Yale National Initiative

The Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools, which builds upon the success of a four-year National Demonstration Project, promotes the establishment of new Teachers Institutes that adopt the approach to professional development that has been followed for more than forty years by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Established in 1978, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, an intensive and sustained collaboration among Yale faculty members and public school teachers, is the premier partnership between Yale University and the New Haven Public Schools. The first such university-school partnership to be permanently endowed as a unit of a university, it is a widely recognized model of high-quality teacher professional development. In 2004, after the successful testing of this model in a four-year National Demonstration Project, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute launched the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools. The Initiative is a long-term endeavor to influence public policy on teacher professional development, in part by establishing Teachers Institutes that will provide state and local policy makers effective examples of the innovative Institute approach in their own communities.