Charlotte Teachers Institute (CTI) has accepted 104 instructors from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools into its innovative professional development program that began this spring. These teachers come from 15 subject areas in 43 schools and include grades K-12.
The teachers, known as CTI Fellows, will work with faculty from Davidson College and UNC Charlotte in a long-term effort that will challenge them to explore content areas and expand their own ideas for new curriculum, with guidance from the faculty. Seminars and their CTI leaders include:
- Charlotte as a New South City: Using the Collections of the Levine Museum of the New South, Shep McKinley, history, UNC Charlotte
- The Nature of Energy: How We Use and Store It to Power Our Everyday Lives, Susan Trammell, physics, UNC Charlotte
- Math and Sports, Tim Chartier, mathematics, Davidson College
- Imagining Modern Bodies: Disability and Art at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Ann Fox, English, Davidson College
- Grammar for the Real World, Ralf Thiede, linguistics, UNC Charlotte
- Human Social Groups, Lisa Walker, sociology, UNC Charlotte
- Chemical Magic, Durwin Striplin, chemistry, Davidson College
- Urban Encounters: Hispanic and African American Literature, Brenda Flanagan, English, Davidson College
CTI fellows will discuss and research the topics and collaborate on how to teach new content to their students in engaging ways. Their study will culminate with each teacher creating an original curriculum unit to be taught in his or her classroom and to be published on the CTI website. Each fellow is enrolled in one of CTI’s eight seminars throughout the entire period.
“We kicked off this year with our interactive orientation at Discovery Place,” said CTI Executive Director Scott Gartlan. “The CTI Fellows will participate in three spring seminar meetings followed by independent summer study. We will pick up with weekly meetings again in September through November. This combination of collaborative work and independent research has proven quite effective in helping teachers explore their ideas.”
CTI is an affiliate of the Yale National Initiative to Strengthen Teaching in Public Schools and also links its Fellows’ units to the YNI website at Yale University as part of a national curricular resource bank for teachers.
“High quality professional development programs have common key characteristics,” Gartlan said. “They focus on content knowledge linked to pedagogy, teacher leadership, extended duration, collective participation and collaboration, and innovative and active teacher learning.” He noted these characteristics are the pillars of CTI’s professional development program.
Charlotte Teachers Institute is an educational partnership among Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Davidson College and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. CTI cultivates content-knowledge, creativity, leadership skills and collaboration within and among Charlotte’s public school teachers. Programs include long-term seminars and special events for teachers, as well as community presentations such as its “Exploding Canons” interdisciplinary discussion series. Resources come from the three Institute partners and private funding institutions, such as the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Belk Foundation, the Piedmont Natural Gas Foundation and the Wells Fargo Foundation. The Institute is housed at UNC Charlotte within its College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
A complete list of the 2013 CTI Fellows is on the Web.