The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute

In New Haven it conducted a program of seven seminars for Fellows. It continued its expansion of Centers for Curriculum and Professional Development in the schools (with eleven Centers thus far and one more expected in the near future). It developed further the relationship of its resources to school curricula. And it pursued its fund-raising to ensure the continuation of its activity in New Haven and across the country in the longer term. 

Progress on the national level has been most notably assisted by a four-year grant from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and a supplementary three-year grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation, for the establishment of a National Demonstration Project. The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has now completed the first year in a three-year process of working with four other Teachers Institutes that looks toward the establishment of a long-term collaboration. This Project has begun to create a network of Teachers Institutes across the country that can serve as a model for university-school collaboration. The periodical On Common Ground may become a vehicle for the dissemination of the progress and results of the Project, in order to encourage the establishment of yet more Teachers Institutes in other urban centers in this nation. 

The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and the National Demonstration Project have received much attention in the press. Periodicals in Pittsburgh, Houston, Albuquerque, and Irvine shared the news of the establishment of Teachers Institutes in those cities. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review carried articles on the achievements of Fellows in that Teachers Institute. And Robert J. Leeney, editor emeritus of the New Haven Register, celebrated a “thriving school improvement program” that has become “a national model.” “The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute is an outstanding program, bringing together educators at all levels,” said President Richard C. Levin in announcing the National Demonstration Project. “We are delighted that the Institute will be able to serve as a national model for similar university-school partnerships across the country.”