Pedagogy of Partnership Builds a Year of Growth Rooted in Student-Centered Learning

This past year, Pedagogy of Partnership (PoP), a Mayberg Foundation partner, continued to demonstrate that how students learn shapes what they learn. At the heart of PoP's methodology is a simple but transformative shift: moving classrooms away from frontal instruction and placing the chavruta pair (students learning together in partnership) at the center of the experience. Through this chavruta learning, students find relevance and make meaning together, rather than receiving it secondhand from the front of the room. This student-centered approach is now reaching an estimated 4,000 children across 34 official PoP schools. Sixty-four educators pursued in-depth personalized coaching this past year, a mark of the sustained commitment required to bring this pedagogy fully into practice, while 29 educators deepened their connection to PoP through the Educational Havruta program, reflecting together on their evolving classroom practice.

The year's most significant growth came through new geographic expansion in Miami and Los Angeles, where PoP built local cohorts of educators school by school. In Miami, 21 educators across four schools — Miami Hebrew Academy, Scheck Hillel Community School, Lehrman Community Day School, and Rambam Day School — engaged with PoP, with 13 completing a full year of personalized coaching and 16 more joining in the 2026-27 school year. In Los Angeles, a pilot program engaged educators at five schools, including Valley Beth Shalom Day School, Sinai Akiba Academy, Brawerman Elementary School, Milken Community School, and Pressman Academy, with 11 educators new to PoP this past year and nine more joining in the 2026-27 school year. Neither expansion would have been possible without collective effort: both cities secured local federation funding to match the investments from Mayberg and other national foundations, a model of national and local partnership working in tandem to scale meaningful Jewish education.

This spirit of partnership also drove two entirely new programs this year. Building on an idea Mayberg Foundation President and Trustee Manette Mayberg raised several years ago, PoP launched Turning Our Hearts to Each Other: The Art and Science of Conversation with Kids, supported by the Covenant Foundation. For the first time, PoP extended its methodology beyond students to parents and grandparents, running four sessions each at Chicago Jewish Day School, San Diego Jewish Academy, and Beit Rabban Day School in Manhattan. Parents left not only with a window into their children's classroom experience, but with their own take-home skills for meaningful conversation — a direct extension of PoP's belief that relationship and dialogue, not lecture, are where real learning happens. Additionally, PoP piloted InspirED, a fellowship supported by UJA-Federation of NY that placed eight college students in four day schools for a semester of hands-on experience paired with evening seminars, cultivating a new pipeline of future Jewish educators.

Taken together, this year's achievements reflect PoP's dual commitment to depth and reach: deepening the student-centered, meaning-making practice already embedded in its network, while widening the circle of who gets to learn this way — from parents at the kitchen table to college students considering a career in Jewish education. None of it would be possible without the collective effort of funders, both national and local, choosing to invest together in scaling this work.