The Teach for India Fellowship, is an intense and challenging experience. The path towards becoming a transformational teacher leads fellows to plan judiciously and meticulously, face and overcome multiple obstacles, invest stakeholders in the potential of their children, and seek opportunities to constantly learn, improve and grow. All of these skills and experiences prepare them to become lifelong leaders of the movement.
Teach For India Fellows have two primary opportunities to develop their leadership skills and mindsets:
- Classroom Instructional Leadership: Fellows are full-time teachers in English-medium government or low-income private schools for two consecutive academic years.Their focus is aimed at ensuring a transformative educational experience for their students. Fellows achieve this by developing deep relationships with their students, creating instructional plans to address the needs of individual students and the class as a whole, delivering instruction in an engaging and innovative manner, and by collaborating with other teachers, administrators and community members to build their skills and obtain resources for their classrooms. They also administer regular, rigorous assessments to ensure that students are progressing towards their academic goals. This classroom experience pushes them to be firmly grounded in the theory of the problem of educational inequity and to practice the key leadership principles necessary to meet any ambitious vision.
- School Transformation/Leadership Project: In addition to teaching, each Fellow owns and implements a transformational project in the school and/or students’ community directed towards tackling a challenge that hinders the achievement of their students. These projects range from setting up a community library to instituting a parent literacy program. Fellows will create innovative and sustainable solutions to the problem. To effectively execute the project, Fellows research and plan, invest school and community stakeholders to help implement the project, troubleshoot the project in its execution phase, and chart out a sustainable transition plan. By designing, implementing and managing a small-scale, sustainable project within the school community, Fellows hone their transferable leadership and project management skills. Fellows also develop a deep understanding of the varied barriers to achievement and the complex problems associated with achieving equity in education. This experience shapes and guides the methods Fellows will adopt to tackle educational inequity in the country, both in the short and long term.
