Seventh Annual Conference

Read a story on the Conference at YaleNews.

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

This Conference is the fourteenth national meeting Yale has held on school-college collaboration that strengthens teaching and learning in public schools. It is timely because of the emphasis that public policy makers and private funders now place on the fundamental necessity of effective teaching for student learning, the precept on which our local Teachers Institute was founded and the conviction that drives our work nationally. We convene at a time of unrelieved criticism of teachers and the teaching profession to congratulate and support – to root for – the teachers who are colleagues in this work.

We held the first Conference in this room twenty-eight years ago; it was the first national meeting of the Chief State School Officers with college and university presidents from their states on the subject of teaching. The next Conference in 1986, also held here, prompted the Education Editor of The New York Times to conclude that a new national movement of collaboration between school teachers and university faculty members had begun to "subvert the traditional separation between school and college." Since then, that collaboration has spread and produced encouraging results: We have established,

• that our approach enhances precisely those dimensions of teacher quality that are known to improve student learning,
• that Teacher Institutes exemplify the crucial characteristics of the highest-quality teacher professional development,
• that Institute participation encourages teachers to remain in teaching in their high-need schools, and
• that Teachers Institutes animated by the approach we share can be rapidly established in other communities.

These four are among the reasons we undertook the Yale National Initiative as a long-term endeavor to influence public policy toward teacher professional development, in part by assisting with establishment of new Institutes in states around the country. We want the example of these Institutes to persuade more school districts to adopt this type of teacher professional development.

The two main purposes of the present Conference are to consider what the five Institutes and twenty-one 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 examine and learn from each other about the principles, practices, and results of the Teachers Institute approach.

Again this year we have much to celebrate.

• We have begun to implement aspects of the five-year plan we made last year with numerous colleges and university and school district partners to expand, deepen, further evaluate, disseminate, and institutionalize our work.
• We expanded the National Initiative to include five more school districts and two additional states.
• To inform the design of a new evaluation, we commissioned a more explicit theory of change, with research supporting that theory.
• We have begun to develop a new information system to assist with evaluation and the operation of existing and new Institutes.
• The present Institutes held twenty-one (21) local seminars, and the curriculum units they produced, together with the curriculum units you wrote in national seminars, have been added to the more than 3000 Institute-developed units, many of which are searchable on our National Initiative Web site.
• We have begun to re-design our Web site to improve its function, update its appearance, and enlarge its audience before our Conference next year.
• In June the Teachers Institutes bill was introduced in the United States Senate and House of Representatives to create a grants program to support the planning and development of new Teachers Institutes around the country.
• Senators and Representatives from Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Delaware have joined those from Connecticut in co-sponsoring the legislation, which helps to demonstrate the national significance of the Teachers Institute approach.
• Some of you and others of our colleagues have contacted your Senators and Representatives to advocate the incorporation of provisions of our legislation in the Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now pending in the Congress.
• This fall we are publishing a new issue of our periodical On Common Ground, with a cover story on the legislation and a feature on the theory of change.
• A section of the periodical recognizes the building and establishment of the exemplary Delaware Teachers Institute in New Castle County, which we admitted to the League of Teachers Institutes at our Conference last year and which has begun operation this year.
• Other articles go to the center of our work where teachers write about curriculum units they developed in national seminars and have taught in school courses.

So, to celebrate these accomplishments, we are excited to welcome back the 2011 National Fellows, whose seminars met on campus in May and July, and to welcome especially the superintendents and other representatives of their school districts, who have come with the Fellows from their communities. Everyone’s presence makes this meeting a splendid opportunity to reflect on the past year, enjoy what we have accomplished, and recommit ourselves to the work for the benefit it can provide students in the school districts you represent and in other districts around the country. They 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 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 can take advantage of being together in New Haven to determine the steps you will be taking, when you return home, to develop or sustain a local Teachers Institute, and to consider other ways your experience here can contribute to your work locally.

A hallmark of the Institute approach is its 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 improve 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 seven national seminars we offered this year. They will describe curriculum units they prepared and, in many cases, have begun to teach.

The break-out sessions later this morning address aspects of the Teachers Institute approach, subjects of some of our seminars, and current topics in our work. Each session will be led by Initiative participants who will open with remarks to frame and stimulate discussion. Although these topics may be familiar to National Fellows, many of you will be hearing about them for the first time. More than four fifths 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 less well 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, the sciences, and mathematics.

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

This afternoon our long-time consultant Ellen Kisker will speak about, and five school teachers and university faculty members will comment on, the theory of change she has prepared.

Later this afternoon, National Fellows will attend seminar reunions. At the same time, school officials will caucus to discuss how they select professional development activities and the types of evidence they need about programs they are considering or implementing. We will ask them to advise the Initiative on our evaluation plans and on opportunities we may have to work together to increase knowledge about the efficacy of professional development practices.

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. A section in the printed program on the local Institute experience of the National Fellows and college and university faculty members attending the Conference will help you identify individuals with whom you may want to talk then or at other times. As with the morning break-out sessions, we ask that each team distribute your members around the room at dinner so that you 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, and we therefore want to present some options to preserve the principle of organizing seminars that address subjects teachers request for their own further preparation and for the development of curriculum units they believe will motivate and educate their students

You then will meet in teams from each community 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. Each team will select a teacher or district official to report during lunch on your meeting.

Again, welcome to our annual Conference. Your taking time from your demanding schedule to attend is gratifying, and I hope that you will find this time of reflection, celebration, and planning to be worthwhile.