Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The age-old question is one that students at Westchester Fairfield Hebrew Academy take seriously thanks to an innovative enrichment program that challenges the way children look at problem solving.
The school, whose enrollment draws from a wide geographic region spanning from Riverdale, NY, to Westport, CT, adopted Excellence 2000, or E2K as it is known, this academic year.
“WFHA is a school which wants students to think about questions in a deep way. We want to nurture learners who question the world around them and we give them the tools to make sense of what they see,” said Nora Anderson, WFHA’s Head of School.
The E2K program was developed in Israel as a method to teach math and science to gifted students. The program was developed at the Society for Excellence in Education, which also oversees operation of the Israeli Arts and Science Academy. According to SEE, in the United States, the program is employed at close to 100 schools including 50 schools in Illinois, five school districts in Iowa, and, via the Gruss Foundation in New York, at Jewish Day Schools. About 40 schools in the New York region participate in the program. In Israel, more than 10,000 students are involved.
At WFHA all children in grades four through seven were tested at the conclusion of the last academic year. Based on the test results, combined with a recommendation from both a student’s math and science teachers, 19 children were invited to join the special program, said Rhonda Ginsberg, the director of the school’s E2K program.
Ginsberg, who is also the school’s fourth-grade general studies teacher, went to Israel to participate in the program’s math and science instruction course. There, she also learned about E2K’s unique philosophy – the instructor is not the sage on the stage, but the guide on the side.
“When I heard that,” Ginsberg said, “I knew this was the program I needed to be in, because this is what I believe. This is a radical departure from most teaching. You’re not training the child to perform specific operations, but to teach the children how to think, how to become creative problem solvers using math and science.”
How does her instruction differ from a more traditional approach? “In many science classes, for example, a student might be given an experiment to perform. In E2K, the student is presented with a problem and he or she must develop the experiment to solve the problem,” she said.
In math, the program emphasizes working in groups. Recently, the fifth- and sixth- grade E2K students participated in their first international competition. The challenge included students from 14 schools throughout the United States and more in Israel.
In the first part of the competition the students were divided into four teams of two children. Each team was given a two-page set of algebraic equations with fractions. They then had to use the results to map out an image. Over a period of 30 minutes the students needed to determine four images. Teams that finished early were able to help the other teams, as they each had different equations and images.
In the second part of the contest, the entire group worked together to solve math problems. All answers were submitted via computer through an instant message type of system. Although some schools had network problems during the timed competition, and one school even lost their network connection, WFHA stayed online.
“Our network stayed up and everything worked, but we had a back-up computer ready and waiting in case something happened,” Ginsberg said.
The students were tense as they worked feverishly to quickly find the right answers to the questions. “After all our responses were in, the central place gave us the answers. We didn’t know what the other teams’ scores were,” said sixth-grader Ethan Saal. As it turns out, the WFHA team had only one incorrect answer - taking second place among all the schools competing.
The WFHA eighth-grade E2K students will compete against other schools in science in February — stay tuned.