programs to further instill leadership qualities in their students and teachers. Rabbi Shalom Skolnik is part of the Teacher Leadership Cohort with Legacy Heritage Foundation for teacher leadership.
Better Together student Ezekiel Esterman prepares a personalized package to be sent by a senior participant.
The Legacy Heritage Instructional Leadership Institute supports Jewish day schools in delivering excellence in the teaching of Judaic studies. It provides high-quality professional learning that inspires teachers, and thus students, to delve deeply and meaningfully into the study of our sacred texts.
More than 80 day schools across denominations have participated in the Institute’s professional and leadership programs to elevate their teaching of Tanakh and rabbinics, helping them meet their expectations of excellence for Judaic studies.
The Legacy Heritage Teacher Institute is comprised of three tracks of teacher professional development (Jewish text; arts and teacher leadership). Programming offers classroom teachers an opportunity to participate in specially designed educational programs at Hebrew University, Camp Stone, or Brandeis University. The programs share a common goal of raising the quality of instruction and learning through intensive training, mentoring, and developing and implementing of sustainable, replicable, innovative curricula and programs.
Rabbi Skolnik is also leading a school-wide program called Konei Olam. This curriculum is geared to students in grades two through four.
This series satisfies a systematic study of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, religion and sociology; helping young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, interdependent world based on the eternal truths of Torah and mitzvot.
The students in the middle school grades at Mayan Torah have also been involved with the Legacy Heritage Foundation Better Together program, a school-based Jewish intergenerational program that pairs together young Jews and older Jews for meaningful in-person interactions (during non-COVID times). The students prepared care packages and sent postcards to senior citizens across the United States. Malky Weisman, Judaic enrichment teacher, organized this project.
For more information on the offerings at Maayan Torah Day School, visit maayanpdx.org.
