"To Motivate My Students:"
An Evaluation of the National Demonstration Project of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
by Rogers M. Smith

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NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION PROJECT EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Recent research indicates that the single most important factor in student performance is teacher quality. Some researchers contend that teacher quality accounts for twenty times more of the variance in student achievement than any other factor, including socioeconomic status. By common consensus, quality teachers are:

i). Teachers who really know their subjects;

ii). Teachers with good basic writing, math, and oral presentation skills;

iii). Teachers with high expectations of their students;

iv). Teachers who are enthusiastic about teaching; and

v). Teachers who can motivate all students to learn.

Most forms of professional development fail to foster teacher quality along these five key dimensions.

For over 25 years, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has been developing a unique model for improving teacher quality. The Institute approach significantly strengthens teachers in all five of the major dimensions of teacher quality. At its heart are partnerships between institutions of higher education and public schools. The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute offers five to seven seminars each year, led by Yale faculty, on topics that teachers have selected to enhance their mastery of what they teach. The seminars meet 13 times in a four-month period from March through July. In these seminars teachers gain more sophisticated content knowledge, and they also enhance their skills by preparing curriculum units adapting the themes of the seminars for their students. Most teachers are enthusiastic about the seminars and the opportunity to teach the units they have written. They expect more of the students taking them. And they succeed in motivating their students to learn at higher levels.

From 1999-2002, with a grant from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute launched a National Demonstration Project to create similar Institutes at four diverse sites with large concentrations of disadvantaged students: Pittsburgh, PA; Houston, TX; Albuquerque, NM; and Santa Ana, CA. Each site adopted the basic Institute model, adapted to meet distinct circumstances and challenges.

All four sites succeeded in establishing Institutes that, during the course of the National Demonstration Project, offered seminars that achieved positive results similar to those in New Haven. At each site, teachers drawn from all grade levels and all subject areas participated out of desires to obtain curriculum suited to their needs, to increase their mastery of their subjects, and especially to obtain materials to motivate their students. 95% of all participating teachers rated the Institute seminars "moderately" or "greatly" useful. Similar percentages said the seminars increased their knowledge, improved their skills and morale, and raised their expectations of students. After teaching their units, 2/3 of all participants rated them superior to all other curriculum they had used. Roughly 60% of all participants rated student motivation and attention as higher during these units, producing substantially greater content mastery.

Institutes also served to foster teacher leadership, to develop supportive teacher networks, to heighten university faculty commitments to improving public education, and to foster more positive partnerships between school districts and institutions of higher education. Problems arose chiefly when Institutes departed from National Project guidelines or when local financial obstacles proved too great to overcome. Where funding could be found and the Institute model was largely followed, the Institutes achieved significant, sustainable success in improving teacher quality.

The Teachers Institute National Demonstration Project: Aims and Assessments 1

I. Project Aims: Improving Teacher Quality. The true test of any effort to improve education for America's disadvantaged students is whether it helps students learn more and better. Among educational researchers, a new consensus is emerging about what is most needed to help students to learn. None would dismiss the older view, elaborated in the works of James S. Coleman and Christopher Jencks, that socioeconomic backgrounds strongly affect student achievement2. Classrooms that have good physical, curricular, and technological resources and manageable numbers of students also matter greatly. But recent research suggests the single most important factor in student performance is teacher quality.3 Some researchers contend that in their studies of gains in student achievement, teacher quality accounts for twenty times more of the variance than any other factor, including socioeconomic status.4

What are the ingredients of "teacher quality"? Though different researchers give different answers, five elements emerge repeatedly as central. Quality teachers are:

i). Teachers who really know their subjects, not just "how" to teach;5

ii). Teachers who have good basic writing, math, and oral presentation skills;6

iii). Teachers who expect their students to achieve;7

iv). Teachers who are enthusiastic about teaching; 8and

v). Teachers who can motivate even highly disadvantaged students to learn.9

These findings have triggered policy debates on how to attract new and better teachers--a commendable goal. But for years to come, the teachers we now have will do much of the teaching. The quality of all teachers will also always flag if their professional development is neglected. Researchers and policy-makers have given much less attention to the vital question of what forms of professional development really contribute to teacher quality. The bleak consensus of researchers and teachers is that many existing forms are cursory, dreary exercises that leave teachers bored and resentful, not informed or inspired.10

The Teachers Institute Approach to Teacher Quality. For over 25 years, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has been developing a unique approach to improving teacher quality. In New Haven, where 46 schools serve some 20,759 students, more than 60% of the students come from families receiving public assistance, and 85% are African-American or Hispanic. Among many other things, quality teachers are badly needed. Though the Institute alone cannot solve and has not solved all New Haven's educational problems, data obtained through annual teacher surveys and school district performance evaluations indicate that its approach has significantly strengthened New Haven teachers in all five regards noted above: content knowledge; basic communication and calculation skills; expectations of students; teacher enthusiasm; and capacities to motivate students.11

At the heart of the Teachers Institute approach is a special sort of partnership between institutions of higher education and public schools. The Institute in New Haven consists of a Director and staff; a network of Teacher Representatives in the New Haven Schools; and a community of Yale faculty members. Each year, the Institute offers semester-length seminars, led by Yale faculty, on topics that the teachers, through their Representatives, have selected to enhance their knowledge of what they teach. These seminars combine teachers from different schools teaching different subjects at different grade levels, who all wish to learn more about topics in history, literature, politics, math, physics, or other areas, in order to improve their teaching. In these seminars teachers gain more sophisticated content knowledge, and they also enhance their writing and oral skills by preparing substantial curriculum units that they discuss with their fellow teachers in the seminars, then teach to their students. These units, roughly 10 to 15 pages, are based on research into a topic inspired by the seminar and assisted by the faculty member, but adapted to the teachers' courses and students. The units often represent the first substantial research and writing project that teachers have undertaken since college. They contain a narrative describing the unit's goals and strategies and several sample lesson plans. By presenting their units in progress to their fellow teachers, seminar participants receive useful pedagogical feedback as they also improve their oral communication skills. Both faculty and teachers are paid stipends, out of recognition that all are giving both time and expertise to improve teaching.

Through offering five to seven seminars a year and making them available to all teachers willing to do the work, the Institute has now reached roughly a third of New Haven high school and middle school teachers and a fifth of primary school teachers. Teacher responses over two decades provide extensive evidence that the seminars not only increase their content knowledge, including science and math knowledge in some seminars, but also writing and oral skills in all seminars. They also heighten teachers' enthusiasm for their work, raise their expectations of students, and provide them with curriculum that they are strongly motivated to teach and that more effectively motivates students to learn.

The National Project. In 1999, after two years of planning, and aided by support from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund (now the Wallace Foundation), the Institute began a National Demonstration Project to determine if this approach could work in other cities with similarly disadvantaged students but with distinct challenges. The most significant differences were much larger district sizes, differing institutions of higher education, and greater language barriers. Some sites also adopted somewhat different means of structuring their Institutes, providing further variations. Teachers Institutes were created through university/school district partnerships at four sites:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where two private institutions, a liberal arts college, Chatham College, and a research university, Carnegie Mellon University, joined with the Pittsburgh Public Schools, a district about twice the size of New Haven, to create the Pittsburgh Teachers Institute (PTI);

Houston, Texas, where a public institution, the University of Houston, joined with the huge, 210,000-student Houston Independent School District, one of the nation's five largest, to create the Houston Teachers Institute (HTI);

Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a public university, the University of New Mexico, joined with the Albuquerque Public Schools, a system about four times the size of New Haven and with many Hispanic and Native American students, to create the Albuquerque Teachers Institute (ATI);

Santa Ana, California, where an elite public university, the University of California-Irvine, joined with the Santa Ana Unified School District, a system roughly three times the size of New Haven and comprised largely of Spanish-speaking, limited English students, to create the Santa Ana Teachers Institute (SATI).

During the three years of the evaluation period for the National Demonstration Project, from July 1999 through July 2002, all four sites administered mandatory surveys to all teachers who participated as Fellows in their seminars to gain teachers' assessments of the seminar experiences. The Project also conducted a one-time survey of teachers in participating schools at the four sites, including both teachers who had been Fellows and those who had not (Non-Fellows), on their use of curriculum units created in the Institutes.12 This Evaluation Report is based on analysis of those surveys, along with materials provided by each of the sites; the report of the Project's external evaluator, Policy Studies Associates; pertinent secondary literature; and evidence about the Institute approach accumulated over the last quarter-century in New Haven.13

II. Assessments of Achievements. As the National Demonstration Project's external evaluator, Policy Studies Associates, concluded, the central lesson of the Project is that it "succeeded in reaching its goal" of demonstrating that the Teachers Institute model could be replicated in a relatively short period of time in four sites that are considerably larger than New Haven.14 Collectively, the new Institutes involved roughly 650 teachers and 60 college faculty members in 75 seminars over the course of the Project, with many teachers taking more than one seminar. These seminars produced results that were remarkably similar to each other and to experiences in New Haven, and markedly better than those reported by most existing forms of professional development. The most important difficulties encountered in the Project came from departures from the Institute model that worked against sustainability of Institute-style seminars at two sites, Albuquerque and Santa Ana, not from any clear shortcomings in the model itself.

Evidence from surveys of Fellows concerning their seminar experiences shows strikingly that teachers chose to participate out of desires to improve themselves in precisely the areas that research indicates to be key to teacher quality. When asked to choose among 12 reasons for participation in the seminars, teachers favored four:15

• Desire for materials to motivate students (A): cited by 88%-97% of Fellows at the four sites.
• Desire for curriculum fitted to teachers' needs (B): cited by 84%-92% of Fellows.
• Desire to increase teachers' mastery of their subjects (C): cited by 79%-91% of Fellows.
• Desire to exercise intellectual independence (D): cited by 76%- 92% of Fellows.

These results demonstrate that virtually all teachers wanted to increase their content knowledge; to use curriculum about which they could be enthusiastic because it fit their needs and exercised their minds; and above all, they sought materials that could motivate their students. There were also revealing variations. Younger teachers most often stressed the importance of increasing their mastery of the subjects they are teaching. High school teachers, more than primary school teachers, emphasized the importance of developing materials to motivate students.

Still more significantly, teachers at all sites overwhelmingly believed the seminars strengthened their capabilities in these and other regards vital to teacher quality. In contrast to most professional development programs, the surveys revealed no widely shared criticisms of the seminars. Instead, 95% of all teachers praised the overall program, rating it "moderately" useful (40%) or "greatly" useful (55%), in a remarkably consistent range running from 91% at Houston to 99% at Albuquerque. In questions pertinent to the main dimensions of teacher quality:

• 94%-98% of Fellows "Agreed" (31%) or "Strongly Agreed" (66%) that the seminars helped their professional growth (A);
• 90%-95% of Fellows "Agreed" (44%) or "Strongly Agreed" (48%) that the seminars helped their knowledge and confidence (B);
• 92%-96% of Fellows found the new knowledge they gained "Moderately" (22%) or "Greatly"(72%) useful (C);
• 83%-91% of Fellows "Agreed" (44%) or "Strongly Agreed" (44%) that the seminars raised their expectations of students (D).

The data strongly support the conclusion that virtually all teachers felt substantially strengthened in their mastery of content knowledge and their professional skills more generally, and they also developed heightened expectations for what their students could achieve. At each site, these results also grew more positive during the course of the national project, as the new Institutes gained experience in constructing appropriate seminars. And again, the surveys show other significant variations. More experienced teachers, presumably more familiar with alternative forms of professional development, rated the overall program especially highly. Teachers with Master's as well as Bachelor's degrees were more likely to say the seminars raised their expectations of their students, especially teachers in the humanities. Though teachers in the physical sciences rated their seminar experiences highly, their ratings were slightly less positive than those provided by teachers in the humanities, social sciences, and other areas.16

The Curriculum Units in the Classroom. Except for a handful who were unable to do so, virtually all Fellows went on to teach the units they had prepared, and roughly a quarter also used other Teachers Institute units. About 87% taught their units in from 2 to 5 classes, usually over a full academic year, sometimes half a year. Most teachers chose to present their units via teacher-led discussion rather than extensive lecturing. They also stressed writing exercises and activities designed to strengthen speaking, listening, vocabulary and reasoning skills, much more than test taking. About a fifth of the teachers used units to develop math skills, largely but not exclusively teachers in the physical sciences. Much recent research indicates that these teaching methods, employed by teachers with good content knowledge, are especially effective in enhancing student knowledge, critical thinking skills, and problem-solving capabilities. 17

The Fellows expressed very strong satisfaction with the units. Over 98% rated them either "very useful" (57.3%) or "somewhat useful" (40.9%). Only Fellows teaching in the physical sciences were more likely to rate them "somewhat" instead of "very useful." All teachers particularly valued the sample lessons and activities the units provided, along with the resource lists for teachers and students. Roughly 75% of teachers also compared the units favorably to commercially available curriculum in terms of sample lessons and activities, teaching strategies, resources and other features. In these comparisons, teachers in the physical sciences rated the units just as high or higher than their counterparts in other subject areas.

Overall, an impressive 65% of all Fellows rated the units written by themselves or other Institute Fellows as superior to all other types of curriculum they had used, with almost 34% rating them the same. Roughly the same percentages rated the units as more enjoyable or equally enjoyable to teach than other curriculum. There were no statistically significant variations according to the grade levels or subject areas in which Fellows taught. In these regards, physical science teachers again resembled other teachers. Due to their low numbers, the responses from Fellows using other Fellows' units, as well as from Non-Fellows using units, must be interpreted with caution. Still, these responses were essentially indistinguishable from those of Fellows teaching their own units.

It should be noted that no Institute made a concerted effort to persuade teachers to use Institute-prepared units instead of other curriculum. Instead, teachers learned about units most often from knowing their authors, other Institute Fellows, or from the Institute Teacher Representatives at their schools--essentially "word-of-mouth" forms of dissemination largely limited to the schools participating in the Institutes--and from the Institute Web sites. Even so, at least 90 teachers used units that they did not write during the National Project, and about half of those had not participated in an Institute. 18

Student Responses to Curriculum Units. Because the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, sponsor of the National Demonstration Project, wished evaluators to focus on the Project's impact on teachers, it did not authorize funds for the complex task of directly evaluating the impact on students of having had teachers who had been Fellows. Teachers using units did, however, provide a great deal of data concerning student responses to those units.

Again, these data are highly positive. Teachers believed these units were especially challenging for students: 55.4% of responding Fellows rated those challenges as high, 43.0% as moderate, and only 1.6% as minimal. Yet they found students responded well to these challenges. 60.4% rated student interest during these units as high, 34.5% rated it as moderate, 5.2% as minimal. In comparison with other sorts of curriculum they had used, Fellows found the Institute-prepared units received strikingly superior student responses. The different grade levels and subject matters in which Fellows taught produced only minor variations, although again science teachers rated units somewhat less highly. Overall:

• 60.8% of Fellows rated student attention as higher during these units than during other work; 39.2% about the same, 0% lower.

• 58.4% of Fellows rated student motivation as higher during these units; 40.4% about the same, 1.2% lower.

• 55.3% of Fellows rated student interest as higher during these units; 43.5% about the same, 1.2% lower.

• 50.3% of Fellows rated student content mastery as higher during these units; 49.7% about the same, 0% lower.

Corollary Benefits. Experiences at the four sites during the three years of the Demonstration Project, and in New Haven over a quarter-century, indicate that the Institute approach generates significant corollary benefits that are not easily grasped through survey responses and not always visible in a relatively short time period. Perhaps the most important of these include:

• The development of teacher leadership capabilities, as many teachers serve as Teacher Representatives or Seminar Coordinators.
• The development of teacher networks, as teachers gain knowledge of who their fellow teachers at other grade levels and other schools are, and what they are doing in their classrooms;
• The development of university faculty who see themselves as partners in improving public education, rather than passive, often critical recipients of its graduates;
• The development of university-public school institutional partnerships in ways that promote respect and strengthen education in both settings.

Qualitative evidence from Houston, Pittsburgh, and New Haven, especially, provide many strong testimonials by teachers, university faculty members, and university and public school administrators of the Institutes' benefits in all these regards19.