The Upper Valley Teacher Institute, under a variety of names, has been training teachers since 1968. However, UVTI's practical model for training - a full-time internship enriched with weekly seminars and workshops - has an even longer history. Barbara Barnes, one of UVTI's founders, knows that history well.

Barbara says credit for originating the UVTI model should go to Katherine Taylor, director from 1921 to 1949 of Shady Hill School, a K-8 independent school in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Taylor was at Shady Hill when Barbara was a pupil in the 1930's, and Barbara remembers her vividly. "Katherine Taylor was a tall, skinny lady," she recalls, "a brilliant Vassar graduate, full of passion for learning. She had done a great deal of work with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago, and she was in that mold of wonderful, intelligent, liberal women."

Two of Katherine Taylor's convictions made an indelible impression on Barbara. One concerned the importance of teachers. It took a recent two-year study by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future to conclude, "What teachers know and can do is the most important influence on what students learn." Katherine Taylor could have written that statement - though more forcefully and with greater style - 70 years ago. Her second conviction concerned the role of independent schools. Katherine Taylor maintained that the only justification for the existence of private schools is to experiment with methods of learning and teaching in ways that public schools might not have the freedom to try. Ultimately, private schools should contribute to the quality of public education.

Acting on her convictions about teaching and learning, Katherine Taylor started a teacher training program at Shady Hill in 1928, and it continues to this day on the model she established. College graduates become apprentice teachers at Shady Hill, working during the year with two different master teachers in two different grades. They participate fully in the work of the profession, and each week they learn about educational theory and methods in seminars and workshops. If this sounds familiar, it should; it is in essence the same model that UVTI uses today.

Following Mentor's Example

Like Katherine Taylor, Barbara has made teaching and the education of teachers her life's work, but that was not what she intended when she was a student at Radcliffe. "I was determined to be a doctor," she says. "I thought that was the best way to save the world, and I was a very idealistic adolescent - who kept on being an adolescent for a long time!" She changed her mind just weeks before entering medical school, as the result of an experience at summer camp. "I was in charge of teaching sailing," Barbara says. "I'd grown up sailing in small boats, but I had no idea how to teach it. I remember sitting up at night, making little models of boats, drawing diagrams, trying to figure out what to do. I found the process utterly fascinating. By the end of the summer, I realized that I didn't want to go to medical school after all - I wanted to be a teacher."

Barbara returned to Shady Hill to join Katherine Taylor's teacher training program, and then she taught at Shady Hill for a year. After her marriage, Barbara taught in a one-room school house near Middlebury, and then in Norwich, where she participated in developing a science program that became a model for middle-school science instruction. Starting in 1968, she and Jackie Clement, Audrey Logan, and Frank Thoms worked together to establish a teacher training program in the Upper Valley that was consciously based on the Shady Hill model. It became UVTI.

UVTI's recent name change to UVTI may have seemed like a big step, but not when viewed against the background of the names that the program used in its earliest years. "The program was built with all the federal funding that was available in the post-Sputnik era," Barbara says. "From year to year, the name changed depending upon where we got the money!" It was variously known as the Education Professional Development Act (EPDA) Program, the New England Professional Training of Educators (NEPTE) Program, and at times these names might even have been hyphenated. The EPDA-NEPTE Program! "UVTI" was an improvement.

Barbara was the program's first director, from 1968 to 1972, but then she was appointed assistant dean of students at Dartmouth. After five years at Dartmouth, she accepted a position as head of Laurel School, an independent girls' school in Cleveland, Ohio. It was a rather conservative institution, and she felt that some of the teaching could be improved.

Barbara recalls visiting her mentor and friend Katherine Taylor just before leaving for Cleveland. "Katherine was very old and ill at the time," Barbara recalls. "I told her that I'd been appointed head of the Laurel School. I said, 'It's not really my kind of school, but I promise, Katherine, I won't try to change too much too fast.' Katherine held out her long, thin hand, took mine, and said, 'But you will make changes.' And I did."

In fact, Barbara started to develop an internship program and recruited many talented new teachers. She came to feel that she had done some of the best work of her life at Laurel School. In 1984 Barbara returned to Vermont to take on the challenge of rebuilding the Putney School, and in 1989 she retired - though Barbara's idea of retirement resembles most people's idea of full-time work.

Keys to Good Teaching

When Barbara talks about teaching and learning, it's easy to visualize the idealistic adolescent who decided she would rather be a teacher than a doctor. "A teacher has to have passion," Barbara says, "has to be excited about her subject and believe it's really important for the next generation to know. When teachers like this are sharing, talking together about what they are doing on a daily basis, that's when you get the best curriculum and the best teaching." And good teachers must be well educated. "Teaching has to be a postgraduate program," Barbara insists, "and teachers need a liberal arts education. When you are teaching a group of kids, you need to know everything you possibly can! I always felt completely inadequate, I never knew enough, there were always too many things in life I didn't know anything about."

Recruiting well-educated, mature liberal arts graduates is, of course, a hallmark of the UVTI program. "In many ways this model still hasn't had much of an impact on the rest of the country," Barbara says. "We still have state universities with a pedantic way of training teachers. That's why it's so important that we become a national model. The timing is right - people are beginning to question the way things have been done for so long in education."

Barbara feels that by helping with the creation and development of UVTI, she is carrying on the work of Katherine Taylor. "I feel as though UVTI is doing exactly what Katherine Taylor envisioned, really making a difference in public education. As you become older, you start thinking more about your life's work, and so it's been in recent years that I've become very conscious of her influence on me, on the fact that she has been my mentor in life."

Just as Barbara now recalls Katherine Taylor's influence on her decades ago, it is likely that some time in the middle of the next century, a retiring educator - perhaps a UVTI graduate - will look back on her life's work and realize how much she owes to Barbara Barnes.