The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute

For the local program, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute is currently seeking funds that might be used for seminars in either the humanities or the sciences. Its major long-term need is for an endowment that would provide continuing support for seminars in the sciences. The existing endowment for the Teachers Institute is limited to support for seminars in the humanities, and the teachers' expressed need for seminars in the sciences has increased dramatically in the last few years.

On the national level, the Teachers Institute has developed an ambitious plan for a fourteen-year continuing initiative that will establish as many as 45 additional Teachers Institutes across the nation. This plan includes, for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and those new Institutes that wish to continue as part of this initiative, a two-year phase of assessment and preparation, followed by a twelve-year implementation phase. During the two-year preparation phase, funds will be needed to support planning grants that will enable the existing new Institutes to:

ascertain how they might most advantageously scale up or otherwise have an important systemic effect within their districts, regions, or states;

develop a research agenda that will provide information in support of these plans;

and initiate efforts in these directions.

Funds will also be needed to enable the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute to:

engage in similar planning and research with respect to the process and the likely effects of this initiative;

distill what has been learned during the National Demonstration Project about the process of creating new Institutes;

reconfigure its staff and phase in the staff for a new national association of Teachers Institutes;

and explore possible alliances that could assist with administration or management during the implementation phase.

During the twelve-year implementation phase, funds will be needed to:

establish a national association of Teachers Institutes, with a Director, appropriate staff and technical support;

provide renewable Implementation Grants for the Teachers Institutes already established, in order to assure their viability, their scaling-up to serve their own urban sites, and their contribution to the process of establishing new Teachers Institutes;

enable the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and, to some extent, the other existing Institutes, to make initial contacts, carry out visits to interested sites, establish an annual July Intensive in New Haven, and maintain Annual Conferences;

sustain the publication of On Common Ground, which will serve as a means of disseminating information about the progress and results of the national initiative;

and provide eight-month Planning Grants and three-year renewable Implementation Grants to the new Teachers Institutes being established.

Funds will also be needed to provide technological assistance for the national association of Teachers Institutes.

The funding described above might best be provided by a partnership between the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and one or more major foundations, which would work with us in accomplishing this plan. That funding might be supplemented as necessary by other major grants or lesser grants. The grants might be administered by the partnership, by individual foundations, or by the office of the Director of the national association of Teachers Institutes. The projected cost of the entire initiative is 63.8 million dollars. A detailed break-down of that figure is included in the document prepared by the Institute: "Strengthening Teaching in America's Schools: A Proposal to Replicate Nationally the Successes of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute."