NEH-funded institutes are professional development programs that convene K-12 educators or higher education faculty from across the nation in order to deepen and enrich their understanding of a variety of topics in the humanities and enrich their capacity for effective scholarship and teaching. Each institute allows 25 to 36 participants to study a humanities topic with a team of experienced scholars. Because this larger format emphasizes the range of perspectives that can be brought to a topic, an institute typically has more and longer meetings per week than a seminar. Project leaders and participants mutually explore connections between scholarship and teaching, and some time is provided for work on individual or collaborative projects.