Fully 24 percent of the i3 winners plan to use their grants to help improve teacher effectiveness. You may have heard of some of the big-ticket winners, like Teach For America, which will use its $50 million grant to grow the size of its teacher corps by 80 percent by 2014.
But here’s a rundown of some of the other winning teacher plans:
• The American Federation of Teachers’ own Innovation Fund will use its grant to scale up one of its projects, a plan to pilot and implement a new teacher-evaluation and -development system in select New York and Rhode Island affiliates.
• The Boston Teacher Residency will expand its program to prepare and then place a total of 130 teacher residents in “turnaround” schools in Boston.
• Jefferson County schools, in Louisville, Ky., will move to a trimester system that, among other things, will allow teachers more time to collaborate on professional development.
• The Exploratorium in San Francisco will devise a professional-development program that integrates English-language development and science instruction to be used in the district’s elementary schools.
• The Miami-Dade school district and several project partners will create an early-learning specialization within the district’s on-the-job master’s degree program, and the school system will also expand a “master teacher” program in which select teachers lead professional learning communities to additional grades and subjects.
• The Chicago-based Erickson Institute will establish a whole-school professional-development program for math teachers of pupils in K-3 classrooms in Chicago.
• The New Teacher Project will set up an effectiveness-based teacher-preparation program, using a student-achievement- focused curriculum, for prospective teachers in the District of Columbia; Chicago; Fort Worth, Texas; and Nashville, Tenn.; among other sites. It plans to prepare up to 2,400 new teachers by 2015 and certify only those teachers who have demonstrated classroom effectiveness.