One part of the Pardes Tefilah Education Initiative is to facilitate processes to help schools clarify their goals for tefilah education. All educators agree on the centrality of goals throughout the curriculum; once goals are articulated, we know how to move forward. We encourage you to use our Reimaging Tefilah Education: Guidelines for Schools, which helps schools develop a more defined and thoughtful approach to tefilah education.
We’ve articulated the following eight overarching goals that address the wide range of visions for tefilah education reflected in North American Jewish day schools. A summary is found below and a more detailed exploration is in the second chapter of the Guidelines: Overarching Tefilah Goals Schools may focus on one, two or three at any given grade and may or may not cover all eight throughout the school.
Our database resources have been tagged with the appropriate tefilah goal(s) in mind to enable schools who use our goals based approach to find appropriate material. The following are the keyword, title, and explanation of each goal.
At the moment resources relating to the History and Personal Practice goals are not featured on our database.
We urge those submitting materials and those utilizing them, to carefully consider their goals as some resources will be appropriate to meet more than one goal.