Professional Development

Yale’s work with New Haven area students is complemented by the wide range of professional development opportunities made available for teachers that welcome them into the fold of Yale’s academic community. Programs provide teachers with opportunities to engage in dialogue with other area educators, conduct research in Yale laboratories alongside Yale faculty and graduate students, and enroll in seminars led by eminent Yale professors. Teachers may leave sessions of the Teacher Leadership Program at the Yale University Art Gallery with strategies for encouraging critical thinking through looking closely at art, or complete summer-research fellowships with innovative ways for engaging students through project-based learning. 

Professional Development Programs

Brain Bee

For students in grades 8-12, Yale’s annual Brain Bee is a free neuroscience competition that tests students’ understanding how the brain functions. Competing students can flex their brain knowledge to win prizes as groups or as individuals. After the competition, students interact with Yale neuroscience majors and hear neuroscience talks from Yale faculty.

Code Haven TEACHTECH

TeachTech is Code Haven’s one-day conference for middle and high school teachers interested in incorporating computer science into their classrooms. Teachers learn about computer science fundamentals, how to demonstrate these concepts to students in an engaging way, and basic software that they can implement in their classrooms to make computer science more appealing to students.

Demystifying the Middle East: An Afternoon of Food and Culture for Educators

Each semester, educators from the New Haven area are invited to an afternoon of food and culture with a Yale professor who specializes in research on the Middle East. Past workshops have included photography and exploration of Kurdish culture, and “(Almost) Everything You Wanted to Know about Afghanistan but Were Afraid to Ask.” Food is provided by Sanctuary Kitchen, a catering outreach program that empowers local refugees to share their cooking talents with the New Haven community. The meal is followed by a Q&A with the chef and Sanctuary Kitchen director. These events are sponsored by the Yale Council on Middle East Studies and Yale Pathways to Arts & Humanities.

Fortunoff Archive

The Fortunoff Archive’s collection consists of more than 4,400 testimonies of Holocaust survivors, witnesses, and liberators. The archive offers several fellowships, including a two-year fellowship for a postdoctoral scholar, as well as fellowships for doctoral candidates and senior scholars. The collection is available as a free resource for teachers interested in utilizing the archives.  

Gilder Lehrman Center

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition is dedicated to the investigation and dissemination of knowledge concerning slavery and its legacies across all borders and all time, from the distant past through the present day. The Center fosters improved understandings of the role of slavery, anti-slavery, and the lasting harms of slavery in the functioning of the modern world. Through fellowships, workshops, public programs, and digital resources including annotated teaching guides, the Gilder Lehrman Center supports scholarship, public history, and public education.

Music in Schools Symposium

The Symposium on Music in Schools is held once every two years at the Yale School of Music as part of the Music in Schools Initiative. This invitational “working symposium” brings together national leaders for three days of intense discussion on pressing issues surrounding music education in public schools. The symposium also honors outstanding music educators and teaching artists with the Yale Distinguished Music Educator Award.

Yale Center for British Art Summer Teacher Institute

The Summer Teacher Institute offers practicing teachers an enriched understanding of how visual art can support their students’ reading, writing, and thinking. Workshops, discussions, and lectures by university faculty and museum educators demonstrate how “visual text” can be used to enhance literacy instruction. Institute sessions include hands-on experience with works of art and exploring ways to make the museum an extension of the classroom. Participants are given the tools they need to lead dynamic museum visits and to incorporate visual arts into classroom instruction.

Yale Center for British Art Visual Literacy Consortium

The YCBA Visual Literacy Consortium brings together a group of educators for a bimonthly consortium to promote the important dialogue about visual literacy and its role in school curricula. The purpose of the group is to share experiences, research, and resources and to work toward an expanded notion of literacy that includes making meaning from visual as well as written texts.

Yale Child Study Center's Comer School Development Program

The Comer School Development Program is committed to the total development of all children by helping to create learning environments that support children’s physical, cognitive, psychological, linguistic, social, and ethical development. The Organization’s professional and consultation unit provides New Haven teachers, administrators, and parents with professional development opportunities on a range of topics including child and adolescent development; creating positive classroom and school climate and culture; engaging families and communities; and more.

Yale New Haven Teachers Institute

The Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute is an educational partnership designed to strengthen teaching and learning in New Haven public schools. Yale faculty members and New Haven teachers work together in discussion seminars to develop new curriculum units. The seminars, which meet over a five-month period, are designed in response to teacher requests and have addressed topics across the sciences and humanities. Fellows become members of the Yale community for one year, with library and other campus privileges, and receive a stipend upon successful completion of the Institute.

Yale University Art Gallery Teacher Leadership Program

The Teacher Leadership Program is a free one-hour workshop for educators of all levels and disciplines that meets at 4:00 pm on the first Thursday of the month throughout the academic year. The sessions are held on Zoom and are led by Jessica Sack, the Jan and Frederick Mayer Curator of Public Education; Wurtele Gallery Teachers; and Education Department staff. In this program, educators explore innovative ways to connect their curricula and interest in art with the Yale University Art Gallery’s collection. The sessions also address online and in-person teaching techniques.

Yale University on iTunes U

Yale University has a wide array of podcasts available from faculty, alumni, and distinguished visitors Topics include arts and humanities, science and engineering, health and medicine, the environment, as well as other areas of interest.

Yale YouTube Channel

The Yale University YouTube channel supplies a variety of videos to the viewing public. Covering anything from speeches and course lectures to videos made about happenings on campus, the Yale YouTube channel is a free way to experience all that Yale has to offer.