Yale Teachers Institute participants returning to campus for conference

This summer, 74 educators from public schools across the country came to the University to gain a deeper knowledge of the subjects they teach through seminars offered by the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools®.

Those teachers will return to campus — and will bring along their superintendents and other school officials — on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 21 and 22, for the Yale National Initiative’s seventh annual conference, an invitation-only event. While here, the educators, who represent 21 school districts in 10 states, will have the opportunity to learn more about the approach to high-quality teacher professional development pioneered by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute®.

The Teachers Institute, an educational partnership between the University and the city’s public schools, aims to strengthen teaching and learning in the classroom by bringing together teachers with Yale faculty members who are experts in their fields. In 2004, the University launched the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools with the goal of establishing programs modeled on the Teachers Institute in high-need school districts throughout the country.

In the national seminars, the participating public school teachers develop a curriculum unit to use in their classrooms and to share with other teachers in their school district and — via the Internet — across the globe. The curriculum units address the academic standards of the teachers’ school districts and assist the teachers in engaging and educating the students in their school courses.

The 2011 seminars and the Yale faculty members who led them were: “Chemistry of Everyday Things,” Gary W. Brudvig; “The Art of Reading People: Character, Expression, Interpretation,” Jill Campbell; “Love and Politics in the Sonnet,” Paul H. Fry; “The Idea of America,” Bryan Garsten; “Great Ideas of Primary Mathematics,” Roger E. Howe and Amanda Folsom; “The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans and Intangible Heritage,” Joseph R. Roach; and “Organs and Artificial Organs,” W. Mark Saltzman.

Thirty-four of the participants in the 2011 seminars — named Yale National Fellows — were from school districts that are exploring the establishment of new Teachers Institutes in Chicago, Illinois; DeKalb County, Georgia; Emeryville and San Mateo County, California; and Richmond, Virginia. Others hailed from five school districts participating in the Yale National Initiative for the first time, from the Diné Nation; San José, California; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Still others came from established Teachers Institutes that are members of the League of Teachers Institutes® located in Charlotte, North Carolina; New Castle County, Delaware; New Haven, Connecticut; and Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Congressional bill

Earlier this year in the U.S. Congress, Senators Joseph Lieberman ‘64 B.A., ’67 LL.B. (I-CT) and Richard Blumenthal ’73 J.D. (D-CT) and Representatives Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-3) and Chaka Fattah (D-PA-2) introduced the Teachers Professional Development Institutes Act, S. 1240 and H.R. 2255, to provide competitive grants to establish National Institutes nationwide.

“The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute in Connecticut is an innovative model that can and should be used across the country to help teachers at schools in every community develop and hone their skills so that they and their schools can be successful,” said Blumenthal. “In order for students in every neighborhood to receive an education that will prepare them for the future, we must have teachers who are experts in their field and equipped with the best tools and strategies to educate our children.”

DeLauro added: “Nothing we do in Congress is more important than ensuring our children have the tools and opportunities they need to succeed. For over 30 years, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has demonstrated that partnerships between teachers and institutes of higher education are beneficial to the educators’ professional development and, most importantly, lead to improved student achievement. I am very proud of the Yale-New Haven model, and look forward to expanding its success to schools across the country.”

Co-sponsors of the legislation include Senator Chris Coons ’92 J.D., ’92 M.A.R. (D-DE) and Congressmen John Carney (D-DE-At Large) and Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL-3).

According to James R. Vivian, director of the Yale National Initiative, evaluations have shown that the Teachers Institute approach exemplifies the characteristics of the highest-quality teacher professional development, enhances teacher quality in the ways known to improve student achievement, and encourages participants to remain in teaching in their schools.

In their recently published book, “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back,” Thomas L. Friedman and Michael E. Mandelbaum ’68 B.A. write: “Teachers Institutes differ from most of the professional development that school districts provide and from outreach and continuing education programs that universities typically offer in that school teachers and university faculty members work together as professional colleagues, in a program that is led in crucial respects by teachers themselves. This not only improves the teachers’ classroom performance; it also serves a purpose as important as recruiting and training good teachers: keeping them.”

For more information, visit the Yale National Initiative website.