#teachergrant

Well done, 2017 Fund for Teachers grant applicants. After dedicating countless hours of dreaming, planning and writing visions for self-designed learning, you pushed “Submit” yesterday. We honor your commitment to personal and student advancement.

Now what?

The selection process began this morning. Committees comprised of FFT Fellows, along with other educational, corporate and civic volunteers will now determine which proposals have what it takes to impact the profession, students and school communities. Using a rubric supplied to each applicant, committee members grade every proposal and submit scores online before convening several weeks later to discuss/defend their decisions with others who also reviewed the same proposals. Our 2017 Fellows will be notified by email on Tuesday, April 5, at which time we’ll also post the list on our website.

Last Minute Feedback

One week from today, you’re done. No more wordsmithing, budget adjusting or second-guessing. (Well, maybe the second-guessing sticks around until the grant announcement on April 5...) So use the next six days wisely. FFT Fellow Lisa Marien suggests getting feedback from at least four readers and, since it worked for her, we share her tips:

One friend read my proposal who is an editor and homeschooling parent. She critiqued grammar and raised several other content questions I hadn't noticed.

Two friends who are married read it. They tossed around their thoughts with each other before sharing their feedback with me.

Finally, my principal read it, giving it the final once-over for educational soundness.

Check out this video to see Lisa's fellowship in action.

A few more FAQ’s we often receive during the last week of submissions:

Will my proposal be favorably considered if I low-ball my budget?

Readers look at the merits of your entire proposal, not just the costs of your fellowship. We know that prices change as summer approaches, so use research to your advantage. Pick a median figure between the highest and lowest fares you can find. Name the sites where you found your price quotes.

What should I include in my budget?

Readers will look closely to see if you have sufficient resources to execute and implement your fellowship.

Don’t forget the costs of obtaining passports, visas or immunizations.

Have you included the costs of materials you will need to implement your learning back in your classroom?

If you will need special equipment, be sure to include if you will be using your own or school equipment, or whether you intend to purchase equipment that will then be accessible to your school.

“Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.”  - Amy Poehler

Collaboration and innovation go hand-in-hand. Planning your Fund for Teachers fellowship allows you to bring your many gifts to the table -- your ideas, your passion, your mind, heart, and soul -- and share them in pursuit of a common goal. Many of our Fellows deepen and extend their learning by collaborating with fellow teachers, experts, local and international organizations, and professional networks. Take some time to think about how collaboration can strengthen the ideas for your Fellowship.

Here are three ways to think about collaboration and partnering for greater impact:

Applying as a Team  Becky Pavlick, Barb Chordas and Amy Buick teach in Meriden, CT.  They travelled to London to gain a different perspective on the American Revolution. Click here to read an interview describing their team approach.

Building collaboration around multi-disciplinary units  Paula Fortuna and Sadhana Bilodeau completed workshops in Asian literature from Indiana University and then created their own educational tour of Japan. “I didn’t have the context needed to backup my teaching, much less to coordinate with my colleague around common themes. Access to experts in the field of history and literature and through the real life experiences gained from visiting Japan… helped us find the common ground between our two subject areas (literature and history) bringing us closer to our goal of creating a Japanese studies unit.” Click here to read their fellowship report.

Going to a conference and building a professional network  She traveled to Australia to immerse herself in trends for teaching coding. She attended an international conference and then visited schools to see the practice of coding in action.  “It was vital for me to pursue this fellowship because I knew that I would gain insight into an established coding curriculum and support materials; relationships for global collaboration; the opportunity to connect with, learn from, and collaborate with experts and peers at the EdTechSA conference." Click here to read her fellowship report.

Building collaboration into your FFT Fellowship will help your students see that the world does not exist as separate parts. Everything is interconnected.

For many teachers, thinking through the “Student Growth & Learning” and “Implementation Plan” sections of the proposal are the most difficult because these are the most theoretical at this stage of the game. 2015 Fellow Louis Shede shares how he approached sections four and six of the FFT application:

When I was writing my proposal, it was difficult to think outside the box and imagine how my fellowship would impact my students in a profound way.  I found it easy to think in terms of phases: year one, year two, etc... I also found it important to think big and not be discouraged by what my school could not do to support me. I thought, what do I want my vision to be, not what will my school allow me to do? This really helped to think big and then plan the different phases that would let me create sustainable and manageable mini-goals for making this happen.

For me, the first phase was to start the Wilderness Club which I did last year.  Right now the club is currently building it's first service-learning project.  We were able to get funded on DonorsChoose.org for tools and painting supplies and we are creating a plastic tree that we hope will bring awareness to all the plastics we use everyday in our community.  Check out our project here: A Plastic Tree Grows in Norwalk.

For the second phase, I wanted to impact more students by creating a curriculum that would get more students outside and interacting with the environment.  By collaborating with the Carver Foundation in Norwalk, I have been able to take a diverse group of students that come from a low-income household outside once a week.  I have named the program "Leave No Child Inside" after the article published by Richard Louv.  Each Thursday the students and I go outside and make observations about our environment, develop and refine are five senses, work on leadership and communication skills, and have lots of fun!

For my third phase (3 years after my fellowship) I wanted to create a course that would be part of the educational experience at Norwalk High. To make this happen for next year I had to start planning now and submit a course proposal to the district for approval.  For next year all incoming freshman will have the opportunity to take Wilderness: Environmental Justice in the 21st Century. I am so excited to see my fellowship dreams form into reality. The journey has had its obstacles and set-backs but I learned from my NOLS fellowship experience that if it was easy, everyone would be doing it!

Just found out about Fund for Teachers? It’s not too late to design/submit your proposal for relevant, self-designed learning this summer. As a matter of fact, the majority of applications arrive within the week leading up to our January 31 deadline. To help you jump start your application, we share the process of two successful grant applicants, Joel Hinrichs and Petery Bouley (featured in the above video).

Joel and Peter were looking to understand the complexity of the Syrian refugee crisis from multiple perspectives. They knew that if they wanted their students to develop as open-minded, inquisitive and empathetic citizens, then they had to model this type of learning themselves.

As they considered what they would need to capitalize on their experience, they broke their learning journey into the most basic skills and then asked themselves the same question they would ask their students, “What does good look like and how do we get there?”

Do we know how to interview people well?  Before leaving, they consulted with friends in journalism.

Do we know how to make a good video presentation?  They enlisted the help of the digital story-telling team at their school.

Do we know how to find the people we should contact? They found local experts and researched refugee organizations in each of the 5 countries they visited.

Can we engage our students in a relevant issue? They worked with their fellow English teacher to have students generate the research questions that they would explore on their fellowship.

Their “Teacher Growth & Learning” (section three of the application) demanded not only the hard skills of field-based work, but also the soft skills of modeling inquiry and empathy, and the collaboration skills needed to develop rigorous new curriculum around engaging content that would have an impact far beyond the classroom. Make sure your “Teacher Learning” is concrete, detailed and reflects your various learning goals.

As the world looks back at the rule of Castro, we choose to highlight the work of FFT grant recipients who looked forward for ways to teach students about how art, wellness and the human spirit eclipsed communism. Be sure to check the links below for more examples of FFT Fellows as ambassadors in Cuba.

Mental Health + Physical Health = Academic Success Sahar Khatri, Highbridge Green Middle School - Bronx, NY

I am proud to work in a school that supports students beyond their academic needs. Ninety-seven percent of our students live in poor and unstable circumstances, which often results in socioemotional and behavioral issues, lower academic performance and poor health. Our staff consistently reflects on ways to help students and their families cope with the challenges of their reality: being first or second generation immigrants of poverty trying to navigate unfamiliar and often confusing systems.

Despite economic challenges, Cuba is globally recognized as a leader in public health and education, with a well-developed school health program and literacy rate of 99.7 percent. Furthermore, Cuba does not prioritize or distinguish between mental and physical; instead, the two are considered a “single unit.” In the Bronx, where we see almost five times as many children hospitalized for asthma-related complications and twice as many children diagnosed with diabetes than the rest of the United States, students’ barriers to physical and mental health regularly impact academic performance.

To learn how Cuba integrates student wellness into the curriculum, my team and I designed a fellowship which created a first-of-its-kind professional learning community between American educators and Cuban health professionals in collaboration with the Cuban Health and Education Ministry.

Our Fellow team included four middle school educators: Johanna Marte, Elizabeth Martinez, Graciela Pichardo and me. We were joined by one of our school’s math teachers, a social worker and a counselor from a high school in Queens. This dedicated team enrolled in a two-week course at the National Institute of Hygiene, Epidemiology, and Microbiology in Central Havana taught by a talented and experienced team of professors, psychologists, pediatricians, educators, social workers and community workers. We explored health curricula and programs addressing HIV and sex education, LGBTQ, mental health and special education. When not in class, we observed Havana organizations providing services around these issues.

Our biggest take-away was the centralized collaboration among the community, schools, medical personnel and families. Students as young as five years old are identified for educational, behavioral and emotional services, creating a preventative approach to health and education. Our team brought elements of this back to the Bronx to strengthen relationships with families and build further connections within our community. Implementing Family Teacher Teams (FTT) is one of component of this plan. Instead of traditional parent/teacher conferences, we meet as a team of parents and advisors to go over student progress, practice strategies to support students at home, set goals and build networks with other families. In addition to the FTT, our school is also a member of the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project. The fellowship in Cuba gave us an opportunity to reflect on conversations we have with families during these visits and the necessity of discovering students’ past social and emotional experiences within the education system so we can support their needs.

Beyond our school, we are collaborating with feeder elementary schools to learn about the needs of our students before they enter our building. The journey ahead is long, but our ultimate goal is to create brave spaces for conversations around sex education, LGBTQ rights, and mental and emotional health, and we will do so through a long-term collaboration with peers in Cuba.

Fund Facts: Sahar is a Math for America Fellow, founding math teacher at the Highbridge Green Middle School and member of The Global Math Department – an online community of math educators. Read more about her fellowship at http://bit.ly/FFTkhatri. Pictured: FFT Fellows with a professor at Havana’s Intercultural Center.

Thirty-six FFT Fellows designed learning experiences in Cuba over the past five years, including:

Jean Ramos & Heather Temple, Port Chester Middle School, Ryebrook, NY, who examined multiple aspects of Cuba's history and art to broaden students' awareness and expand current repertoire of cultures explored within language classes serving a diverse population of Latino/Hispanic students;

Mary Rodriguez, John F. Eberhart K-8 School - Chicago, IL, who toured Cuba with the People-to-People Program, meeting Cuban artists and observing the country's rich cultural heritage, to develop an elementary/middle school Cuban folk art unit incorporating themes of community, heritage, and identity; 

Nessa Mahmoudi & Charity Johnston, Melrose Leadership Academy - Oakland, CA, who explored the African Diaspora through Afro-Cuban music and dance workshops in Cuba and use multimedia artifacts collected to inspire African American students in a dual-language program that celebrates their heritage as they learn Spanish; and,

Questioning Multiculturalism by asking, “Whose World Is This?” Sarah Giesler, Alta Vista High School – Kansas City, MO

Ten days will not be enough.

We are five days into our Fund for Teachers fellowship in to France, and we have learned much – but we also have started to realize the scope of our project goes beyond our ten days here. We are encouraged by what we have done, seen and heard, and we are excited to see where our projects take us – and our students.

Mike, Mary Claire and I teach at a small charter school in Kansas City, Missouri, that has a majority Latino population. As social studies, language arts and journalism teachers, we assign projects around immigration, identity and community, pushing students to leave their comfort zones and write in new ways.

Since we arrived in Marseille, we have been doing just that: leaving our comfort zones and writing in new forms. As we become the students, it is fun to leave teaching for a bit and engage more in learning; we’re asking questions, exploring new areas and people and conducting research. This learning is particularly important to us because we are viewing the world from a new perspective. Many times we get caught up in our own bubbles, focusing only on Kansas City or the Latino experience or immigration in the United States. One of our biggest takeaways so far has been that despite our different demographics, France and the United States are very similar in terms of history, immigration, political rhetoric – the list goes on.

Our experiences in Marseille encourage us as we take our learning and projects back to our students. Mary Claire and I are excited to continue writing news and feature stories and models for our students, and Mike has some new ideas for his immigration unit; we are all having fun experimenting with blogging and social media posts. In the coming months, we will discuss our new global perspectives with our students, challenging them to expand their worldview.

In a more localized way, we now understand our students better, too. Not only do we better appreciate their immigrant backgrounds, but we also identify with what they go through as students. We are experiencing the struggles and rewards of finding primary and secondary sources, interviewing others and writing intriguing stories. On top of those activities, we are dealing with the realities of travel, such as dealing with logistics while in a foreign country. While we all speak some French, our deficiencies in the language create some difficulties when meeting others; the Euro Cup soccer tournament is taking place in France, leading to riots and tear gas; striking transportation workers cancelled our train to Paris; we are seeing increasing numbers of French soldiers casually carrying assault rifles. Needless to say, we are on edge. Many of our students, though, live with similar anxieties all of the time. Now that we identify more with students, hopefully we can engage and provide scaffolds for them in stronger, and more empathetic ways.

Despite our anxieties, we are having a great time and learning more than we realized we would. Though it is clear that we have only scratched the surface of the subjects of our project. We have much more to do in the final five days.

(Photo: A bookstore window Fellows spotted in Marseille, France.)

Growing Greatness Diane Wood, Lincoln Elementary School - Norman, OK

As early as 1811, school gardens were used in Europe to provide places where students could study the natural sciences and learn vocational skills. During the Victorian era in England, school gardens were commonly part of nature study classes. In recent years, Chef Jamie Oliver pioneered a “food revolution” to reform the school lunch program and successfully petitioned the British government to place a ban on processed junk food in all UK schools.

Oliver’s Kitchen Garden Project supports schools in the United Kingdom through food education and cooking skill classes. Schools that join the Kitchen Garden Project receive recipes and lesson plans that cover basic cooking skills, lesson plans on nutrition and access to the online community of participating schools.

Scheryl Wood and I used our FFT grant to research this program in England and Scotland and turn our fledgling school garden into the setting for cross-curricular instruction and community service.

Approximately one year after learning that our grant was funded, students are actively harvesting herbs, garlic, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, spinach, lettuce, potatoes and turnips from our school garden. Fifth graders are preparing to plant cotton as part of their American History unit this spring and kindergartners use their space for a butterfly garden. Our school community also includes students with autism; these students’ teachers and parents are helping create a sensory garden as an oasis of calm. We hosted a Community Day in February, when students, parents, teachers, volunteers and neighbors (who are also invited to harvest produce) helped weed and prepare for spring plantings. “Watch D.O.G.S.” (Dads of Great Students) regularly repair and maintain the beds.Our garden now extends into the community. Last fall, I spoke at the school district’s annual conference, sharing how to re-create our garden and ways we’re using project-based learning to engage students in all grades and disciplines. As a result of our fellowship, I was also asked to serve on the board of directors for Earth Rebirth, a nonprofit dedicated to placing a garden in every Norman Public School. We’re hoping to help Leadership Norman build a community garden for senior adults at the YMCA, as well.

A fellow board member at Earth Rebirth is the kitchen manager at a homeless shelter located within walking distance of school. At her invitation, my students regularly harvest vegetables, deliver the produce, then stay to serve lunch and clean up afterwards. I can’t believe how much they enjoy this extension of our garden. Afterwards, they throw on hairnets and joyfully wrestle for mops and brooms.

Teachers are always grateful to have opportunities for quality professional development, but being able to travel internationally and design our own experience surpassed all expectations. Because of Fund for Teachers, we were able to learn in a setting that would have been unobtainable through our own means. We find ourselves constantly referencing our fellowship with students to make them aware that there are donors in the world who desire to help others achieve their dreams. Our dreams became a reality and are transforming children’s attitudes, food habits and perceptions about serving others.