Yale National Fellow Featured on CBS 6 News in Richmond

Valerie Schwarz, a fourth-grade teacher and seventeen-time Yale National Fellow, was recently featured on CBS 6 News in Richmond, Virginia speaking about her participation in the Yale National Initiative. They also featured her former student Elijah Robins, who spoke about learning from a curriculum unit Schwarz created as a Yale National Fellow and a presentation he gave at the Yale National Initiative's 2022 Annual Conference in New Haven. Richmond Public Schools participates in the Yale National Initiative with the goal of establishing their own local Teachers Institute.

WRIC in Richmond, Virginia also featured Schwarz and her student in November 2022 shortly after their presentations at Yale.

The Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools, now in its eighteenth year, is a long-term endeavor to influence public policy on teacher professional development, in part by establishing exemplary Teachers Institutes for high-poverty, high-minority schools in states around the country. These Institutes follow the approach developed originally in New Haven and implemented now in other cities.

Teachers Institutes are educational partnerships between universities and school districts designed to strengthen teaching and learning in a community's high-need public schools. Evaluations have shown that the Institute approach exemplifies the characteristics of high-quality teacher professional development, enhances teacher quality in ways known to improve student achievement, and encourages participants to remain in teaching in their schools.