Ninth Annual Conference

October 18-19, 2013

Following are the remarks of Initiative Director James Vivian in welcoming participants to the ninth Annual Conference of the Yale National Initiative.

This Conference is the sixteenth national meeting Yale has held on school-college collaboration that strengthens teaching and learning in public schools. The two main purposes of the Conference are to consider what the Teachers Institutes and the sixteen school districts currently participating in the Initiative have accomplished so far and to plan for the future of our work locally and nationally. Throughout, we will learn from each other about the principles, practices, and results of the Teachers Institute approach.

We greet the 2013 National Fellows, whose seminars met on campus in May and July, and are excited to welcome the superintendents, chief academic officers, and others who have come with them from their school districts and states. More than two thirds of the school-district representatives are attending your first annual Conference. So, the Conference affords a valuable opportunity for those of you who know the Institute approach to inform those who are just becoming acquainted with the meaning we invest in teacher leadership, institutional partnership, collegiality, and classroom application; about the support an Institute provides a school district for implementing its academic standards and for carrying out its strategic plans; and about the ways we work in the humanities, and in the STEM fields of sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Everyone's presence makes this meeting a splendid opportunity to reflect on the past year and recommit ourselves to the work for the benefit it can provide students in your school districts and in other high-need districts around the country. Your students are the reason we are here.

Teachers become National Fellows to learn from experience about the Teachers Institute approach and to help their school districts understand the advantages of that approach for their own curriculum and professional development. National Fellows have had various opportunities to meet at home with their superintendent and other district officials to explain the approach and the promise it holds for their community. The Conference continues and intensifies those conversations. Fellows and district officials also can learn here from colleagues from other communities. And each team should take advantage of being in New Haven together to determine the steps you will be taking, when you return home, to develop or sustain a local Teachers Institute and – whether or not you have or are planning an Institute – to explore ways your experience here can contribute to your work locally.

A hallmark of the Institute approach is our insistence that teachers' further preparation in subjects they teach have direct, practical application in their school classrooms. The curriculum units local and National Fellows write focus the attention of each seminar on enlarging teachers' effectiveness, and thus their districts' capacity, to increase the rigor of school courses and to deepen student learning in the seminar subjects. That is why we begin the Conference this morning with a panel of National Fellows, at least one from each of the six national seminars we offered this year. They will describe curriculum units they prepared and, in most cases, already have begun to teach.

The break-out sessions later this morning address ways Institute seminars can enhance teaching about images, sciences, cultural geography, role models, and Shakespeare, as well as uses of technology to disseminate and increase the visibility of our work. The break-out sessions this afternoon will focus on ways that curriculum units developed in local and national seminars have improved student learning in various subjects and grade levels. Each session will be led by Initiative participants who will open with remarks to frame and stimulate discussion.

I urge the team from each community to distribute your members across the break-out sessions this morning and this afternoon so that you can take part in as many as possible of these roundtable discussions. Whatever break-out session you attend this morning, we will have an opportunity during lunch to hear reports on all of the sessions.

After lunch, National Fellows will attend seminar reunions. At the same time, school officials will caucus to discuss challenges they face and to advise us on ways local Teachers Institutes and the National Initiative can assist their districts.

At the reception and dinner this evening you will have an opportunity for informal conversation across communities and across the roles we play as individuals. The printed program lists the local Institute experience of some National Fellows and of college and university faculty members attending the Conference to help you identify those with whom you may want to talk then or at other times. As with the break-out sessions, we ask that each team distribute your members around the room at dinner so that you will gain a wide acquaintance with colleagues from around the country.

In our first session back here tomorrow morning, six Yale faculty members will describe and answer questions about potential national seminar subjects for the coming year. Insofar as we can, we pattern our national work after that of a local Teachers Institute, so we want to present some options to preserve the principle of organizing seminars that address subjects that teachers request for their own further preparation and for the design of curriculum units that will engage and educate their students.

You then will meet in teams from each location to discuss the sessions you attended and the implications of the Conference for your work locally, including the plans you will make for recommending teachers to become National Fellows next year. At lunch we will ask district officials to report on their caucus this afternoon and your team meetings in the morning and, in particular, on the ways you believe teachers' participation in our national program can provide local benefits.

Again, thank you for taking time from demanding schedules to attend our annual Conference.