Thinking about Learning

Abstract

I write this during the summer of 2021. The global pandemic that has kept most of us in our homes and out of our workplaces, synagogues, and just about anywhere else where you might expect to find community and camaraderie, has begun to ease, and at times, it feels like there might even exist a different “normal” that is just around the corner. Many of us can breathe easier owing to the availability of vaccines, though even for many vaccinated people, eating in restaurants, teaching in classrooms, and getting on airplanes still seem like either a distant memory or a dream of some distant future. Over the past 18 months, the question I have been asked more than any other has been about the experience of teaching online. Perhaps people are genuinely curious, and perhaps they are just making conversation, but the overwhelming sense is that, however learning online might differ from or resemble learning in face-to-face settings, it is qualitatively different, even if we cannot yet articulate just how those differences matter or manifest. I can say that my teaching has bent around the demands of the video-mediated classroom environments, as it has had to become more rigidly planned and structured to suit the demands of fatigue, pacing, and breakout rooms. The upshot is that many people in and around education, at nearly all levels, are thinking about their shared enterprise in new and different ways. The three articles in this issue of the Journal of Jewish Education, though not focused on COVID-19, or online learning explicitly are wonderful examples of what we can learn by attending to the ways in which people think about learning. Thinking about learning, or what psychologists and learning scientists call “metacognition” is nothing new. But these three articles offer a fresh array of approaches to understanding not just the importance of metacognition in reinforcing or enhancing learning but its place in making learning possible across a variety of settings. In “Coverage and Comprehension: Rabbinical Students and the Study of the Babylonian Talmud,” Jane Kanarek presents data from interviews with rabbinical students about their experience learning Talmud. Kanarek hypothesized that an important dimension of their studies would be the speed at which they covered material from the Bavli, and that “fast” and “slow” would become significant variables in students’ perception of their own learning. She found that they spoke about speed, but not in the ways that she expected. Instead, they expressed their desire and ability to learn both JOURNAL OF JEWISH EDUCATION 2021, VOL. 87, NO. 3, 189–191 https://doi.org/10.1080/15244113.2021.1964057