Celebrating 20 Years

The Yale National Initiative is a program of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, which was established in 1978 as a partnership between Yale University and New Haven Public Schools. By bringing university resources to bear on improving local public schools, the Institute was, and is, a pioneer in both school-college collaboration and content-based professional development.

After becoming the first such program to be endowed as a permanent unit of a university in 1995, the Institute launched a three-year National Demonstration Project in 1998 to help fund and support the creation of Teachers Institutes based on the New Haven model in four cities across the country. Following the Project's successful conclusion, the Institute launched the Yale National Initiative in 2004 to continue the work of implementing new Teachers Institutes. Each year, the Initiative brings public school teachers to Yale to participate in national seminars led by Yale faculty, develop a curriculum unit to teach their students in the coming year, and learn about the Teachers Institute Approach.

Since the Yale National Initiative conducted its first national seminars in 2005, 626 public school teachers have developed 1,105 curriculum units in 115 seminars led by Yale faculty. In addition to the four Teachers Institutes created during the National Demonstration Project, five new Teachers Institutes have been established during the Initiative, and forty-five high-need school districts across the country have benefited from their teachers' participation as Yale National Fellows.

Please join us in celebrating twenty years of our work together - as teachers, faculty, school and university representatives, colleagues, and friends - to strengthen teaching and learning in the nation's high-need public schools. We look forward to expanding our efforts in the future.