Today is a once-in-a-lifetime event, as he moon passes between Earth and the sun for a total eclipse — the perfect event to capture students’ imagination across math, English and art classes. That’s what FFT Fellow Jerry Hites, thought anyway, when he proposed an Innovation Circle Grant last year.

Jerry’s school, Fairport Harding High School in Fairport, OH, sits in the path of totality, which means thousands of visitors are flocking to the region to experience 3 minutes 49.9 seconds of totality. Jerry wanted to build on the local significance of the event, and his teaching team was over the moon to join in.

“I haven’t team taught in a long time, but my colleagues were excited about using the eclipse as a lens for our students to study in-depth and examine their perspectives and that of the world around them,” Jerry said. “Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum and teaching shouldn’t either which is why this project involves science, geography, math, art, and ELA.” 

Nine months earlier, Jerry used a Fund for Teachers Innovation Circle Grant to witness the impact of art on a small town. He visited the Starland District of Savannah, GA, a revitalized area made up of shops that expand on peoples’ talents. Then, through monthly, virtual meetings with other Fellows throughout the fall, he arrived upon the idea of this solar eclipse project:

• • English students read A Few Beautiful Minutes, Voices in the Park and The Day You Begin, and used examples of reference books to draw their own picture books for elementary students.
  • Art students created pieces using black chalk paper, pastel chalks and glow in the dark paints in space donated by the First Congregational Church.
  • Math students constructed maps and timelines converting the path into mathematical formulations. And,
  • Special education students theorized on past, present and future impact on the local region, specifically Fairport.

One of Jerry’s students designed an I Was There 4-8-24 T-shirt to sell at a local vintage store (image headlining this post). All 100 students in his classes got to do a chalk design, canvas painting and all received a copy of A Few Beautiful Minutes. “The excitement hasn’t died down yet,” Jerry said.

Later this week, his students will present about the eclipse, and their projects, to elementary students and the town’s school board.

“The driving question for this project was: We make decisions all the time. When we make these decisions, are we walking out of the darkness into the light or out of the light into the darkness?” Jerry said. “The choice is ours.” 

You can watch Jerry’s presentation about his Innovation Circle Grant and this particular project here.

Today we open our third year of Innovation Circle Grants specifically for those previously awarded Fund for Teachers grants. Participants dive into one of two topics alongside other FFT Fellows – first individually over the summer, then virtually as a cohort throughout the fall – to create positive change in their classrooms and communities.

Based on input from our Educator Advisory Council and additional FFT Fellows, the 2024 Innovation Circles are:

Advancing Student-Centered Learning and Teachers Shaping the Future of Education.

Topic #1 – Advancing Student-Centered Learning

Due to the success of last year’s Circle with a similar theme, we’re continuing to devote resources to Fellows’  research and implementation of learning informed by students’ heritage, home, and history. What does this mean specifically?

• Have you noticed a pattern of student engagement you want to shift?
• Are students telling you (with words or actions) that they need a change?
• Is your current curriculum feeling estranged and lacking engagement?

As with our fellowship grants, the subject of your learning is up to you; it just needs to be focused on and rooted in your students’ lived experiences.  

Topic #2 – Teachers Shaping the Future of Education

Too often, decisions impacting education fail to entertain teachers’ voices and wisdom. This Circle represents Fund for Teachers’ effort to further empower educators as advocates for themselves and their students. Under the leadership of two nationally recognized thought leaders (who were once teachers themselves), participants this Circle will identify an issue that they want to influence. That issue, however, can range from:

• student-driven concerns;
• school-specific dilemmas (i.e. cell phone use);
• district policies impacting students, teachers and/or families, or;
• state and/or national educational advocacy opportunities.

Ultimately, the purpose of this circle is to help teachers learn how to navigate environments to promote change that will serve your communities. 

Timeline

Now through April 18, FFT Fellows are encouraged to apply for an Innovation Circle grant here. The FFT Fellow facilitators will be announced in mid-March; the new Circle cohorts will be notified on April 29; and checks will be distributed, and virtual orientations held in May.

Fund for Teachers established this secondary grant to support our Fellows who initially took learning into their own hands through a summer fellowship grant. Innovation Circles represent the next step in their journey toward personal and professional evolution. Questions? Contact Liza Eaton at info@fundforteachers.org.

Kicking off Women’s History Month, we share this fascinating fellowship designed by two teachers from Alpine, Texas.

“An American woman with a prosthetic leg, a Black woman born into poverty and segregation, and a Sufi Muslim Indian woman facing prejudice, were not satisfied to stand still or conform,” wrote Cory Cason and Renee Parson in their 2023 Fund for Teachers grant proposal. “Stories of historical figures serve as powerful role models and as high school U.S. and world history teachers we are in a unique position to use them as a classroom tool. Their compelling stories will inspire our students to look beyond their own circumstance as they ‘see’ the world and help cultivate the characteristics of empathy, resilience, adaptability, and courage we wish to see in our students.”

Thus began this teaching team’s quest to follow Virginia Hall, Josephine Baker and Noor Inayat Khan through Europe. Why these women in particular? Because in addition to their public personas as author, entertainer and princess, they also became exceptional WWII spies.

Dead, Old and Irrelevant?

Renee and Cory live in a remote corner of West Texas and teach at a school where sports and organizations such as Future Farmers of America characterize the cadence of the school life and the surrounding community. The history teachers (in addition to coaching track and field, history fair, and UIL academic contests) realized that students’ awareness of the wider world and appreciation of historical events were lacking.

“If we do not tell compelling narratives, our students will not be affected,” said Renee. “We believed that discovering
the stories of historical figures could be used as a strategy to create empathetic global citizens, but it’s difficult to use
historical figures as role models if we and our students cannot relate to them as real people.”

Renee and Cory designed a Fund for Teachers fellowship to:

1. Become experts on Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan and Josephine Baker,
2. Create substantive authentic teaching materials, and
3. Navigate international travel in search of history

to use historical figures as role models by cultivating a real connection to these women and inspire an interest in the world beyond Alpine High School’s campus. The end result would be a new unit called “Spies Like Us.”

Sleuthing Out Surprising Facts

The International Spy Museum in Washington DC kicked off the transatlantic fellowship, where all three women are featured in the “Sisterhood of Spies – Celebrating Women in Espionage” exhibit. Their narratives are told and artifacts are on display, including Baker’s sheet music with invisible ink, a clandestine Mark II radio and transmitter, the type used by Khan and Hall’s Order of the British Empire award.

Next, a flight to London, where the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) recruited Hall and Kahn. A day trip to the Beaulieu Finishing School revealed the site where British SOE spies (including Hall and Kahn) mastered radio communication, weapons and sabotage.

Chunneling to Paris provided the opportunity to visit The Pantheon Mausoleum, where Baker is one of the few women and the first woman of color to be memorialized, as well as visit the Parisian streets and arrondissements where the three women lived and worked — including Avenue Foch where Khan was arrested and interrogated at Gestapo Headquarters. Additional stops included:

• The Musée de la Libération de Paris-Musée du Général Leclerc-Musée Jean Moulin museum partially housed in former secret French Resistance tunnels,
• The Chateau des Milandes where Baker lived after WWII and is now a dedicated museum space with exhibits from all aspects of her life,
• The medieval village of Villefranche-de-Conflent where Virginia Hall began her escape during the
  winter of 1942 with a wooden prosthetic leg over the Pyrenees into Spain, and
• Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site where Noor Inayat Khan was imprisoned and executed.

From every stop, Cory and Renee sent missives to students via social media to report on their findings.

Cluing In in the Classroom

Renee and Cory are translating their experiences into a spy school for students set in the high plateau of the Chihuahuan Desert between the Glass and Davis Mountain Ranges. Students are creating podcasts about women involved in World War II espionage and hosting a dinner party or tea at which students “interview” these same individuals for a cumulative report.

Along the way, the teachers’ content knowledge and mindset expanded as much as the students’:

• The independent bookstore and public libraries asked them to speak about their fellowship; and
• The duo is producing a podcast about the entire experience and impact.

“Sometimes when you do something for a long time, you take it for granted,” said Cory. “Admittedly history was becoming a bit boring for me. But as we traveled, I fell in love with history all over again. Experiencing history outside of the classroom and in the present was an adventure. I found that even though this was my first big trip overseas in 25 years, I was able to take advantage of every moment offered.”

Over the course of my career, I have observed the wide variety of background experiences that students bring to school and how those experiences impact learning. The more confident and savvy learners tend to get the lions’ share of the time, resources, and attention; these same students tend to be from stable homes rarely impacted by poverty and trauma. In my class, every student has a voice, but how do I ensure that they are equally heard and heeded?

Teachers all over the United States are struggling to create and implement working definitions for concepts such as equity, equality, motivation, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Participating in Fund For Teachers’ Innovation Circle on equity and collaborating with my “fellow” Fellows to elevate every students’ voice brought these definitions sharply into focus for me.

I used my Innovation Circle grant to attend the International Baccalaureate workshop on Social Emotional Learning, which incorporated global perspectives, international mindedness, and equity mindsets. During the two virtual summer seminars, I had an aha moment – the more reticent students didn’t lack the materials or time they needed to successfully complete a 5th Grade Exhibition project, but the confidence that they COULD.

After this fellowship, I now understand that one of the greatest factors in helping students achieve equity is helping them develop self-efficacy.

Students from poverty, trauma, and troubled backgrounds often lack the self-efficacy (the belief that they can do a task) to be successful in school, and, by extension, in life. Parent contacts confirmed this and student surveys bore it out. Therefore, I am now focusing more on the development of student self-efficacy in the process of teaching. I have a new perspective on the balance of process and product, and intensive efforts devoted to building student self-efficacy is transforming a once-difficult class into a one filled with successful, positive, motivated students. (see their work below)

A few takeaways from my seminars and group work with Fellows:

• “Equity is the provision of personalized resources needed for all individuals to reach common goals:  the goals and expectations are the same for all students, but the supports needed to achieve those goals depends on the students’ needs” (Latta, 2019).  The supports typically consist of providing students with materials, supplies, time, personnel, and opportunities, all of which are indeed important for students to succeed.
• Inequity in education has been traditionally associated with groups of students who have suffered from discrimination due to their race, ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, class, gender, or disability.  I contend that the true inequity lies in a student’s belief in self, based on the experiences and treatment s/he has received. Without belief in self, no amount of materials, supplies, time, personnel, or opportunities can assure success.
• True equity, that which resides in the heart, requires intangible, elusive, but very real  self-efficacy.  Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in his/her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments (Bandura, 1997).   Self-efficacy reflects an individual’s confidence in his/her ability to exert control over his/her own motivation, behavior, and social environment.  All human experiences – the goals people strive for, the amount of time and energy that is expanded towards meeting the goals, and the likelihood of attaining certain levels of behavioral performance – are all rooted in self-efficacy.

• Self-efficacy focuses on “doing” and self-esteem focuses on “being.” Self-efficacy is the belief that one is able to do and self-esteem is a general feeling of one’s worth as a human being. The self-system is comprised of all of these elements, which manifest themselves in attitudes, abilities, and cognitive skills.  The self-system also plays a major role in how people perceive situations and how they behave in response to different situations (Bandura, 1977).
• Equity in education must include developing self-efficacy in all students.  It does not matter how much “stuff” or time or opportunity a student has.  If s/he does not believe in his/her capacity to execute the necessary behaviors, success will always be out of reach.

The good news is that self-efficacy can be nurtured in four ways:

1. 1. Experiencing mastery experiences;
   2. Witnessing other people successfully completing a task;
   3. Being persuaded through positive verbal encouragement; and
   4. Developing psychological responses by learning how to minimize stress and elevate mood when facing difficult or challenging tasks.

More good news: 94% of my fifth graders are participating in Exhibition, compared with 75% in past years. The IB Fifth Grade Exhibition is scheduled for May 19. We started work on September 2, and we will continue to move forward with Exhibition projects with the 32 kids who are participating. Self-efficacy work is woven into the process, and also with the two students who chose not to participate in Exhibition. The equity portion is having them BELIEVE that they can do it, so that they WILL do it.

Caroline Belden, author and social justice advocate, explains it this way, “Equality is leaving the door open for anyone who has the means to approach it.  Equity is ensuring there is a pathway to the door for those who need it.”

As teachers, we have the power to create that pathway for our students. Teachers want all of our students to succeed, to become productive citizens, and to become lifelong learners.  Equity in the classroom, developed through self-efficacy, will help all students to succeed.

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Janet Key is a three-time FFT Fellow: In 2011, she attended the Clarice Smith National Teacher Institute at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC;  in 2014, she returned to Washington to participate in the Smithsonian Science Education Academy for Physical Sciences (pictured); and in 2021, she received an Innovation Circle Grant to virtually attend the three-day International Baccalaureate conference titled “Your Exhibition” to develop fifth graders research and presentation strategies on a transdisciplinary theme, a required component of the IB Primary Years Programme. Janet is a proud Milwaukee Public Schools teacher since 1985, and retirement is on a distant horizon.  She currently teaches at Lowell International Elementary School, in kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms.

I teach three levels of English Learners:

• those emerging from the Newcomer program
• those who have been in the country 4-7 years, and
• those who have not reached English fluency after more than seven years of American schooling.

Students in that last group — known as Long Term English Learners (LTELs) — may have been born in this country, but they have hit a plateau in academic English language acquisition. These students need robust, rigorous and culturally relevant curriculum and instruction to help them catch up to their “English Only” peers. Without it, they remain the most likely to drop out and least likely to go to college of any of the subgroups at our Title 1 school.

I used my Innovation Circle Grant to work on to finding innovative ways of blending language development with the arts in order to start closing gaps and opening opportunities for these students.

With a $1,000 grant and alongside peers in the Art & Equity Innovation Circle, I participated in the “Clay: The Remix” workshop at Penland School of Craft in Penland, NC, to learn how to use simple tools in the creation of poetry, street art and prints, then transfer those images to clay, to empower students with a new platform for public voice.

Lugo’s teapot of Ralph Ellison

I had no idea that my teacher in my learning experience would be a prominent artist who would transform me and my students. Potter Roberto Lugo shared his slides and the story of his trajectoy as an artist, he spoke about the worth of every person, about putting hidden heroes onto fine porcelain, about “ghetto” being another word for “resourcefulness” and about the need for people from different backgrounds to come together for conversation. At this moment, I knew Roberto Lugo would resonate with my students. I took his ideas, expressed in a 60 second documentary called Meet Roberto Lugo: the Hip-Hop Potter and ran with them. In doing so, I learned to be more resourceful, which included getting ideas from my Circle Members on how to convert my project from ceramics to 2-D posters.

I first taught students about Roberto Lugo and exposed them to his elaborate pottery. Then, students designed 2-D teapots, vases, teacups and sneakers in his style but with their own “hidden heroes” highlighting their heritage as they developed their academic English skills. Students chose the winning art after listening to classmates give “elevator pitches” for their submissions. The pieces tell counter-narratives of  grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunties. uncles and cultural celebrities. They honor those who have passed and those who are still alive. To my delight, some student “winners” were previously among the most disengaged students.

Students’ final exam was to write a letter to Lugo. Those letters, along with sample essays and artwork impressed Lugo so much that he highlighted them on his Instagram page. He is also planning to set up a Zoom meeting with the students.

Last week, Robert Lugo himself acknowledged students’ work on his Instagram site, sharing this video with the words:

Y’all if you need some inspiration today look at the work of these young artists lead by their teacher @fer_sha_fer_sha. I just can’t believe I’m an inspiration for these kids. All we tend to think about ourselves is our faults and not our contributions. Thank you for reminding me that I am somebody and I want to remind you that you are too.

As part of the Innovation Circle Grant program, participants create learning units based on their independent research and collaborative ideation. Download Lisa’s “Who Deserves to be in a Museum” curriculum here.

Lisa Shafer is an English Language Development teacher at Skyline High School in Oakland, CA. She also has taught journalism, the graduate capstone course and English at other high schools. She is a three-time Fund for Teacher Fellow and is a former participant in the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program (JET). She loves incorporating journalism, storytelling and civic engagement into her lessons for English Learners.

What are Innovation Circles?   

Innovation Circles is a new grant program at Fund for Teachers (FFT) designed to stimulate and enrich teacher innovation. Through self-designed learning experiences and virtual Circle meetings, Fellows have the funds and collaborative peer support to design outside of the box. 

What do Lead Fellows Do? 

As a Lead Fellow for an Innovation Circle, you will guide Circle participants (also Fellows) along a path to design unique classroom-based innovations. These innovations should be grounded in students’ needs and will demand a certain amount of testing and risk taking. This means you will need to create time and space for participants to build community, share, refine and problem solve. While you may have deep expertise in the Circle topic, your role is that of facilitator, not instructor.  

Why Lead Fellows?   

Fellows with experience in the Circle topic and who have worked to implement changes in their own classroom are uniquely qualified to support others. In addition, Lead Fellowship opportunities give Fellows access to teacher leadership experiences that they may not have in their schools.  

The Details: 

• Build virtual community with 10-15 Fellows in your circle.  
• Plan and facilitate monthly meetings, virtually. Some meeting materials will be provided.  
• Collaborate with FFT to identify a key common ‘text’ for the Circle topic.  
• Monitor Fellows’ progress to inform Circle meeting design.  
• Communicate with Fellows between Circle meetings to answer questions, communicate meeting logistics etc.  
• Collaborate with other Lead Fellows to problem solve and navigate Circle leadership.  
• Demonstrate expertise with the topic through ‘text’ selection, strategic questioning and feedback on Fellow’s work. The topics determined by Fellow interest, are outlined here. 
• Use Fund for Teachers for support in Fellow learning and grant administration. NOTE: FFT will provide administrative support and Fellow communications related to technology, grant funds and grant deliverables.  
• Lead Fellows will be paid a $1500 stipend. 

How Might Your Time be Divided?

The Ideal Candidate:

• Believes that teachers can and should stretch and try new things in their classrooms – that they are designers and creators. 
• Is interested in growing their skills as an adult learning facilitator.  
• Is passionate about the Circle topic. 
• Has experience teaching and/or facilitating online. 
• Has  approximately 30-40 hours to spend on this project between April, 2022 and January, 2023. 
• Is currently an educator and FFT Fellow. 

Interested in applying? Complete the application, here.

Have questions about the position? Reach out to Liza Eaton, Director of Programs, The Ramsden Project.