Penn GSE announced a new fellowship in May that will give 300 Philadelphia teachers a stipend and professional development resources to help inhance the school district’s new Algebra 1 curriculum.
Credit: Abhiram Juvvadi
Penn’s Graduate School of Education announced a fellowship for eighth- and ninth-grade teachers in the School District of Philadelphia focused on “enhancing” the Algebra 1 curriculum across the city’s public schools.
The fellowship — which receives funding from the Neubauer Family Foundation — supports 100 recipients per year, who will each “earn a $3,000 stipend, professional learning credits, and a Penn GSE certificate of participation.” Over the period of the three-year grant, 300 teachers — all Algebra 1 educators in the district — will be able to participate.
GSE professor Janine Remillard described the motivations behind the program in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian.
“The district recently adopted a new curriculum program, called Illustrative Mathematics, which helps teachers connect algebraic procedures to underlying concepts, but this approach is unfamiliar to many teachers,” Remillard wrote. “We hope that teachers will feel more prepared to develop students’ understanding of algebraic concepts and flexibility using different algebraic procedures.”
In the announcement of the fellowship, Penn GSE Dean Katharine Strunk similarly noted the need for stronger support across the district.
“This fellowship was created in direct response to a need identified by the School District of Philadelphia, and we are proud to help meet that need with evidence-based support for teachers,” Strunk said.
The program will begin in summer of 2025 with a four-day summer institute along with “monthly peer collaborations, individualized coaching, and three follow-up professional development days during the year.”
The announcement of the fellowship follows the creation of the Promoting Achievement and Support for STEM program — an initiative that has also helped foster a partnership between Penn GSE and the Philadelphia school district.
“Algebra 1 is a gateway to future achievement, and this fellowship represents the kind of forward-thinking collaboration that can make a real difference in the lives of our students and the effectiveness of our educators,” Tony Watlington — the superintendent of the school district of Philadelphia — said in the announcement.
Remillard emphasized that the fellowship can bring educators together and expressed “hope” that “teachers will enjoy themselves” as they “deepen their knowledge of different algebraic concepts” alongside colleagues.
“We believe that all teachers need regular opportunities to come together, to reflect on their teaching, and learn from and with others over time,” she wrote. “The fellowship seeks to create this type of structure.”
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In an interview with the DP, Penn Learning Network Executive Director Lara Paparo — who will be responsible for managing the fellowship — highlighted that the program serves as a “promising opportunity” to build a model that can be used in other contexts “across the state and country.”
“What we’ve seen so far is that the school district has teachers from a variety of schools from who teach in a variety of content, who are able to take their learning and bring it back into their school community to impact even more and be able to scale, grow, and create communities of partners within it,” Paparo said.
“All children and communities deserve well prepared and supported teachers,” Remillard wrote to the DP. “This [initiative], we hope, provides an example of this.”
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