Tenth Annual Conference
October 31 - November 1, 2014

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

This Conference is the seventeenth 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 2014 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. 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 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 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 already have begun to teach.

The break-out sessions later this morning address nine dimensions of the timeliness of the Teachers Institute approach. I urge the team from each community to distribute your members across the 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, we will have an opportunity during lunch to hear reports on all of the sessions. This afternoon teachers from all participating locations will be stationed to explain and answer questions about displays of student work from curriculum units written in national seminars. Later, 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 in supporting teachers to deepen student learning and increase the rigor of school courses.

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 this evening 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 tomorrow morning, six Yale faculty members will describe and answer questions about the subjects of national seminars they are prepared to lead in 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 and your team meetings 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.