About Discovery

History & Mission

The Discovery Institute began as the Discovery Center in 1987, when Dr. James W. Sanders (Teacher Education) and Dr. Leonard A. Ciaccio (Biology) secured a $6,000 grant to work with four high school teachers in redeveloping their four different academic curricula into classroom activities using an interdisciplinary theme to engage their students in learning more actively. They hoped that more interesting classroom atmospheres would result in more students graduating from high school adequately prepared for college.

Today, more than 50 additional grants later, this enterprise has expanded into a $4.5 million annual operation. In 2001, the City University of New York conferred Institute status on the Center, with a mandate to disseminate programs throughout the University. Twelve full-time and two half-time professional staff, eleven of them retired teachers who began as participants in the Institute's programs, assisted by over 30 NYC master teachers and 50 CSI faculty implement the Institute's projects. They are supported by three full-time administrative assistants.

All projects are integrated into a single mission: the renewal of the teaching, mainly through the professional development of in-service teachers, and also, more recently, through the redevelopment of pre-service teacher education programs and the recruitment of highly qualified new teacher prospects through a Teaching Scholars program.

All professional development efforts stress the need for teachers to turn learning over to students through a discovery approach, to integrate disparate subjects by working on common themes, to be mindful of state learning standards in all lesson plans, to attend to basic skills development and to relate lessons to the real worlds of students.

However, within the above parameters, teachers are left entirely to their own creativity. This idea is the Discovery Institute's fundamental philosophical principle, and it is the basis of its success. All professional development efforts respect teachers' professional integrity. Discovery Institute staff members never dictate to teachers; they serve only as resources. Within the state-mandated curriculum, teachers create their own activities, and implement them in their own ways. The Institute provides no ready-made curriculum guides or materials, and it discourages teachers from using them. Experience has confirmed that an imperfect lesson personally developed by a teacher impacts students more than a "perfect" lesson borrowed from an "expert." Every teacher must reinvent the wheel.

Each of the hundreds of curriculum development workshops conducted at the Institute every year stresses this principle, which results in the Institute's singular achievement: teacher empowerment.