The Wurtele Gallery Teacher Program Method: A Practical and Experiential Approach to Training Cohorts of Museum Educators

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This article examines the Wurtele Gallery Teacher Program Method as a replicable model for training cohorts of museum educators. Since 2005, this program has trained and paid graduate students to be museum educators for the Yale University Art Gallery's public education initiatives, which include school, youth, family, teen, access, and adult teaching. In our article, we examine the pedagogical underpinnings and share principles of training museum educators that we have developed over the past 19 years. We offer these principles – designing the training syllabus to mirror teaching structure, modeling learner-centered techniques to teach about teaching, and building community while providing structures for mentorship and growth – as recommendations for museums that train cohorts of educators. We also share practical approaches, activities, and tools to use in both training and museum teaching.