‘Lifelong learners’: In Yale seminars, public school teachers build new expertise and find inspiration

On a sunny May day, 10 New Haven public school teachers, part of a Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute seminar, were on a tour of a greenhouse at Marsh Botanical Garden, led by David Heiser, the garden’s associate director of student and public engagement. After a short introduction in a room full of pitcher plants — “It looks like water, but it’s not just water: it has enzymes in it that help digest insects, they’re all carnivorous,” he said — he invited them to explore.

“Go ahead,” he told a teacher who asked if she could touch the plants. “At your own risk!” 

“They are carnivorous,” another teacher warned teasingly.

“Just don’t touch anything furry that’s not a mammal, that’s what I tell my students when I take them in the forest,” said Liza Comita, the Davis-Denkmann Professor of Tropical Forest Ecology at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) and the seminar leader. “But don’t touch the furry mammals either.”

The group was touring the gardens as part of Comita’s seminar, “Tropical Forests: Ecology and Conservation.” It is the first seminar Comita has taught as part of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, an initiative that brings New Haven public school teachers to campus to learn from Yale faculty in focused seminars, and to develop a curriculum unit for their students based on the topic.

“For me, it was a good opportunity to think about how I tell people about, and get people excited about, tropical forests and understanding both how fascinating they are, but also how important they are, for biodiversity, for shaping global climate, and as a climate mitigation strategy,” Comita said. “I had to figure out how to translate what I normally teach in a more technical way to a specialized graduate-level audience to a more general audience, who would then adapt it and teach it to students ranging from, in my seminar, kindergarten all the way up through high school.”

This year, in addition to Comita’s seminar, teachers could in enroll in “Making Visible the Invisible,” a survey of historical visualization techniques in scientific inquiry, taught by Paola Bertucci, a professor of history and history of medicine in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS); “The Science of Rivers,” on the hydrology, structure, and ecology of rivers, with Peter Raymond, the Oastler Professor in Ecosystem Ecology in YSE; or “Latine Media, Representation, and Cultural Politics,” a survey of Latine popular media and politics with Deb Vargas, an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and ethnicity, race, and migration in FAS. 

In addition to the trip to the Marsh Botanical Garden, Comita took her fellows to visit collections in the Yale Peabody Museum, and to East Rock Park to connect the plant-animal interactions they’d been learning about in tropical ecosystems to those they could observe more locally. 

The Marsh Botanical Garden’s collection of tropical plants, Comita said, offered fellows the chance to experience the plants they’d been studying in a more hands-on way. “It was a great way for them to see and touch and smell these tropical plants and experience the variety of life forms and leaf shapes and fruits, and to look at how species have adapted to a particular environment.”

Introducing the fellows to the botanical garden as a public resource — the garden grounds are open every day from 7 a.m. to sunset, while the greenhouses are open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and both are free to visit — was an added benefit of the trip, Comita said. 

As the teachers continued their tour of the greenhouse, Heiser pointed out a banana plant. “It’s in flower,” he said. “And you can see immature bananas going on.”

A middle-school teacher laughed. “They’re 7th-grade bananas!”

Elsewhere, Jackie Tolkin, an elementary school science teacher at Edgewood School, was inspecting an agave plant. Comita’s seminar was her first with the institute. “It’s awesome,” she said. “We want our students to be lifelong learners. So to be able to participate in something where I get to be a lifelong learner is wonderful. Our seminar leader is wonderful. And the fact that we get the privilege of going to Yale University and working with a professor who is expert in their field is absolutely wonderful.”

A partnership in teaching

The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute was founded in 1978 as a collaboration between Yale and the New Haven Public Schools — the first university-school partnership of its kind. Its founding director, James R. Vivian, led the institute until his retirement in 2024 — nearly five decades of leadership that saw the creation of an accessible database of thousands of curriculum units, the fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between Yale faculty and New Haven teachers, and the establishment of the Yale National Initiative, which seeks to propagate their model in other high-need school districts around the country. 

Essential to the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and its mission, Vivian said in 1987, is the collaborative and collegial partnership between school teachers and university faculty and a commitment “not only to excellence in education at all stages of the educational process, but also inseparably a commitment to ensuring that all students have equal opportunity for and access to that excellence.”

“Our goal with both the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and the Yale National Initiative is to strengthen the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning in public schools here and across the country,” Stephanie Reid, who succeeded Vivian as the institute’s director in 2024, said. “Jim’s vision and the principles of partnership, teacher leadership, and collegiality he championed for nearly 50 years are as powerful and relevant now as ever before. And that vision continues to be realized and renewed through the engagement of teachers, principals, and school administrators, in collaboration with dedicated university faculty and staff.” 

Public school teachers from the Greater New Haven area are invited to apply to the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute each year in January; the program is open to teachers in main content areas (such as English, history, languages, arts, science, and mathematics), and from kindergarten through high school. Those accepted as fellows begin a five-month program in late February. They work closely with seminar leaders, all tenured Yale faculty, as well as their fellow teachers to develop a curriculum unit drawn from the seminar topic, which they complete over the summer and implement in the classroom the following year. Every curriculum unit is published on the institute’s website — creating a vast depository of pedagogical innovation, available to all. 

In addition to the seminars, teachers are given Yale IDs and access to the libraries and other collections on campus, and attend a series of lectures, which are also open to the public. Fellows also receive a stipend once they complete the program. 

The institute is a cornerstone of Yale’s broader partnership with New Haven’s public-school students and teachers. Other programming that helps strengthen the city’s educational system includes Yale’s Pathways programs, which bring K-12 students from the greater New Haven area to campus for a wide range of free events and classes in STEM and the arts and humanities, and the Yale Teaching Fellowship, offered in partnership with New Haven Promise, New Haven Public Schools, and Southern Connecticut State University. Through the fellowship, teachers receive full tuition and a living stipend to pursue graduate studies in teaching, in exchange for a commitment of three years of service in New Haven public schools.

In 2005, the institute launched the Yale National Initiative, which set out to offer a similar opportunity for public teachers across the country, both through programming held over the summer at Yale, and by supporting the establishment of similar teachers institutes in other cities.

Part of what makes these seminars so fulfilling for both the public-school teachers and the Yale faculty who teach them, said Reid, is that they rest on a foundation of collegial relationships and reciprocal learning. 

“It’s not simply a service that we give to the teachers, but it is also a service that they give to us. I am a better teacher for being in an environment with K-12 teachers,” Roderick Ferguson, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and professor of American Studies in FAS, said. He has taught a total of four seminars, in both the New Haven and the national program. “It has demanded of me that I find ways to convey the things that I’m interested in — to figure out, how would I teach issues of art and social movements to someone whose job it is to teach kindergartners?”

“I think this is really unique, in that we’re the experts — the teachers are the experts in pedagogy,” Matthew Schaffer, a history teacher at the Engineering & Science University Magnet School in West Haven, said. “It makes it more of a collaboration, to see some of the things that professors are doing that are best practices, in education, and then to share, ‘Oh yeah, here’s how I approach this topic with my students.’”

Including those participating this year, 141 Yale faculty have led New Haven seminars, and 40 have led seminars in the national program. 

Participating in the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute also offers Yale faculty another way to connect with the university’s home city, and to promote the many Yale resources that are open to teachers and students. 

“I had many conversations with the participants in my seminar about using the resources here, going to the Beinecke Library, to the Yale University Art Gallery, and that made me understand those spaces as not necessarily Yale-specific spaces, but as community spaces,” Molly Brunson, an associate professor in Slavic languages and literatures and history of art in FAS, said. “It helped me imagine them as community resources, which I will take into my future teaching with Yale students, to impart that they live in a space that they share with a broader community.”

Strengthening education across the country

For the teachers who participate in the Yale National Institute over the summer, the benefits echo those of their New Haven colleagues: a deepened sense of knowledge, a renewed joy of learning, and a supportive and collegial network.

Last summer, the cohort of schools represented included, for the first time, South Anchorage High School in Alaska. 

“We live in the biggest state, and it’s also a big island, because we’re separated from easy opportunities to get outside of our district and share ideas about how other teachers and other administrators are approaching the teaching and learning process. So it’s really valuable to just get outside of our own context,” said Luke Almon, the principal of South Anchorage High, which participated for a second time during the 2026 session. “And it’s really important to put teachers at the center of the professional development process and give them the space and the time they need to develop really good ideas that appeal to kids.”

Jolene Smith is a fifth-grade teacher on the Navajo Nation, in Kayenta, Arizona. This summer, she attended the national program for the 14th time; she has served as a teacher representative for the initiative, helping to support the program and recruit other teachers from the school districts on the Navajo Nation. “It’s helpful getting new ideas from teachers out here and talking with them, discovering that we have similar problems with our students and similar things that work,” Smith said. 

Each summer, the Yale National Initiative offers accepted fellows — K-12 public school teachers from across the country — a two-week residential seminar program with Yale faculty. The teachers are drawn from high-need districts either seeking to create or that have their own teachers institute, modeled on the New Haven program.

Since the initiative’s launch in 2005, five teachers institutes have been established: in Philadelphia; New Castle County, Delaware; Charlotte, North Carolina; the Navajo Nation; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Each fall, national fellows return to New Haven for a conference that includes a showcase of their completed curriculum units and a panel of students who speak about their experiences learning from them. 

Semaj Scott, then a 10th-grade student from Hearne, Texas, attended the 2025 conference with his English teacher, Debra Jenkins. He spoke about a unit Jenkins implemented after her seminar with Marta Figlerowicz, a professor of comparative literature in FAS, on “Graphic Narratives as Teaching Tools.”

Jenkins wrote a curriculum unit that aimed to use graphic narratives to “give students new ways to express themselves and feel empowered through creativity. In the act of writing speech bubbles or designing panels, I hope my students will start to see their own lives as stories worth telling.”

The impact of what Jenkins brought back to the classroom, Scott said, had less to do with the topic than the habit of critical thinking it sparked.

“We do a lot of thinking and a lot of processing in her class, and now I’ve started thinking and using a deeper thought process in my world history class, my math class,” he said. “It felt like losing the ability to walk and learning how to again. It felt new but natural. It felt different, but the same all at once.”

For Jenkins, who has been attending the national institute since 2019, the summer seminars give her a sense of energy and purpose for the school year. “In my teaching, it definitely gives me the motivation to get up and do this job every day,” she said. “I truly believe that I can change this world through these students.” 

Curriculum creativity

What sets both the New Haven and national program apart from other professional development opportunities for teachers, fellows say, is its emphasis on content knowledge and curriculum writing. 

“Especially when we’re teaching the units that we’ve created, the biggest help is that we become such experts in the content, it makes it a lot easier to be flexible,” Schaffer, the eighth-grade history teacher, said. “Being able to develop a unit like this allows for a much richer curriculum, because I’ve built a repertoire of resources and knowledge that I know I can turn to.”

Because of the wide range of grade level and subject matter taught by fellows, how they apply material from a college-level seminar can vary widely. Gary Brudvig, the Benjamin Silliman Professor of Chemistry and professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry in FAS, has taught 10 seminars, both national and local, and led his 11th, “The Chemistry of Cooking,” this summer. 

“It’s an outstanding topic to introduce science, especially for elementary school age kids, because they’re very curious and many of them are interested in cooking,” he said. “But some of the chemistry’s not that simple, and so it’s relevant for even AP high school chemistry or other sciences as well.”

For the 2025 New Haven institute, Brunson taught a seminar called “Objects, Material Culture, and Empire: Making Russia.” While teaching about 19th century Russia wasn’t widely applicable to elementary or even high school curriculums, she said, the underlying topic — object-based teaching — was. 

“In my seminar, I had an elementary school art teacher, I had a kindergarten teacher, I had a high school science teacher, high school creative writing teachers,” she said. “And they were all doing very, very different things, and thinking creatively about how to integrate objects into their various contexts.”

Curriculum units from the seminar included one for kindergarten students, using two illustrated versions of the Ukrainian folktale “The Mitten”; a middle- and high-school level unit on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; a STEM course on the material culture of science labs; and an art course on blacksmithing.

In their curriculum units, the fellows incorporate hands-on lessons, offer additional resources, and detail the implementation of district curriculum standards. 

Many seminars meet for sessions in the university’s collections — at the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, among other spaces — giving fellows an opportunity to work closely with primary and archival sources. 

For some, encountering these materials has an emotional resonance as well as an intellectual one. During one national seminar called “A History of Black People as Readers,” Ferguson brought fellows to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. “The archivist pulled out all of these texts that had to do with Black literacy,’” he recalled. “And when we got to Zora Neale Hurston’s handwritten copy of ‘Their Eyes Are Watching God,’ one teacher burst into tears.”

Open access

Gaining familiarity with these resources goes beyond enriching the fellows’ curriculum — it helps underscore the accessibility of Yale museums and galleries to students and the wider public. Over the years, New Haven fellows have incorporated site visits to campus collections into their curriculum, bringing students to campus to view archival material in person. 

The opportunity to publicize this access and the resources available for all New Haven students, as well as to develop new relationships with public school teachers, was one motivation for historian Paola Bertucci in joining the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute as a seminar leader this year. 

Bertucci is also the curator of the History of Science and Technology division of the Peabody Museum. “I always wanted to reach out to K-12 teachers in New Haven,” she said. “Since I teach with collections at Yale, I thought it would be wonderful to share that with the fellows in this seminar.” 

The seminar has given the fellows new familiarity with materials they might use in their own classrooms, Bertucci said, but it has also given her new connections in the school district. “Not many teachers know that the history of science and medicine and technology is a discipline,” she said. “And my mission is to reach out to public schools to make as many teachers as possible realize that this is a field, and it’s very important on many levels.” 

Over the course of her seminar, Bertucci took her fellows to The Cushing Center, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Beinecke Library, and a seminar room in the Medical Library, where Melissa Grafe, the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History and head of the Medical Historical Library, had laid out a selection of 16th and 17th century books of secrets and works on physiognomy, a historical and discredited practice of assessing a person’s temperament or character based on their outer appearance. 

“These are books that deal with secrets,” Bertucci told the fellows. “Now, what kind of secrets are you imagining?” 

The fellows hazarded a few guesses: the inner workings of the human spirit? Ghosts? Ways to control and manipulate nature?

None of those, Bertucci said. “Secrets are recipes.”

The fellows leaned in closely to inspect the books, which detailed the ways to read the hidden meanings behind the features of the human face — bravery or cowardice, deception or honesty, intelligence or stupidity. The books offered one glimpse into what Bertucci hoped to convey through her seminar — the ways that art and science intersect, the need to understand and categorize natural phenomena through visualization, and the enduring debate over the essence of life and being.

And already, Bertucci said, she was impressed at how the fellows’ curriculum units were taking shape and building off their readings and discussion.

“It’s fun to see how people who are teaching very young students come to these seminars and then find ways to translate what they’re learning,” Bertucci said. “And some of their proposals — I mean, they saw the connection with what I tried to teach more than I did. So, I was very pleased.”