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Teacher Power
For
20 years, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has helped local
teachers develop and enrich their own curricula. Now, the Institute
is helping to spark similar partnerships around the country.
May
1998
by Mark Alden Branch '86
In many
ways, the gulf between the worlds of New Haven public school teachers and Yale professors could not be greater.
Public school teachers must use meager resources to reach large
numbers of students who might just as soon be elsewhere, while professors
enjoy reasonable funding and support and greet students who have
fought hard for a place in their classrooms. Throw in class, race,
and educational differences, and the chances for a meeting of the
minds look slimmer and slimmer.
But just
such an alliance between Yale faculty and New Haven teachers, built
on a common love of teaching and learning, has been thriving for
the past 20 years. Every summer since 1978, the Yale-New
Haven Teachers Institute has offered seminars led by Yale faculty
to New Haven public school teachers, who go on to use what they
have learned to plan lessons for their own students. This simple
idea has proven so successful that the Institute recently received
a grant to help it seed similar college-school partnerships in other
cities across the country.
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"The
best thing you can give to anyone is what you do best."
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"I think
it is one of the best things Yale can do for the city," says Sabatino
Sofia '63, '66PhD, a professor of astronomy and co-chair of the
Institute's University Advisory Council. "The best thing you can
give to anyone is what you do best."
The Teachers
Institute has prospered, according to former University President
Howard Lamar '51PhD, who
has led two seminars, "because it is characterized by Yale faculty
not telling anybody what to do." The topics for the seminars, for
example, are chosen largely by local teachers based on their needs
and interests. And the Yale faculty are there not to tell teachers
how to teach, but to impart their knowledge and insight on subject
matter.
"The
teachers have the expertise in the level they're teaching,"
says history professor Cynthia Russett '64PhD, who has led two Institute
seminars. "We don't. We can help them find out what's new in the
subject area, but they have the expertise in what their students
can handle. They have to decide for themselves how to use the material."
It was
a group of teachers, in fact, who first approached the University
about a venture that was a precursor of the Teachers Institute.
In 1970, a group of history teachers at Richard C. Lee High School
came to Yale's history department with a proposal to create a series
of summer seminars for teachers led by University faculty. The teachers,
in turn, would develop short "mini-courses" for their students based
on what they had studied in the seminars. Funded jointly by the
New Haven public schools and Yale, the History Education Project
(HEP) proved a great success, but not before Yale and the teachers
had sized each other up warily.
"At first,
the teachers were very suspicious," recalls Lamar, who helped found
HEP. "They thought 'Why are they so interested in us?' And on Yale's
part, there was great debate over such issues as whether the teachers
should have library privileges. It began very slowly. But at a fairly
early point, a sense of mutual purpose and understanding evolved."
Out of
that project grew the idea for a broader, more rigorous program
that would encompass other areas of study. (First on the school
system's list was English, since administrators agreed that much
improvement was needed in that area.) Jim Vivian '68, who had recently
returned to Yale as a graduate student in history and had taken
on responsibility for HEP, unwittingly embarked on a new career
path when he prepared a grant application for what would become
the Teacher's Institute. "I originally had agreed only to write
the proposal," says Vivian, "but the National Endowment for the
Humanities required us to list a project director, so I put my name
down, with the understanding that it would be a short-term, part-time
commitment."
Twenty
years later, Vivian still lists himself as director of the Institute,
which is now a small but established part of the Yale landscape.
With a full-time staff of just three people operating out of the
basement of the Whitney Humanities Center, Vivian has effectively
managed both the substance and the image of the Teachers Institute
through conferences, publications, and special programs. His National
Advisory Committee -- which includes noted educational reformer
Theodore R. Sizer '53 of Brown University and Smithsonian Institution
secretary I. Michael Heyman '56LLB, among others -- is as effective
in getting the word out about the Institute as it is in collecting
input. And an occasional publication called On Common Ground, mailed to university and school officials across the country, reports
on YNHTI's activities and other school-university partnerships.
"Jim
Vivian brings to the Institute an intense dedication and a clear
picture of what the goal is to be," says Lamar. "He also brings
an infinite patience. There were years when the University wasn't
that interested in the Institute, but Jim has persisted."
One
of Vivian's missions has been to put the Institute on firm financial
footing. After receiving a pair of endowment challenge grants
in 1990 ($2 million from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
and $750,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities), the
Institute raised another $2 million for an endowment, making it
the first permanent enterprise of its nature at any university in
the nation.
The Institute's
operating method is now well-defined. Every year, teachers who work
as liaisons with the Institute poll their colleagues in order to
identify seminar topics that would be useful for them in their teaching;
these range from astronomy to myths to American political thought.
Often, topics are chosen to address specific cultural interests
of New Haven students, including immigration, the blues, and Latin
American literature. The Institute then approaches an appropriate
professor, who further develops the seminar. To take a seminar,
teachers submit an application that includes a description of the
teaching unit they intend to devise. Vivian says that admission
is intended to be inclusive (84 of about 100 applicants were accepted
last year, the most the program could accommodate) and that the
program hopes to "involve those with the least preparation in their
field." In that way, the Institute can help deal with the problem
of frequent reassignments in city schools, which often force teachers
to tackle subjects they didn't study in college.
Once
accepted, the teachers become Fellows of the Institute and receive
Yale library privileges, e-mail accounts, and other benefits. The
seminars meet twice during the spring semester, then weekly for
11 weeks beginning in May. In addition to the seminars, Fellows
attend a series of talks by Yale faculty members on various subjects
relating to Institute seminars in hope of stimulating discussion
and interdisciplinary connections. Upon completing the seminars
and their curriculum plans, Fellows receive a $1,000 honorarium
and continuing education units.
The seminars
are carefully constructed to create a collegial environment for
professors to share with teachers their knowledge and insight and
for teachers to share with each other their pedagogical techniques
for conveying this material to students. In order that the professor
not be seen as a schoolmaster, much of the administrative work is
handled by a seminar coordinator, an Institute Fellow who is also
enrolled in the seminar. The coordinators pay attention to attendance
and participation and consult with Fellows on the progress of their
work.
For
the Fellows, the seminars have obvious benefits: the opportunity
to sharpen their understanding of the content they are teaching
and a focused way of creating a curriculum. But some of the benefits
are more basic. "I got a sense [from leading seminars] that teachers
have very
little opportunity to talk among themselves," says Cynthia Russett.
"The idea that they could get together and share among themselves
was important in itself."
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"You get to talk to
people your own age."
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Pedro
Mendia, a third-year Fellow who teaches second grade at the Clinton
Avenue School, confirms this view. "The nice thing about the seminars
is that you get to talk about these things with people your own
age," says Mendia.
Fellows
also are exposed to resources that Yale faculty take for granted
but that are often scarce in the schools, most notably the Internet.
Russett tells of a Fellow in her seminar on women in American history
and literature who found women's diaries from the Civil War on the
World Wide Web. "Now her students have the opportunity to look at
these primary sources," says Russett.
The experience
of creating their own curricular material is also empowering for
some teachers. "I feel much more confident now when I introduce
my own material," says Mendia.
For the
school district, the Teachers Institute provides a way to create
curricula to help meet specific district and state standards. The
Institute is also a powerful incentive for many teachers to stay
in the New Haven schools. (Teachers in suburban schools are not
eligible for the Institute.) "I would think twice about leaving
New Haven, as it would bother me not to have access to the Institute,"
says Mendia. "And to have access to the libraries at Yale is a really
remarkable thing."
But what
is in it for the faculty? They are compensated financially for their
work, but Sabatino Sofia says his participation is in part a gesture
of gratitude. "As a scientist, I'm well aware that most of our funding
comes from the government," says Sofia. "When I fly a [solar research]
balloon at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, part of that
money is coming from a kid flipping burgers at McDonald's. The least
we can do is give back something."
Howard
Lamar points to another benefit for faculty members: They have to
stretch their own knowledge in response to the needs and interests
of the Fellows. Lamar tells of one seminar he led on the history
of New Haven that was "a revelation" for him, and another on the
regions of the United States. "A majority of the teachers were from
the South, especially the Carolinas and Virginia," recalls Lamar.
"Hearing their views of the Northeast and their reminiscences of
the South was fascinating. It was a piece of social history that
hadn't been recorded, and they turned out to be superb genealogists
of their own history."
Lamar
also says that it is gratifying for faculty to see "that
their area of interest, which they might consider very esoteric,
could click if presented in a certain way" to students. "It gives
the professors a sense of belonging and purpose," he says.
While
the Institute has clearly had a positive effect on the professors
and fellows who have participated, Vivian and his staff are working
to see that the benefits multiply throughout the New Haven schools
and beyond. Some 40 percent of New Haven secondary school teachers
have completed at least one seminar (the program was opened to teachers
of lower grades more recently), but they and the other 60 percent
stand to gain from the Institute's initiative to put more than 1,100
curriculum units on the Internet (at www.yale.edu/ynhti), where
they are accessible to any teachers who want to use them. The units
have been available on paper for years, but the electronic format
makes them searchable and easy to use, a boon for teachers in need
of resources. "I regularly pull up lessons from other Fellows, if
only for the bibliographies people have put together," says Sequella
Coleman, a Fellow who teaches sixth grade at Fair Haven Middle School.
"I use them a lot more now that they're online."
But making
curriculum units available is just the beginning. After many years
of inquiries from other universities and school systems, the Institute
is preparing to help nurture new school-university partnerships.
Thanks to a new $2.5 million grant from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's
Digest Fund, the Institute expects to award planning grants to five
or six universities this year, which will lead to three demonstration
projects over the following three years. Twenty-nine colleges and
universities, representing 14 potential demonstration sites, have
been invited to apply for the national program; representatives
from these schools will visit Yale this summer for an intensive
ten-day session to learn how the Institute works.
Vivian
says the national program will help determine whether Yale's success
can be replicated under different conditions. "In the beginning
Yale was viewed by outsiders as the kind of institution that was
least likely to accomplish something like this," he says. "Over
time that view got turned on its head. Now it's important to demonstrate
that different kinds of institutions can do it, too."
Nearly
everyone agrees that an essential ingredient at any institution
will be a strong leader. "Jim Vivian is so much of the Institute
that the most difficult part to replicate is him," says Sabatino
Sofia.
But Jean
Sutherland, a third grade teacher at Beecher School and ten-year
Institute Fellow, says the most important piece of the Institute
for anyone to copy is the collegial, mutually respectful relationship
between faculty and fellows that the Teachers Institute has encouraged.
"The key is really involving teachers in a cooperative manner. We
have a role in all the decision-making processes, and that's what
makes it work."
If the
Teachers Institute can succeed in establishing sister institutions,
it could become a powerful model as schools across the nation struggle
to improve the standards of both the curriculum and the training
of teachers. It could also be a step toward repairing a fundamental
split in American education. "American higher education and public
elementary and secondary education have pursued different courses
and almost never intersect," says Howard Lamar. "The Teachers Institute
restores a rational continuity between the two." 
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