Leadership Development Program
The program is a two-year in-service professional development course, meeting one full day per week, for TALI teachers, Jewish studies coordinators and principals. Each year there are 40 -50 educators studying in the program. All new TALI schools are required to send 3-4 lead teachers to this program, and educators from veteran TALI schools participate as well. Courses are credited towards an M.A. degree in Jewish Education and are taught by the Schechter Institute faculty. Participants study as a group in four academic courses per semester. The goal is to develop competent and professional educational leadership capable of teaching and supervising Jewish studies in their schools. Teachers become conversant with Jewish sources and the language of Jewish education, and acquire practical skills in Jewish education appropriate to the largely non-religious population of TALI schools.
TALI School Rabbis
The TALI School Rabbis Program adds a critical dimension of spiritual education to the TALI school network by providing non-observant children, teachers, and parents from with positive educational and spiritual experiences with rabbis. The rabbis represent a new type of role model for the pupils and their parents - one of a tolerant and open-minded spiritual educator who relates to them in a language and style that is at once inclusive and conducive to their modes of learning. Some schools have a school rabbi assigned to them, and others choose from a menu of services that a school rabbi can provide.
Curriculum Development
TEF develops educational resources to provide practical and engaging models for their teachers for the integration of the TALI syllabus into their classrooms. The materials teach Jewish sources and expose children to Jewish tradition in a way that inculcates democratic values and religious tolerance, as well as respect for other cultures. Textbooks are used in each grade to teach the Weekly Portion, Holidays, and other values-based topics.
Dialogue and Identity
The TALI School Network in Israel has developed, together with a partner network of Christian-Arab schools, a program for Jewish-Arab encounter, begun in 2007. The model trains Jewish and Arab teachers to implement a curriculum stressing "three religions in the Holy Land", and to jointly facilitate a series of encounters in which their pupils meet and present their religions and culture to each other. The TALI Education Fund initiated the project as a dimension of its goal of strengthening the Jewish knowledge and identity of TALI pupils in the secular public school system. The nurturing of a tolerant Jewish identity within the environment of a sectarian and generally intolerant Middle East, is perhaps the challenge that we face as educators.
Parents' Leadership Development
The TALI Education Fund (TEF) conducts a TALI Parents' Leadership Development Program, with the goal of empowering parents as advocates of Jewish education in their children's schools. The more than 50,000 TALI parents represent enormous potential to change attitudes and impact on Israeli Jewish identity through their involvement in their children's schools. In the program, parents develop orientation and skills needed to build successful TALI committees in their schools; participate in parental forums on the regional and national level, reinforcing the work of TALI teachers and principals; play an active and positive role in their children's Jewish education.