Applications for 2012-2013 Teaching Ambassador Fellowship Now Open
“We have a set of amazing teachers each year who spend a year with the Department and help drive our policy discussion…I have come to rely on the Teaching Ambassador Fellows for their invaluable feedback and their ability to facilitate dialogue with teachers across the country.” – Secretary Arne Duncan
Applications for the U.S. Department of Education’s fifth cohort of Teaching Ambassador Fellows opened on January 21st and are scheduled to close on February 22nd, 2012. Since 2008, this highly competitive program has enabled a total of sixty-nine outstanding teachers, each with a record of leadership, strong communication skills, and insights into educational policy based in classroom expertise to work with the Department on a full or part time basis. For more information about the application process, you can visit our program page at www.ed.gov/programs/teacherfellowship or go directly to the applications for the Washington, Classroom, and/or Regional Fellowship onwww.usajobs.gov.
The Teaching Ambassador Fellowship was created because we believe that teachers should have meaningful opportunities to both contribute to and understand the policies that impact their students and school communities. Also when families, students, and teachers want information about education, it is most often to teachers that they turn.
The Teaching Ambassador Fellowship program offers three separate year-long paid positions: the Washington Fellowship is a full-time appointment based at the Department’s Headquarters in Washington. The Classroom Fellowship enables teachers to participate on a part-time basis for the Department, in addition to their regular school responsibilities, working in collaboration with the Department’s Regional Offices. For the 2012-2013 year, the Department has proposed a third track, the Regional Fellowship, which is a full-time appointment based at one of the Department’s Regional Communications Offices – Atlanta, GA; Seattle, WA; and either Boston, MA, New York City or Philadelphia, PA.
All Teaching Ambassador Fellows spend one year learning about key federal programs and policies; sharing their expertise with federal staff members; and providing outreach and communication about federal initiatives to other educators on behalf of the Department in order to help teachers understand and implement these efforts at the federal, state and local levels, to improve the likelihood of their success. For the Fellows, the program adds greater knowledge of educational policy and leadership to their toolkits to contribute to solutions at all levels for long intractable challenges in education.
Teacher leaders — please consider applying and share this information with your colleagues! Call 1-800-USALearn or email us at TeacherFellowship@ed.gov with questions.
