Hagigahs

A Hagigah is a festival. Congregation Solel Religious School Hagigot are celebrations of student learning: students, families, and teachers come together to listen to student presentations, tour student-created exhibits, and sing Jewish music together.
 
While tests are often the tool used to check if students retain knowledge on a particular subject, study after study has shown that when students work directly on projects – artistic, dramatic, singing as well as presentations – the percentage of knowledge they retain is much higher than the “old model.” Students also often feel most positively about their experience at school and their attitudes towards learning have also been much more positive. A three year study done in 1997 of British secondary schools -- one that used open-ended projects and one that used more traditional, direct instruction -- found striking differences in understanding and standardized achievement data a variety of subjects. The study found that students at the project-based school did better than those at the more traditional school requiring analytical or conceptual thought and on those considered rote, that is, those requiring memory of a rule or formula. Three times as many students at the project-based school received the top grade achievable on various national test (Edutopia Article 11/1/2001).