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Celebrating Black History Month

Tasked with developing and implementing an African American history course in keeping with Virginia governor’s executive order, FFT Fellow Ariel Alford (Alexandria, VA) leveraged a Fund for Teachers fellowship to build content and context knowledge. The following is her account of exploring British Black History last summer and why that matters to her African American…

Code Talkers Challenge & Inspire Fund for Teachers Fellow

Thanks to FFT Fellow Tim Barry for his reflection on his two Fund for Teachers fellowships inspired by students’ curiosity and focused on elevating the experiences of Native Americans during World War II. I am in my sixteenth year as a Special Education Teacher and have spent fifteen of those years teaching middle school. Based…

Happy Halloween “Tomb” You

Halloween can be a scary time for teachers, due students’ sugar highs, costumes gone wrong, and the “ghosting” of students” the day after. For Jinafer Brown’s French students, the learning takes on a fatal feel, as well. Jinafer used a Fund for Teachers grant to explore the mysterious megalithic stone structures in Western Europe, gather evidence…

2024 Fund for Teachers Grant Application Opens

For hundreds of teachers, today changes everything. Because today, Fund for Teachers’ 2024 grant application opens. Empowered by experiential learning fueled by $5,000 (for individuals) or $10,000 (for teams of two or more), our grant recipients are inspired to rethink their practice and reignite their passion for teaching, which consequently impacts their classrooms, school communities…

How to Help Morocco

Ariadne Prior-Grosch and Tom Bradway both teach at the Academy for Software Engineering in Manhattan, NY. This summer, they used a $10,000 Fund for Teachers grant to explore Enduring Issues and Crosscutting concepts in 10th-grade global history and earth science curricula across the African continent to highlight content connections, interdisciplinary learning opportunities and culturally responsive…

One Teacher’s “What I Did This Summer”

The day after Labor Day is synonymous with the official return to the classroom and the age-old prompt: “What did you do this summer?” FFT Fellow Kelsi Horner is hoping students at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, KS, ask HER that question. With two colleagues, Kelsi engaged in an immersive experience of…

Teachers: We’re Hiring

Fund for Teachers’ fellowships are based on the belief that teachers know best what they AND their students need to succeed. We also believe that teachers know best what our organization needs to most effectively support teachers. That’s why we started our Educator Advisory Council. And that’s why we want you to apply for the…

The Art of Nature and the Nature of Art

Established in 1854, Norwich Free Academy includes in its mission: “[to] study all that is beautiful in nature and art, and [be] prepared for the highest usefulness and the purest happiness.” Fund for Teachers Fellow Sarah Lefrancois fulfilled that mission and more with her 2022 fellowship. After retracing the footsteps/work of Ansel Adams in and…

Enter to Learn, Learn to Serve

In celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week, we want to share our own appreciation for this thank you note from 2023 FFT Fellow David Cruickshank. With his grant, David plans to research the Japanese culture that has no widespread access to firearms and has built a $2.6 billion flood protection system described as a modern marvel….

Teacher Validation > Teacher Appreciation

This month, social media feeds will be flooded with memes for teacher appreciation and posts about how vital teachers are to our society. At the same time, Fund for Teachers will hand $1.7 million in checks to 396 teachers for summer fellowships they designed. The contrast between memes & money puts into sharp relief America’s…

Fund for Teachers Awards $1.7 Million in Teacher Grants

Fund for Teachers announced today the names of 396 teachers to receive $1.7 million in grants to experience learning they proposed as vital to their particular students’ success. Because the nonprofit places no limits on what is learned – or where – these teachers will pursue topics as diverse as cacao farming and Yiddish music…

“Guardian” of the Wetlands

The conservation of France’s Camargue wetlands represents the opposite of rags to riches: It’s millionaire to marshlands manager. In 1948, a young heir to the Roche pharmaceutical fortune spent a bit of it to buy an estate in a mosquito-infested, briny marshland. The region also was the second-largest delta draining into the Mediterranean Sea, behind…

Remembering the Holocaust

“To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” — Elie Wiesel, Night “It has been almost 80 years since the end of WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust. The survivors of a people’s systematic and institutional genocide are passing away, and…

Teaching Trauma Recovery by Example

“We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.” This excerpt from New York Times bestseller The…

Saluting the Sacrifices of American Indian WW2 Veterans

For the past eight years, I have been a middle school social studies teacher in an American Indian pre-kindergarten through eighth grade magnet school. Our school was created by community elders to provide an American Indian perspective and to welcome students of all backgrounds where teaching is rooted in American Indian culture, traditions, values, history…

Día de Los Vivos

Today Hispanic communities begin Dia de Los Muertos celebrations to remember with joy — not grief — their family members who have died. A team of teachers from Chicago’s Little Village community are striving to help their elementary students remember their Latinx heritage year-round with the help of a Fund for Teachers fellowship. This summer Vanessa…

Teaching Is Scary — Especially About Murder

“Teaching” might not have made this list of scariest jobs, but teaching about Jack the Ripper might have made the cut (pun intended). With their Fund for Teachers grant, Bryce McMinn (science teacher at Orville H. Platt High School in Meriden, CT) and Rachel McMinn (English/Journalism teacher at Success Academy, also in Meriden) researched notorious…

He’d Like to Teach the World to Sing — Opera

You might not know that October 25 is the birthday of Georges Bizet (composer of the opera Carmen) and Johann Strauss II (composer of multiple operettas). Or that today is World Opera Day, the fourth year in a movement to increase awareness of access to opera. Perhaps most surprising of all, one of our grant recipients…