7:47 a.m., Nov. 19, 2009----The University of Delaware is working with educators in northern Delaware to launch a teachers institute in cooperation with the Yale National Initiative, which is intended to strengthen teaching in public schools through a professional development approach that has been followed for more than three decades by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

The project is in the planning stages as the University works with four New Castle County school districts - Appoquinimink, Christina, Red Clay and New Castle County Vocational-Technical - with hopes of offering the institute on campus in fall 2010 or 2011. Organizers also hope to add new school district sponsors, with Brandywine close to joining the effort.

Yale is aggressively seeking to build a network of institutes around the country. The New Castle program would be the first involving multiple school districts.

The project was initiated by teachers who had been fellows at the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and were interested in the establishment of a local program. To date, nearly 20 local teachers, several of whom are UD alumni, have participated as fellows.

Six UD professors and two administrators from the College of Arts and Sciences -- George Watson, interim dean and Joseph Pika, interim associate dean of the college and director of the Center for Secondary Teacher Education -- have visited New Haven to observe the Yale program.

A meeting between UD officials and northern Delaware teachers on the establishment of a local institute was held Wednesday, Nov. 11, at Memorial Hall, and Yale officials will make a site visit to UD in January.

Pika said a teachers institute would provide University faculty an opportunity to work in a collegial manner with teachers as learning peers, offer encouragement for K-12 teachers as they share their instructional techniques, and help to build professional relationships between professors and teachers. “This is truly a teacher-driven program,” said Pika. “Delaware teachers have returned from the Yale Summer Institute with enormous enthusiasm and have driven the planning. In the future, local teachers would play a major role in shaping the seminar offerings offered by UD faculty.”

Furthermore, the institute would offer an opportunity to improve content knowledge among Delaware students, including many who will enter UD, serve underrepresented populations and proliferate current knowledge in various disciplines.

Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute

Established in 1978, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, an intensive and sustained collaboration among Yale faculty members and public school teachers, is the premier partnership between Yale University and the New Haven Public Schools. The first such university-school partnership to be permanently endowed as a unit of a university, it is a widely recognized model of high quality teacher professional development.

In 2004, after the successful testing of this model in a four-year national demonstration project, the institute launched the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools. The initiative is a long-term endeavor to establish teachers institutes that will provide state and local policy makers effective examples of the innovative Institute approach in their own communities.

Teachers institutes focus on the academic preparation of school teachers and on the application in their own classrooms of what they study in the institute. By linking institutions of higher education with urban or rural school districts where the students are mainly from low-income communities, institutes strengthen teaching and learning in public schools and also benefit the institutions whose faculty members serve as seminar leaders.

A teachers 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. At the core of its program is a series of seminars on subjects in the humanities and sciences. Topics are suggested by the teachers based on what they think could enrich their classroom instruction.

In the seminars, the university or college faculty members contribute their knowledge of a subject, while the school 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 the teachers, with guidance from a faculty member, write a curriculum unit to be used in their own classroom and to be shared with others in the same school and other schools through both print and electronic publication.