Fund for Teachers - The Podcast

Hey, you over there…yeah you…the teacher sitting in front of the computer staring at your 2023 Fund for Teachers grant application – the one you’ve labored over for months – the one containing the aspirations you have for yourself, your students, your school and your community.  I’ve got some valuable insider information that can help you more confidently push “SUBMIT” by January 19th. You’re goin...

Here at Fund for Teachers, we’ve spent the summer following our 2022 Fellows, as well as those from 2020 and 2021 whose fellowships were deferred, as they pursued learning around the country and five continents. It’s now September and most of our grant recipients are back in the classroom, so we’re bringing back Fund for Teachers – The Podcast for our fourth season. We are already in contact with...

According to a recent Wall Street Journal  article , more than 900,000 people quit jobs in state and local education last year, while private schools lost an additional 600,000 people. So what would make an overworked, underpaid teacher want to increase their workload and add to their schedules a monthly, two-hour meeting after school? The answer? An Innovation Circles Grant from Fund for Teachers...

Forbes, CNN, Fast Company, The New York Post and even Town & Country claim that MasterClass is one of this year’s top holiday gifts. The streaming platform offers lessons from the best in their fields, delivering – according to its website -- a world class online learning experience. We decided to follow suit and offer a Fund for Teachers MasterClass on crafting a successful grant proposal. Ou...

Today’s podcast airs on Black Friday, when millions of shoppers flock to malls to begin and finish holiday shopping. This scene stands in stark contrast to those witnessed by fifth-grade teacher Janelle Rei this summer. Between meeting with Sudanese refugee students and teachers and observing families living and working in cities built of garbage, Janelle witnessed joy and gratitude for the little...

“The teachers are not alright.” News accounts and social media pages attest to the fatigue – both mental and physical – America’s teachers are experiencing this fall as they continue to adjust to the new normal after the past year of pandemic classrooms. It seems our teachers could use some of the social emotional learning strategies they are sharing with students trying to cope. Hyam Elsaharty kn...

Marlee Matlin , the only Deaf performer to have won an Academy Award , said “Every one of us is different in some way, but for those of us who are more different, we have to put more effort into convincing the less different that we can do the same thing they can, just differently.” Theatre teacher Amy Patel is committed to figuring out how to teach differently so her deaf and hard of hearing stud...

September the 15th begins Hispanic Heritage Month , celebrating the histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America. The Fund for Teachers fellowship of Chicago art teachers Carolina Ibarra and Claire Reynes celebrated the same thing last summer.  In an effort to integrate their elementary students’ cul...

In the Fund for Teachers universe, September is very significant. Our grant recipients are back from their fellowships, back in their classrooms and reporting back to us about what they learned and how their students will now learn differently as a result. September is also the month before we open our grant application for the upcoming year. We begin marketing the opportunity to teachers and dist...

A smart, but angry young student who dreamed of becoming a pediatrician; a chemistry major; a Target hourly employee; and a substitute teacher. This was Veronica Wylie’s circuitous path to her high school classroom in Hazelhurst, MS. Along the way, she’s earned three master’s degrees, founded a nonprofit, interned with NASA and is currently collaborating with Harvard to create antiracist science c...

The Supreme Court recently ruled that college athletes may benefit from perks beyond tuition, room and board and five state legislatures determined that college athletes may begin profiting from their personal brands. This ruling can be life-changing for student athletes, like those with whom Wendy Hutchinson works. As the academic advisor for the men’s basketball team at Edmondson-Westside High S...

Prior to the pandemic, experts widely acknowledged that America’s students were experiencing a mental health crisis. A 2017 CDC report showed that suicide was the second-leading cause of death for 15-24 year olds. Add incidents of self-harm into the equation and the outlook is even more bleak. The average age a student begins self-harming habits is 13 and 45% of people use cutting as their method...

Two hours south of Helen Keller’s home is the town of Trussville. Every elementary, middle and high school has the same mascot and the district prides itself on “One Trussville.” So it stands to reason that when 15 visually impaired students lacked resources to help them stay on pace, their peers stepped up. Led by two Fund for Teachers Fellows, elementary students learned how to braille through a...

For the first time in our 20-year history, Fund for Teachers will host a national convening of educators called Plan It for the Planet – An Environmental Summit on Saturday, April 10th. This free virtual event, cohosted by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums , will bring together leading innovators from America’s preeminent environmental organizations to help teachers and their students develop...

When Enkeleda Gjoni ’s students enter her math class, learning geometry is the least of their problems. One hundred percent of her students are English Language Learners, as was Enkeleda when she immigrated from Albania with “only her education.” Two decades later, she holds two master’s degrees and models for her students what is possible – especially for someone who is competent in mathematics....

Each generation has a novel. For teenagers today, it might be The Hunger Games , for the generation before, Harry Potter . It’s the book that ushered students into reading when nothing else would. For those of us who grew up in the 70s or 80s, that book was The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton . Made into an iconic movie by Francis Ford Copolla who directed the VERY young Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Patrick...

Are you considering applying for a Fund for Teachers grant, but don’t know where to start? What better place than to take advice from Maine’s 2021 Teacher of the Year and Fund for Teachers Fellow Cindy Soule . Cindy is a 4th grade teacher at Gerald E. Talbot Community School and holds a Master of Science in Special Education from the University of Southern Maine and a Bachelor of Arts in Social Wo...

A CNN report cites that after America’s 2016 presidential election, our collective stress “metastasized into a full on cultural disorder” called American Thanksgiving Anxiety . So what are we approaching in the wake of the 2020 election AND a pandemic? Many of us are anticipating a Thanksgiving meal at a dinner table surrounded by masked and politically-polarized relatives – so there’s no better t...

The 1968 musical film “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” gave us a charming performance by Dick Van Dyke, a nightmarish scene involving a Child Catcher, and an Academy-award nominated song that shares the film’s title. The film’s lesser known tune “From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success” could characterize the work of Swedish landscape architect Charles Theodore Sorenson . From the ashes of...

At first glance, commonalities between an Iowa women’s prison, a teen sex education office, an alternative school in neutral gang territory, an orphanage in Rwanda, and Stanford University is difficult to identify. But there are actually two things all of these locations have in common – social emotional learning and today’s guest, Lara Schmidt. Lara is a teacher on special assignment with the San...

Tina Vasquez is a first generation American, and so are the students she teaches at Charlottesville High School . But their experiences as immigrants are very different. Tina came to America with her parents from Germany; one of her students arrived from Central America via a truck concealing layers of humans stacked on each other and a subsequent walk across a desert. Other students have never be...

Were you one of the millions of viewers who didn't give away their shot at watching the Hamilton premiere on Disney+ last weekend? Billed as "the ultimate immigrant success story," the blockbuster musical was penned by and starred a man who grew up in an immigrant community playing the only Founding Father not from America. Lin Manuel-Miranda told Oprah that, "As an immigrant,...

According to a brief published by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, white college freshmen entering civil, mechanical and electrical engineering programs outnumber Black and Indigenous People of Color 7:1. A panel of experts at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine cited factors such as lack of funding and resources available for minorities who want to focus on...

A report prepared by the US Navy for the Department of Defense documents that "more than 40,000 American Indians left their reservations during World War II to serve in ordnance depots, factories, and battle fields. American Indians also invested more than $50 million in war bonds, and contributed generously to the Red Cross and the Army and Navy Relief societies." The Institute for Amer...

In her essay “Don't Say Nothing," Jamilah Pitts exhorts educators that teaching as an act of resistance and teaching as an act of healing are not mutually exclusive. That when teachers choose to remain silent about moments of racial tension or violence—violence that may well touch students’ own communities or families—these children are overtly reminded of their inferior place in society...