Charlotte Teachers Institute

Charlotte Teachers Institute (CTI) provides content-rich professional-development seminars for pre-K through 12th-grade teachers (called "Fellows") in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Led by UNC Charlotte and Davidson College professors, the seminars help about 100 teachers per year to write new curricula by December and then to teach students with it the following spring.  These seven-month fellowships engage teachers over a sustained duration, an essential element in effective professional development.  

This project will provide support for teachers to implement their CTI-generated curricula. A big obstacle to getting these new ideas to students is limited resources, with teachers spending about $500 of their own money on supplies for their classrooms each year. This project will fund materials for teachers to implement their innovative ideas in the classroom, providing support for energy kits to teach science, books to teach literacy, supplies to teach art, technology to teach math and other projects.

Visit the 2017 Seminar pages to learn more about what the teachers are learning, meet the professors who are leading the seminars and see pictures of the teachers who are in the seminars:

• Using Mathematics to Understand Social Issues
• Media and Minorities:  Unpacking Stereotypes 
• Chemical Interactions in the Body
• Memorials, Memories, and American Identity
• Doing Science:  Hands-On Learning in the Laboratory 
• Cultivating Visual Literacy
• The Rise (and Fall) of Democracies around the World
• From Self to Students:  Canvassing Art to Explore Identity