Goals
Delaware Teachers Institute, like classrooms everywhere, shifted to a remote instructional model in April 2020. Our teacher steering committee believed we had an opportunity and responsibility to protect the health and safety of our Fellows above all else. Despite the shift away from in-person learning, Fellows reported seminars to be reflective of our long-standing goals.
Over time, it has become clear that DTI Fellows benefit from a variety of delivery methods. For the 2023 Cycle, we will offer seminar sessions mostly on zoom. However, those seminars will be supplemented with some field experiences at museums and other community sites based on Fellow availability.
No matter the delivery method, it remains our goal:
- to strengthen teaching and learning in the community’s public schools
- to offer seminars on subjects that school teachers request in the humanities and sciences, and which best fit contemporary needs among the student population
- to provide a professional learning model where university faculty members contribute their knowledge of and expertise in a subject, while teachers apply their knowledge of elementary and secondary pedagogy, their understanding of the students they teach, and their grasp of what really works in the classroom
- to support Fellows as they write a curriculum unit to be used in their own classrooms and to be shared with other teachers in both their home schools and across the country through electronic publication
- to remain connected to a national network of local Teacher Institutes and the Yale National Initiative
Delaware Teachers Institute (DTI) adheres to the Teachers Institute approach, originally developed in 1978 by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Ellen Kisker’s 2011 essay, The Teachers Institute Theory of Change describes this design in detail illustrating the mechanism by which our goals are met.