This program depicts the results of the structured, intensive, long-term collaboration among Yale university faculty members and New Haven Public School teachers that has occurred since 1978 through the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. The Institute is an educational partnership between Yale and the Public Schools designed to strengthen teaching and learning in the schools and, by example, in schools across the country. Each participating teacher becomes an Institute Fellows and prepares a curriculum unit to be taught the following year. Teachers ahve primary responsibility for identtifying the subjects the Institute addresses.

Studies have shown that the Institute experience has increased teachers' preparation in their disciplines, raised their morale, heightened their expectations of their students, encouraged them to remain in teaching in New Haven, and has, in turn, enhanced student performance. Curriculum units Fellows have developed are used extensively in school courses.

The Institute has been recognized repeatedly as a pioneering and successful model of university-school collaboration. In 1990 it became the first program of its type to be permanently established as a unit of a university. The Institute assists other institutions and school districts with the development of similar programs to benefit their own communities.