Alumni in the Field
Here are some words from Yale Teacher Preparation Graduates:
"The Yale Teacher Preparation Program fosters a warm and genuine sense of community. The faculty and staff provide ample academic, emotional, and moral support throughout the entire program. At times when I felt depleted, the professors, staff, and fellow students serve as sources of strength for me. They are wonderful and uplifting people who have inspired me with their resilience, creativity, and energy. The program also taught me to approach learning with a persistent intellectual curiosity and an inquiry-oriented mentality, and challenged me to apply this framework in my teaching. By examining the gap between theory and practice, Yale students emerge from this program as better educational practitioners, recognizing the diversity in students' learning patterns and utilizing concrete skills to help students manifest their fullest potential. The Teacher Preparation Program was one of the most challenging yet rewarding experiences of my Yale career."
Han-Ya Annie Hsu (2004)
"Teacher Prep is really one of the best opportunities at Yale to give something back to society. You're not doing a one-time service project when you're studying to become a teacher you're learning how to teach others and to give students the chance to succeed in life. No other program so directly provides you with a way to share your Yale education with the community. Teacher Preparation is a small program so everyone, the professors and the students, are really committed to one another. Our professors care so much about education and about teaching us that by learning to educate people, we are directly affecting the future. The minority of students at Yale want to be teachers-but these future teachers will be some of the greatest forces in the future of education."
Rebecca Williams (2000)
"The program provided me with a group of other Yale students who shared my passion and motivation. Through every step of the learning process, particularly during student teaching, this group was an invaluable resource and support system. The professors were accessible and the program felt personalized and intimate. I was encouraged to explore my own concept of what it means to be a teacher, and to become a reflective practitioner as my perception of teaching changed through contact with other teachers."
Jenny Meyer (2003)
"My experience in TPP had an immediate effect on how I felt about teaching - I loved being able to discuss the larger issues underlying the difficult work I was doing every day. On my discouraging days I return to those questions - what do I really want my students to learn? what do I believe to be the role of the school in society? the role of the teacher? - and the expansive possibilities that they suggest reinvigorate both my imagination and my optimism."
Kendra Mack (2004)
"Unique among courses at Yale, the Teacher Preparation Program gives you the chance to synthesize your academic study of education policy and social justice with hands-on classroom experience and the opportunity for personal, philosophical, and professional growth. Students in the Teacher Preparation Program not only challenge you to understand the social and emotional meaning of public education, but also provide the best support network imaginable amidst the pressures and hopes of a Yale education. Many of my closest friends emerged directly from the Teacher Preparation Program, as we-both as individuals and as a group- began our lives and careers as teachers."
Anna Erickson (2000)
"At the start of the Yale Teacher Preparation Program we are introduced to the theories that pervade educational systems today. Like many other Yalies, I am a theoretically minded student, so I felt confident in my understandings of how schools worked on the macro and micro levels and also of which teaching strategies were effective for particular student groups. But from day one, I was nervous to put all of this theory into practice during my student teaching because I questioned how one could theoretically teach me how to practically teach. How does one learn classroom management without being in the classroom? What I didn't realize in my training was that TPP offered me a repertoire of theories, methods, and strategies from which to draw good practice - there was a bigger picture to teaching than just being in the classroom. As I am entering my third year in a California public high school, I can see the practical benefits that a strong theoretical foundation for teaching offers. My colleagues even comment on the strength of my training. TPP was the best introductory preparation for education and was certainly the highlight of my undergraduate academic career!"
Lindsay Tracy (2002)
