How many Jewish educators have sat with their classes during ate fillah service, less than satisfied with either the content of the service or how their students respond to it? Despite the “training” that they receive in order to successfully perform their bar or bat mitzvah according to the standards of their community, few of our students are really familiar with tefillah - neither the basic structure of the liturgy nor the lessons of the prayers themselves.

In many cases, students’ active disengagement fromte fillah is a reflection of their school or community’s approaches to prayer and education. Generally in supplementary Religious Schools some formal instruction is given on how to participate in specific prayers, but no concerted effort is made to acculturate the students to a community that prays with intention, or even at all. Looking to alternative models of experiential education we can formulate a new approach to teachingte fillah that puts the prayer experience at the center of a lesson, unit or year-long curriculum. This model of teaching

In order to help students to connect withtefillah and be familiar with the liturgy they need to participate in regular prayer services. Instituting a mandatory weekly (if not more often)tefillah service for supplementary Religious Schools helps to establish

regularly and intentionally focusing on a particular prayer or theme that parallels what is being taught in the classroom. These themes could be determined according to the community’s values (via the Religious School Committee or its equivalent), which will both challenge the community to articulate its values alongside the clergy as well as help to bring a widespread buy-in for the program among community members.

Acculturating students to thete fillah experience will require a dynamic balance between instruction on how Jews pray (utilizing first the community’s siddur and eventually other media) and an exploration of why we do so. It is our responsibility to show our students the possibilities thattefillah can provide for them. Spiritually,tefillah can provide a ballast to balance out such pervasive American cultural norms as materialism and narcissism. Educationally,te fillah provides a lens and window through which we can connect to Jews around the world - past, present and future. An endless amount of information including ethics, the Bible, Israel, history and social action and can be spun around the Jewish prayer service.

The supplementary classroom component would ideally be organized and bound (at least among the higher grades) to the services in which the students participate. David Kolb1 offers a strong model on how to structure the learning so that thetefillah experience is central and informative. He identifies four components to the cycle of experiential education: 1) Concrete experience, 2) Observation and reflection, 3) Forming abstract concepts and 4) Testing in new situations. I would add a preliminary step to