Working together at Sinai
The school’s collaborative model helps its students grow
How does the Sinai Schools do it?
How can the network of schools within schools — schools for neurodivergent students, that is, inside Jewish day schools — work with kids who are dealing with a range of challenges, and graduate (sometimes in more than 12 years) young adults who in some cases are entirely ready to be mainstreamed, occasionally already have been mainstreamed, and at times still will need extra help but are far more competent, self-confident, and happy than they otherwise would have been?
Yes, that’s a long-winded question.
The short answer would be “magic.”
But, of course, that’s not right, Rabbi Dr. Yisrael Rothwachs, the school’s Leo Brandstatter z”l dean, said. (Despite his rather formidable set of titles, Rabbi Rothwachs is warm, approachable, and an instinctive educator, deeply concerned about his students and fully engaged with them.)
“We tell stories about our students, and it can seem almost magical,” he said. “We tell the story about a second-grade student who was unable to read or write. His significant academic challenges led to significant frustration, and that anger expressed itself in aggression toward others.
“But over the years, with academic and therapeutic interventions, he grew up to be the person his parents always wanted him to be. At his bar mitzvah, he was like every other bar mitzvah boy. He no longer was aggressive, and he went to a mainstream high school.”
It is not that all Sinai students go to mainstream high schools, but overwhelmingly most of them achieve more than had been predicted for them before they started at the school.
“We tell stories like this, and sometimes they sound like miracles,” Rabbi Rothwachs continued.
“And in many ways they are miraculous — we are aware of the hand of HaShem in all that we do — but there is science in it. We put in our own efforts, so that HaShem can help us.” God, in other words, to be cliched about it, helps those who help themselves.
“So we would like to go under the hood a little bit, and explain one of the tools that helps our students reach this kind of success.”
That tool is the long-named integrated collaborative therapeutic model. Basically, that model uses Sinai’s basic idea — that each student is unique, and that the educators and therapists who work with that child tailor their work to that child’s specific needs, strengths, weaknesses, and interests — and builds the expertise of its therapists and the relationships they develop with the child and with each other to personalize and intensify the education even more.
Sinai offers physical, occupational, speech and language, and art therapy, as well as counseling in such areas as social skills; that, of course, accompanies but does not replace the academic and then later, for some students, life-skill education that is at Sinai’s core, along with its deep rootedness to Jewish community, values, and life.
That’s a lot! But the goal is to bring it all together seamlessly.
“We leverage therapists’ expertise to impact so many parts of the day, whether it is academic or social or extracurricular,” Rabbi Rothwachs says. “When we work on skills, they are not in an isolated environment.” Each child doesn’t get every therapy, he said; many get most, but they’re allocated according to a child’s need, not as a check in a box.
Art therapy is slightly different from the others, he added. “It’s unique. Before I saw it in action, I was a little bit of skeptic. I thought that an art class would be nice to have, but not much more than that.
“It is deeply therapeutic. We can help children who otherwise might not be able to access their emotions through more traditional talk therapy. Art therapy brings them out of their shells. Talk about magic! It really is beautiful to watch.
“All of these therapies are used to help our students grow in lots of different ways.”
Although a few of Sinai’s therapists work in more than one Sinai school, most are assigned to one school, and all work full time for Sinai. “That means that we don’t have to rely on outside agencies,” Rabbi Rothwachs said. “Instead, we are able to invest in building time into their schedules not just to provide the therapy, but also to collaborate with one another, with our educators, and with our parents, and to structure their schedules in such a way that their time is being used to be able to do what works best for each of our students.”
Instead of just moving from child to child, therapists can accompany a child to class, and therefore have the chance to see both how that child works in the classroom, with that specific curriculum, with that teacher and those peers at that time of day in that particular light, but the therapists also can see other students who also are their charges.
“Therapists don’t just provide that therapy but also have the chance to collaborate with other therapists and educators, to brainstorm, and to generalize those skills.”
Arielle Greenbaum Saposh is Sinai’s associate managing director. “We have over 200 students — and we have over 200 schedules,” she said. Each is different; each is specific to a different child. “Our integrated collaborative therapeutic model is why.
“And if we have a student with a highly specific need, we will bring in a different therapist to help that student.”
Because of the collaborative nature of the school’s work, students’ hard-won skills become portable. “You can teach a student a new skill, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the skill will be generalized outside where it’s learned,” Rabbi Rothwachs said. “We can look at the educational record of a child we’re admitting, and we see that the child can follow multistep directions. But often we find that the child can do that, follow those directions, only in specific situations.” The situation, that is, where it’s being taught.
The goal is to teach a child to follow multistep directions — among many other academic prerequisites and life skills — in other situations, that don’t involve working one-on-one with a specific therapist. The goal is to move the skill from the specific to the general.
That’s where the collaborative approach comes in.
The therapist can tell the teacher that she and the student are working on that skill, and how that work is unfolding, and the teacher can use that information as she works with the student in the classroom. The therapist can watch, and follow up on what she sees.
“It’s not strange in our school to see a psychologist on the ball field, or a speech therapist at a lunch table,” Rabbi Rothwachs said. “Even though they are working one-on-one, they want to be sure that what they’re working on comes up in a real-life situation. As a student, you might be frustrated on a ball field; you can work on it or reflect on it afterward.
“Therapists and teachers also get together to collaborate and reflect on their students’ growth in general,” he continued. “We invest a lot of teachers’ time in that. Supervisors and small groups of teachers meet weekly to talk about what’s going on, and those discussions include aspects that are related to the therapists as well.
“There is discussion about something like, for example, a teacher saying to a therapist, ‘I saw that you were working on conversation skills with this student. I would like to try to do that in the classroom; let’s brainstorm to figure out how to do that.’”
They figure out how to help each other — and the goal of that is how to help each student.
The model’s goal is to help students, Rabbi Rothwachs said, but it has “a nice added benefit in that it helps our teachers and our therapists. Time and time again we have heard from our teachers that they really value working at Sinai, and one of the reasons is that they have this opportunity not to just work in a box.
“Teaching often is described as a lonely profession. You only get to see adults at lunchtime. At Sinai, it is the opposite.”
“We foster the collaborative environment by building systems and processes to facilitate bidirectional communications,” Ms. Saposh said. “There is space and time in the day for team members to connect.
Therapies can be both pull out and push in, she continued. Pulling out is straightforward — a therapist removes a student from class for an individualized session. (Here is as good a place as any to say that classes in Sinai are very small; they rarely if ever have more than five students, and generally they have fewer.) Pushing in is when a therapist joins a class. “That not only enables the therapist to assess the student’s progress, it also gives that therapist a chance to model the lesson for the teacher.” The teacher can watch the therapist and then continue to do it herself, once the therapist has left.
Aliza Strassman is the director of Sinai Elementary at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston.
She described the way the collaborative model works; it’s both an overarching idea and a set of highly specific, highly individualized, often very small actions, she made clear.
“It starts at the beginning of the school year, even before school starts, when we are setting up our schedules,” she said. “It works with both academic groupings and therapies. We tweak it as the year goes on.”
She talked about a student who was having a hard time writing answers to questions during a reading comprehension class. “The occupational therapist saw that he often was answering orally,” she said. “The teacher would write down what he said. But the OT was working on handwriting, so the teacher and the OT worked together, to see how much he could write at one time, and which letters were hardest for him. They came up with little tricks to help him. “We zoom out from the big picture of writing to details about writing letters — how to make straight lines and curves, how some letters are straight and others are rounded.
“Once that was going smoothly, the teacher understood how to help him, and the OT could move on to the next issue.”
So coming up with tiny workarounds — the highly specific — helped the student be able to write — which is far more general. Both are necessary.
There’s a PT who specializes in movement at Sinai at Kushner, Ms. Strassman said. “She integrates reading and moving. She’s coaching the teacher.” Not only does the program work well, but “it’s a powerful example of how the learning can go both ways. The teacher is learning techniques that she can use with other students, and the PT now knows more about phonic word families. That’s beneficial to both the teachers and the therapists. It is a benefit of collaboration.”
What does the combination of reading and movement look like?
“The PT will take a word, say, in the AT family — bat, cat, hat, rat – and she might make a word ladder on the floor, with a different word on each rung,” Ms. Strassman said. “You use your entire body in that activity,” and doing so helps you learn.
She talked about a middle-schooler who was new to Sinai at Kushner last year. The student loved soccer, and “she had a lot of soccer skills and knowledge — she also knew a lot about professional soccer — but when she played, there was a lot of disappointment and frustration,” Ms. Strassman said. The student was playing on Kushner’s team, with mainstream students from outside Sinai. “So we took a whole-school approach,” she said. “We worked with the school psychologist on flexible thinking, on how playground soccer is different from the professional game. You might like being goalie, but so do other kids. So we worked on flexibility and cognitive skills, from a cognitive and mental-health perspective. Our PT worked on skills like cheering each other on, on how you handle not winning, and how you handle the pride of winning.
“On the administrative side, we looked at who was on lunch duty when there was a game being played, and we assigned a teacher whose job was to watch the game. The teacher could step in as needed, and the student knew that there always was someone who was there just for her.
“Her parents were with us every step of the way.
“That was last year. This year, we see the results of that intervention, not just in her playing soccer in recess every day, but also in that she’s joined a mainstream gym class. And she’s doing beautifully. Last year, we wouldn’t have thought that was possible.”
Because Sinai has 42 therapists working in its four elementary and four high schools, who both individually and collectively have amassed a wide body of knowledge, and because Sinai so appreciates and encourages collaboration, those therapists share their knowledge and experience with each other. “We have built cohorts of professionals across the schools to brainstorm, and ask for advice across the schools,” Rabbi Rothwachs said. “Over the years, we have made sure that the strategies we have developed at one school are being shared across our schools.”
And in the end, it looks like magic.
Not surprisingly, these highly intensive methods are expensive, Ms. Saposh said. “We have a student/professional ratio of about one to one. We are so grateful to the wider community for its support of Sinai, and for making this exceptional approach to education available to our students.
“We have just begun our annual campaign, which will culminate in our dinner at the Glenpointe in Teaneck on February 23. We will honor Aviva and Avi Vogel — they’re both amazing lay leaders at Sinai, and Avi has just stepped down after being our president for more than a decade.
“We’re honoring Abigail Hepner Gross, who has experienced the benefit of Sinai as a parent, and as a result of that she devoted herself to working as our communications director for many years. And we’re also honoring Joseph Sprung, Michele Mirman, and Diane Lempert as our community partners for their Bear Givers project.”
Learn more about Sinai at sinaischools.org; find more details about the dinner at sinaischools.org/dinner/2025.
comments