I. Policies
A. Purpose
The purpose of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute is 1) to strengthen
teaching and learning in the New Haven Public Schools, and 2) to
disseminate the Institute's model and materials in order to encourage and
assist other institutions in developing similar programs to benefit
mutually the schools and colleges in their own communities. (Appendix A)
The Institute is a natural and appropriate way for Yale's faculty, and
thus for Yale as an educational institution, to be involved in elementary
and secondary education generally and to assist New Haven and its public
school system specifically.
B. Tenets
The Institute is founded upon--and guided by--four principles. These are
described more fully in various Institute publications and funded
proposals. (Appendices B, C, D)
1. Teaching is central to the educational process, and the
ongoing preparation of teachers and their development of classroom
materials are essential for student learning.
2. Teacher leadership is crucial to efforts to revitalize public
education and therefore indispensable within the Institute.
3. Teachers of students at different levels can and must interact as
colleagues to address the common problems of teaching their disciplines.
4. University-school collaboration must be long-term if it is to be
effective.
C. Corollaries
(Appendix E)
1. Participating teachers from the University and the Schools
enter the Institute as professional colleagues working within a collegial
relationship, and their respective contributions in the Institute process
are valued equally.
2. The Institute is a demanding and professionally significant
experience that focuses on the academic preparation of school teachers and
on the application of what they study in the Institute in their own school
classrooms.
3. The simultaneous consideration of subject matter and classroom
procedures is fundamental to the Institute's approach and essential to the
collegiality on which the Institute is founded.
4. School teachers participate in the Institute as Fellows in special
offerings designed to address their interests and needs for further
preparation and curriculum development; they are not students in
University courses.
5. School teachers must play a leading role in the
planning, organization, conduct, and evaluation of Institute programs
intended to benefit them and, through them, students in the New Haven
Public Schools.
6. To strengthen teaching and learning throughout the
schools, the Institute must involve a significant proportion of all
teachers and must therefore actively recruit teachers who have not
participated before, as well as minority teachers.
7. The relationship between Yale and the Schools must
be both prominent and enduring within any viable larger relationship
between Yale and New Haven.
8. As an educational institution, the main resource
that Yale can provide to its home community is its faculty, particularly
through academic programs such as those generated by the Institute.
9. Tangible expression of Yale's and the Schools'
commitment to the Institute is indispensable; for the Institute to be
taken seriously there must be an ongoing financial support from
both.
D. Joint Character
The Institute is a fully integrated unit of the University under the
direction of the Provost, yet at the same time represents an institutional
partnership between Yale and the New Haven Public Schools, as well as a
collaboration among individuals who teach in the University and in the
Schools.
E. Geographic Boundaries
The Institute is sharply focused on assisting the New
Haven Public Schools, the public school system in the University's home
community where its self-interest is most manifest.
F. Participants
Participation in the Institute is limited to members of
the Yale faculty, including the graduate and professional schools, and to
individuals who teach in the New Haven Public Schools. The Institute
seeks to be as inclusive as possible of all New Haven teachers who are
assigned to teach subjects in the humanities and the sciences and
mathematics, and to make Institute participation a regular part of the
professional lives of as many teachers as possible from different
subjects, schools, and grade levels. In recognition of the professional
character of Institute participation--and the fact that involvement with
the Institute is intensive and time-consuming-- participants are
remunerated.
II. Structure
A. Director
The Institute is headed by a Director, who is appointed by the President
and who operates under the administrative jurisdiction of the Provost.
(See Appendix F for a description of the positions of the Director and of
other current staff.)
B. School Teacher Leadership
The network of school teacher leadership for the Institute
is evolving and self-transforming. Currently there are four positions:
School Representatives, School Contacts, Seminar Coordinators, and
Steering Committee members.
The School Representatives have overall
responsibility for organizing the Institute's annual program for the New
Haven teachers who participate as Fellows. The fifteen or more
Representatives, who represent all New Haven elementary, middle, and high
school teachers in the humanities and the sciences and mathematics,
promote the Institute to other teachers in their respective schools and
enable them to have a direct role each year in designing the program.
(Appendix G) They work with School Contacts, who are the
designated individuals for other teachers to contact about the Institute in
schools not large enough to warrant having a Representative.
The Seminar Coordinators, who serve during the
admissions process and the period when the seminars meet between March and
August, act as liaison with the Institute seminars, resolving any
scheduling or administrative problems and facilitating the smooth
operation of the seminars. (Appendix H)
A Steering Committee of teachers who have played
leading roles in the Institute at various times since its inception has
responsibility for long-range planning.
C. University Faculty Participation
University faculty members participate in the program principally as
seminar leaders, conducting seminars for no more than twelve
Fellows, guiding Fellows' research and writing, commenting on the drafts
of each Fellow's curriculum unit, and reviewing the completed units.
(Appendix I)
The University Advisory Council is a
Presidentially-appointed body of faculty members that guides the general
direction of the program and acts as a course-of-study committee so that
the Institute can certify Fellows work to institutions where they may be
pursuing advanced degrees. The Council also advises the President on the
Institute and, more generally, on matters concerning Yale's involvement
with schools locally and with public elementary and secondary education
nationally. (Appendix J) Between meetings the work of the Council is
carried forward by its Executive Committee, all members of the
Council, also appointed by the President.
D. National Advisory Committee
A National Advisory Committee, composed of
Americans distinguished in the fields of education, private philanthropy,
and public policy, assists the Teachers Institute with the further
dissemination, evaluation, and development of its program. New members
are invited to serve, from time to time, by the President. In advance of
National Advisory Committee meetings, members of the University Advisory
Council and the Steering Committee meet separately and together to discuss
program development and evaluation, national dissemination, and finance.
On each of these and any other timely topics, they prepare papers that are
circulated to brief the Committee before the meetings.
The Teachers Institute plays a leading role in the
national movement for university-school collaboration. The National
Advisory Committee assists in determining how to make the most effective
contribution to institutions and schools in other communities. With
respect to evaluation, the Committee provides a variety of perspectives
that aid in examining what each constituency for such collaborative
programs would regard as the best evidence of their effectiveness. The
Committee also provides advice and assistance with fund raising directed
toward foundations, corporations, and individuals located across the
country.
III. Procedures
A. Seminar Planning and Selection Procedures
Each year the Institute takes the following steps to determine seminar
subjects and leaders and to select school teacher participants. In the
fall the teachers who serve as School Representatives canvass other school
teachers, asking what subjects the teachers wish Institute seminars to
address in the coming year. School subject-area supervisors also may
suggest subjects in which professional and curriculum development are
especially needed. As desirable seminar subjects emerge from this
process, the Director, in consultation with members of the University
Advisory Council, identifies appropriate Yale faculty members who are
potentially available to lead seminars on these subjects in the coming
year, and who are invited to prepare a written description of possible
seminars. (Appendices K and L)
The Representatives meet bi-weekly with the Director throughout the fall
to compile and assess the results of these surveys, and to decide which
seminar possibilities best address the interests and needs that
prospective participants have stated. The Representatives then circulate
descriptions of the seminars and work with school teachers in applying by
the application deadline. (Appendix M.1)
Applications of teachers who apply to the Institute are first reviewed by
subject-area supervisors from the Schools to verify that each proposal is
consistent with and significant for school curricula and that each teacher
will be assigned courses in the coming year in which he or she will teach
the unit developed in the program. (Appendix M.2) They also consider
whether the teachers' proposals are important for their own professional
development and pertinent to their periodic recertification as
professional educators in Connecticut. At the same time, Institute
faculty members review the applications for their relationship to the
seminar subject.
Seminar Coordinators, acting as an admissions committee, then consider the
results of the administrative and faculty reviews and make recommendations
about which teachers to accept. (Appendix M.3) The Director makes final
decisions, taking into consideration program objectives and the relation
of proposed unit topics to seminar subjects, as well as such practical
matters as size of seminars and fair representation of schools, grade
levels, and departments. (Appendix N)
Teachers are not selected as Institute Fellows on the basis of their
previous academic accomplishment; rather, the Institute seeks to serve all
teachers in the humanities and the sciences and mathematics who
demonstrate a specific need for additional preparation and a desire to
develop new curricular materials for their school courses. We especially
want to include teachers who have little formal preparation in the
subjects that they are assigned to teach. To select teachers on some
other basis would exclude teachers who, with their students, might derive
greatest benefit from the Institute.
The main criterion for selection, then, is that a teacher
propose to develop and to teach in the coming year a unit consistent with
school curricula and closely related to the general subject of an
Institute seminar. No teacher is selected whose unit would be unrelated
either to a seminar or to courses that will be offered in the coming year.
In this way we ensure that the participants are teachers who will prepare
materials that they themselves will teach and that, by extension, are
potentially useful to their colleagues in the schools.
In practice, each year there is a winnowing from more than
one hundred interested school teachers to those who finally are willing to
commit themselves to participating fully in the program in one of the
seminars that have been organized. Some teachers may be unable to find in
that year's offerings a subject of compelling interest, but the topics on
which most teachers wish to develop curricula each year result in
seminars. In short, the process through which teachers annually play a
leading role in determining the subject areas in which they wish to work
is self-fulfilling; that is, it assures a high level of teacher
participation and guarantees the introduction of Institute-developed
materials into the school curriculum.
One or two years of Institute participation by no means
compensates for many school teachers' lack of formal preparation in the
subjects they teach; nor does it keep them current in their fields. These
are among the reasons the Institute proceeds from a belief that school
teachers should have, as a regular part of their professional lives, an
ongoing engagement with the subjects they teach The Institute seeks over
time to include as many teachers as possible and to ensure that
participants are a cross-section of all New Haven teachers.
B. Requirements for Fellows
In applying to become a Fellow of the Institute, each teacher agrees to
participate fully in program activities by: 1) attending all talks
and seminar meetings; 2) researching both the seminar subject and the unit
topic; 3) meeting due dates in preparing a curriculum unit consistent with
Institute guidelines; and 4) submitting a written evaluation of the
program. Fellows who meet these expectations become for one year members
of the Yale community with borrowing privileges at the University
libraries and access to other campus facilities and resources. They are
listed in the University Directory of faculty and staff. Fellows who are
not participating fully are counseled by their Seminar Coordinator to
withdraw from the Institute and to reapply in a future year when full
participation may be more manageable for them.
C. Activities and Schedule
In early March of each year, the Institute accepts as Fellows fifty or
more New Haven public school teachers in the humanities and the sciences
and mathematics. All Fellows participate in a five-month schedule of
seminars, talks, and curriculum unit writing, as depicted in Figure I,
below. (Appendix O)
(figure available in print form)
The seminars are the main activity of the Institute. Not regular courses,
they have two related and equally important purposes: the further
preparation of teachers in the subjects of the seminars and the adaptation
of this new learning, through the curriculum units, for use in the Fellows'
own and other teachers classrooms. As a group, Fellows study the seminar
subject generally by discussing common readings; individually, each Fellow
selects a more limited aspect of the subject, and researches and develops
it in depth for classroom use. In some seminars, the time is divided
arbitrarily: the leader either lectures for the first hour or uses that
time for a discussion of common reading; the second hour incorporates
either a presentation of work-in-progress by Fellows or more general
discussion of pedagogical applications of material learned in the seminar.
Other seminar leaders seek more flexible or varied models. In all cases,
seminars balance these complementary, but in some ways distinct,
activities.
The Institute's unit-writing process entails two drafts,
in addition to a preliminary statement of topic and prospectus. The first
draft, a prose account of objectives and strategies of the unit, is due in
late May. The second draft, including a rewrite of that section and the
first draft of the rest of the unit, is due in early July. In both cases,
faculty members return the drafts with written comments a week later. The
final version, typed in a format appropriate for reproduction, is due at
the end of July. (Appendix P) During August, the curriculum units are
compiled into a volume for each seminar with an introduction by the
seminar leader. A Guide to the Units is prepared from brief summaries
written by their authors. Fellows also recommend the courses and grade
levels for which their units seem most appropriate, and they propose the
subject-matter categories under which their units should be listed in the
Index of curriculum units written since 1978,which is updated annually.
(Appendices Q, R, S) The Guide and Index are widely distributed in all
the schools so that Fellows and other teachers can identify and request
the units they will use in their classrooms. In September the volumes are
deposited in all school libraries and distributed to teachers who have
requested and wish to use them. (Appendix T)
Although the most intensive phase of the Institute--the five-month program
of lectures, seminars, and writing in which all Fellows participate--concludes with the completion of the curriculum units, many Fellows
are
active throughout the year in the leadership of the program. School
Representatives and Contacts have responsibility for promoting widespread
use of Institute-developed materials by their colleagues.
D. Compensation
Yale faculty members who lead Institute seminars are compensated at a
level that makes Institute participation attractive to all ranks of the
faculty. School teachers who participate as Institute Fellows receive a
stipend upon successful completion of the Institute. To complete the
program successfully a Fellow must fulfill all of the requirements
listed above (page 8). This stipend is intended in part to cover the
Fellows' out-of-pocket expenses of participation, including books and
seminar materials, travel, parking, and word processing.
E. Certification
Upon successful completion of the Institute, Fellows may petition for
certification of their course of study. (Appendix U) Any Fellow who
intends to request that Institute studies be recognized for credit in a
degree program is advised to consult in advance with the dean of the
institution where he or she is enrolled.
F. Evaluation and Annual Report
Institute participants, both Fellows and Seminar Leaders, write an
evaluation at the conclusion of their participation each year and the
Director prepares an annual report on Institute activities, basing it in
part on their comments. (Appendices V, W)
G. Manual of Institute Procedures
The Institute maintains a manual of operating procedures that includes, by
way of example, procedures for teachers' application and admission to the
Institute, guidelines for Institute Fellows writing curriculum units, and
guidelines for ordering classroom materials to implement these units in
school classrooms. (Many documents from the current manual appear in the
Appendix.) These procedures evolve over time, mainly through decisions
made by school teachers serving in the Institute's leadership. In this
way, the Institute remains responsive to the perceived needs of the school
teachers who participate as Fellows.