Teach For India Fellowship Program is now open for the India’s brightest and most promising youth, from the nation’s best universities and workplaces, to serve as full-time teachers to children from low-income communities in under-resourced schools.
Through two years of teaching and working with key education stakeholders, their Fellows are exposed to the grassroots realities of India’s education system and cultivate the knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed to attain positions of leadership in and beyond education, working collectively to build a vibrant movement for educational equity across India.
Mission: At Teach For India, they believe leadership for education is the solution. They are building a movement of leaders who will eliminate educational inequity in India.
Commitments
Each Fellow is assigned a classroom in one of Teach For India’s placement cities, and charged to teach academics, values and mindsets and to give their students the access and exposure they need to reach their personal, long-term visions. Their framework for leadership at Teach For India is called the Leadership Development Journey, and is centered around three commitments:
The Commitment to Personal Transformation: Exploring who you are, your purpose, and striving to be a better person.
The Commitment to Collective Action: Building relationships and organizing partners to multiply and deepen their impact.
The Commitment to Educational Equity: Deepening their understanding of educational equity and committing to attaining it.
Fellows work on these commitments in and beyond the full-time lab of their classroom, where they relentlessly focus on moving their students towards “path-changing” learning, the highest level of their Student Vision Scale.
By growing in the 3 commitments, and embedded with real life leadership experiences in the classrooms and communities, Fellows are ready to be lifelong learners and leaders for greater impact on children.
Training And Support
Their pre-service and in-service training and support is designed to equip Fellows with the knowledge, skills and mindsets to become effective teachers and leaders.
Institute: Prior to being placed in a school, Fellows undergo a rigorous pre-service training program that focuses on classroom practice and leadership development. At Institute, Fellows learn world-class pedagogy (e.g. lesson planning, vision setting, classroom culture) and content instruction, and also begin to develop the mindsets and beliefs needed to drive transformational change within education. They practice their teaching at Summer School during Institute training. Fellows leave institute with a strong network of people who will be their support system through the Fellowship.
Ongoing Support: Throughout the two years, Fellows receive ongoing support through a combination of in-person training sessions, leadership forums, as well as online training courses and resources. In addition, each Fellow has a full-time Program Manager who provides on the ground, intensive technical, leadership and emotional support.
Impact Measurement
They use a number of metrics and assessment tools to measure their efforts.
Reading Comprehension and Mathematics: All of Teach For India’s students take bi-annual standardized assessments, developed in partnership with an external assessment company, to measure progress on reading comprehension and mathematics.
Personal Growth: Using standardized rubrics and sampled surveys, they measure personal, non-academic growth that includes values, mindsets, and exposure and access.
Ongoing Studies: In addition to internal assessments, they participate in longitudinal studies to measure the academic and non-academic effects of their program over time.
Eligibility Criteria
In their Fellows, they look for leaders to join a movement towards educational equity. Aside from passion and commitment to the movement, they look for leadership potential that can develop through the two-year Fellowship.
Their Fellows must possess skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, setting and achieving ambitious goals and have a high bar of expectations for themselves and others. They must demonstrate interpersonal skills through their interactions with various stakeholders, along with academic excellence.
They look for diversity in their cohort. Their Fellows come from across the world representing over 300 college campuses and companies, with varied life experiences, expertise and professional experiences. Their cohorts include college graduates, working professionals, and entrepreneurs.
In order to be eligible to apply to the Fellowship program, you must be an Indian Citizen or an Overseas Citizen of India, you must have graduated with a minimum of a Bachelor’s degree by June/July 2023, and this must be your first application to the 2023 cohort of the Teach For India Fellowship.
Note that prior teaching experience is not necessary to apply to the Teach For India Fellowship. They provide rigorous training to all Fellows to set them up for success in their classrooms.
