About Us

Jewish New Teacher Project helps Jewish day schools achieve instructional excellence by increasing teacher and school leader effectiveness, teacher retention and student achievement, and bringing the language of teaching standards, collaboration and professional development into school culture.

By improving teacher and administrator skills through intensive mentoring and coaching along with shared cohort learning and job-embedded instruction, we help schools deliver higher quality Jewish day school education and become institutions of instructional excellence, allowing students to reach their potential. Such students are committed, engaged and inspired in all that they do — personally, within the Jewish community, and in the wider world.

Our Values

We believe that every Jewish child deserves an excellent education.

We believe that a great teacher can transform a child’s life.

We believe that teachers and school administrators are the most important in-school contributors to student success.

We believe that great teachers and school administrators are made, not born.

We believe in implementing outstanding professional development programs in schools across the entirety of the Jewish community, in a manner respectful to each school’s philosophy and approach.

“I have to admit that when I started training as a JNTP mentor, I had no idea what I didn’t know. I thought that we would learn how to offer some words of comfort to a new teacher struggling to make it through their first parent teacher conference sessions, or how to check the boxes on a lesson plan. I did not appreciate the depth and power of mentorship, and the different mental muscles I would need to exercise to be effective in this capacity.”

Rabbi Dov Emerson

Director of Teaching and Learning, Yeshiva University High School for Boys

“My mentor helps me clarify my learning goals and offers space, time and someone to bounce ideas off of or offers suggestions of how to improve my teaching. Feeling “go, go, go” all of the time, it’s nice to get the opportunity to process and reflect. The biggest value of having a mentor is having someone constructively develop and improve my teaching with no judgment.”