9:09 a.m., Nov. 8, 2010----A nationally respected professional-development program that participating educators say has transformed their teaching and energized their students will be offered for the first time in Delaware through a partnership between the University of Delaware and five public school districts.

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Plans for the innovative Delaware Institute have been under way for several years, modeled after the Yale National Initiative to Strengthen Teaching in Public Schools and spearheaded by a Delaware high school English teacher who has attended four Yale seminars since 2005. Those plans now will be implemented after the Yale Initiative, at a recent conference, accepted Delaware as the newest member of the League of Teachers Institutes.

“This is very high-quality professional development, and teachers love it,” said Raymond Theilacker, the four-time Yale Institute fellow who is the founding director of the new Delaware Institute. “Every year, we survey teachers who participated in a Yale institute, and every year they are extremely positive about the experience. But they also express an interest in having this opportunity closer to home.”

The institutes are unusual, Theilacker said, because they focus on expanding the teachers' content knowledge in a subject such as science, math or English, while most professional development programs concentrate on teaching methods and classroom techniques.

Each session of a teachers institute involves a series of seminars that bring no more than a dozen public school teachers together once a week to meet with a university faculty member. The seminars cover topics chosen by the teachers that draw on the faculty member's professional expertise, and they allow the teachers to discuss their experiences with various classroom instructional methods and strategies.

In addition to attending the seminars, the participating teachers -- called fellows of the institute -- are required to develop a curriculum unit that they then teach in their own classrooms and share with other educators. The fellows are selected from kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers, and Theilacker said that mix of elementary and secondary teachers offers the participants a new and rewarding perspective.

Joseph Pika, director of the Center for Secondary Teacher Education in the College of Arts and Sciences, has described the institute as “very much a grassroots effort” in Delaware. Not only are the school teachers enthusiastic, he said, but University faculty members have told him they're eager to be involved in a project designed to improve the public schools and to take part in seminars that are flexible and collaborative.

Now that Delaware has joined the national initiative, UD faculty members are submitting proposals for possible seminar topics. Plans call for the first four topics to be selected in December and for those seminars to be offered beginning in August.

The Delaware Institute is unique, Theilacker said, because it is a partnership with several districts, while the other institutes around the U.S. involve a university working with a single, large, urban school district. Current participants in Delaware are the Appoquinimink, Christina, Colonial, New Castle County Vocational-Technical and Red Clay Consolidated school districts.

James R. Vivian, director of the Yale Initiative, called Delaware's multi-district partnership “a pioneering model.”

State Secretary of Education Lillian M. Lowery, who attended the Yale Initiative conference at which Delaware became a member, said the institute “will provide a systemic, far-reaching way to engage numerous public school teachers with University of Delaware faculty members in developing high-quality curriculum units.” By focusing on content, she said, teachers “will have intimate access to technically accurate and contemporary knowledge in the various academic disciplines.”

Article by Ann Manser