The national Teachers As Scholars (TAS) program is a unique staff development that bonds the link between formative and higher education and the formative bond between student and teacher firmly in the life of ideas. Through a series of content-based and research-oriented interdisciplinary seminars, teachers develop and strengthen curriculum that deepens and broadens classroom experience for all students. The beneficiary of a teacher's intellectual engagement with powerful curriculum is student achievement in all areas: critical-thinking, problem-solving, reading comprehensively; and building schema for future learning. Experts in education agree in important ways that the developing years of adolescence demand stimulating and challenging curriculum. That is what TAS—UCLA provides.

Two scholarly traditions have built the program: one is the revered Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship study that has fostered learning throughout America and worldwide. The other tradition is UCLA's International Studies and Overseas Programs (ISOP), which over a course of more than twenty years has gained a reputation of excellence through its summer programs that guide teachers into the challenges of 21st Century globalization so that they in turn foster a wider perspective of the world in students.

Today, both programs have embarked upon a new joint venture. It is through this union and the seminars of study we now offer that students in your school will rise to the standards movement and meet the challenge of the looming high school exit exam. Teachers will acquire new skills of technology use, working with the standards, and employing strategies that help young people fulfill the requirements of high-stakes testing.

As politicians and administrators ponder what test will comes next, students are champing at the bit, ready to engage in a richer understanding of the world that surrounds them and ready to develop habits of mind that bode success. What brings that wealth of ideas to the classroom door are teachers who themselves have been vitalized by collaborative scholarship, exemplified by Teachers As Scholars—UCLA.