Grant Application
Deadline: January 21, 2021 at 5:00PM CST

Part II: Proposal

The Fund for Teachers grant proposal consists of five sections and should articulate creative, thoughtful activities or projects that demonstrate potential for learning.

• Create and save your proposal using a word processor, avoiding any formatting.
• 25,000 characters, including spaces, (approx. five and a half typed pages) cumulative for all seven sections.
• Avoid identifying references.
• Answer all of the questions under each section.
• Insert your answers for each section separately into corresponding text boxes.
• Avoid using hyperlinks and web addresses.
• Refer to the Scoring Rubric when addressing each of the seven proposal sections.

TEAMS:

• Proposals should reflect collaboration and demonstrate your ability to work successfully as a team. Team members should be active participants in the writing process. They should also understand that they are financially responsible for their portion of the grant if awarded.
• Only the team lead is responsible for entering the proposal online.

Proposal Sections:

Fellowship Purpose: What is your genuine problem of practice? Why is it important to address that problem of practice?

• Describe what you know about your students, their backgrounds, and their learning challenges.
• Describe the gaps that exist in your own practice, curriculum, or school culture.
• Articulate your learning goals in a way that connects them to the opportunities and gaps identified.

Fellowship Learning Plan: What is your plan to address your problem of practice?

• Outline the details of your summer learning experience.
• Describe how you plan to implement change in your classroom/school (eg. revised units, changes in pedagogy)
• Lay out how the proposed activities relate to your learning goals and the needs of your students.
• Describe how you will collaborate with others to support your learning (e.g. experts in the field, your students, other teachers).

Teacher Growth and Learning: What key actions will you take to make sure that you can maximize your fellowship learning and implementation in the classroom?

• Describe how this fellowship represents risk taking for you.
• Name strategies you will use to ensure you are prepared to learn, meet your fellowship goals, and solve your problem of practice.
• Explain how the school or your classroom conditions make it possible for you to innovate.

Student Growth and Learning: How will students benefit from your proposed fellowship, both in their content knowledge AND in the way they learn?

• Describe the impacts you expect your fellowship to have on students (eg. New content knowledge, changes to the way students learn)
• Describe possible impacts you expect your fellowship to have on your community (eg. other students, teachers, stakeholders)
• Describe any opportunities for students to take leadership and be changemakers as a result of your fellowship

Budget Narrative: Provide a brief narrative showing evidence of thoughtful planning and research supporting your specific itinerary.

• The narrative should explain your rationale for the project's expenses.
• Stipulate a time frame and approximate costs as closely as possible. 
• Team budgets should include both costs broken down by individual and totals for the whole team.

Food costs should reflect actual destination rates and cannot exceed $50 per day/per person.