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Introduction | |
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During 2003 the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute continued its New Haven program for the twenty-sixth year while preparing for the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools, a long-term effort to establish up to 45 new Teachers Institutes throughout the United States. | |
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From its beginning in 1978, the overall purpose of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has been to strengthen teaching and learning in local schools and, by example, in schools across the country. New Haven represents a microcosm of urban public education in the United States. Eighty-five percent of the students in the New Haven Public Schools are African American or Hispanic, and two thirds (67 percent) of the district's students are eligible for the free or reduced-price lunch program. The Institute places equal emphasis on teachers' increasing their knowledge of a subject and on their developing teaching strategies that will be effective with their students. | |
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At the core of the program is a series of seminars on subjects in the humanities and the sciences. Topics are suggested by the teachers based on what they think could enrich their classroom instruction. In the seminars, Yale faculty contribute their knowledge of a subject, while the New Haven teachers contribute their expertise in elementary and secondary school pedagogy, their understanding of the students they teach, and their grasp of what works in the crucible of the classroom. Successful completion of a seminar requires that, with guidance from the Yale faculty member, the teachers each write a curriculum unit to be used in their own classroom and to be shared with others. Meetings in school, often through the Institute Centers for Curriculum and Professional Development, enable the curriculum units to be shared at the same educational site. Both print and electronic publication make them available for use or adaptation by other teachers in New Haven, and by teachers, students, educational leaders, and the wider public throughout this nation and indeed the world. | |
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Teachers are treated as colleagues throughout the seminar process. Unlike conventional university or professional development courses, Institute seminars involve at their very center an exchange of ideas among teachers and Yale faculty members. This is noteworthy since the teachers admitted to seminars are not a highly selective group, but rather a cross-section of teachers in the system, most of whom, like their urban counterparts across the country, did not major in one or more of the subjects they teach. The Institute's approach assumes that urban public school teachers can engage in serious study of the field and can devise appropriate and effective curricula based on this study. | |
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Through 2003, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has offered 160 seminars to 557 individual teachers, many of whom have participated for more than one year. (Please see Appendix for a list of the Fellows.) The seminars, meeting over a five-month period, combine the reading and discussion of selected texts (and often the study of selected objects and aspects of the local environment) with the writing of the curriculum units. Thus far, the teachers have created 1438 curriculum units. Over the years, a total of 83 Yale faculty members have participated in the Institute by giving one or more seminars. (Please see Appendix.) Of them, 57 have also given talks. Forty other Yale faculty members have also given talks. At this date about half of these 123 participants are current or recently retired members of the faculty. | |
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The Institute's twentieth year, 1997, had brought to a climax a period of intensive development of the local program. That had included placing all Institute resources on-line, providing computer assistance to the Fellows, correlating Institute-developed curriculum units with new school-district academic standards, establishing Institute Centers for Curriculum and Professional Development in the schools, and establishing summer Academies for New Haven students. In that year, while continuing to deepen its work in New Haven, the Institute began a major effort to demonstrate the efficacy of its approach in other cities across the country. | |
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This effort involved in 1998 the planning stage of a National Demonstration Project, supported by the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund (now the Wallace Foundation) and a supplementary grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation. In 1999 partnerships were established between colleges or universities and school districts at four sites that planned to adapt Institute's approach to local needs and resources. Implementation grants were awarded to four new Teachers Institutes--in Pittsburgh (Chatham College and Carnegie Mellon University), Houston (University of Houston), Albuquerque (University of New Mexico), and Santa Ana (University of California at Irvine). These grants enabled them to work with the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute for a period of three years, from 1999 through 2001. | |
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In 2003 the Institute's work on the national level was notably assisted by an extension of the support for the National Demonstration Project by the Wallace Foundation and a grant for 2002-2003 by the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. This support enabled the two-year Preparation Phase of the Yale National Initiative to be brought to completion. The Preparation Phase included Research and Planning Grants for the Pittsburgh Teachers Institute and the Houston Teachers Institute, which have significantly contributed to the evaluation of the Teachers Institute approach. The Preparation Phase enabled the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute to collate and analyze data from the questionnaires and surveys conducted during the National Demonstration Project, establish a Web site for the Yale National Initiative, and prepare the "Understandings" and "Necessary Procedures" that serve as basis for membership in a new League of Teachers Institutes. Finally, the Preparation Phase made possible a summary evaluation of the National Demonstration Project by Rogers M. Smith and other researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. | |
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The two major sections of this report therefore describe the two complementary areas of activity undertaken by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute in 2003. Between these major sections we have placed a briefer section on the Institute Web site, which served both the local and national programs before the launch of an additional site specifically for the Yale National Initiative in 2004. | |
