Questions Lead Way in One School's Teacher Training

Tiferes Bnos is an all-girls school located on the first floor of an apartment building near the border of the Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of Brooklyn. It would be unsurprising if the school had a poor academic track record. None of the teachers went to college. All the students speak Yiddish as their first language. The vast majority of the schools 430 students are extremely poor. So are the teachers: the base teacher salary at the Orthodox Jewish school is just $6,000 dollars a year. The students spend less than half of the week studying math, reading, science and social studies; most of their class time is spent on religious instruction.

The principal started off the meeting, as she always does, with a critique of her own performance. Then, she spent most of the rest of the meeting listening. Teachers went around the circle, sharing obstacles they were facing and asking one another for advice about how to better monitor small-group work and manage their classrooms. More experienced teachers, a couple with several years on the job, shared ideas with the newcomers and offered to lead workshops about the topics that came up. Amsel suggested some books.




“They don’t feel forced to grow, but they would feel out of place if they didn’t,” she said.