Go First With NIET: Apply to Be a Fellow Today!

Teacher leader roles may be different across schools, but one quality shines through in them all: they elevate others. The concept of the NIET Fellows Program, which just opened its 2025-2026 application window today, was built upon our partners’ need to create more opportunities to build educator leadership capacity and elevate excellence in schools - and NIET’s intrinsic drive to respond to that need. In the inaugural year 2024-25, educator leaders from across the nation applied to NIET’s program, a year-long initiative to deepen knowledge of instructional best practices and more effectively support teacher growth and student achievement within schools and districts.

With the 2025-2026 application opening up for future fellows, the impacts of the initiative are changing practices in schools nationwide. Fellows experience a breadth of opportunities during their time in the NIET Fellows Program - from receiving in-depth and tailored coaching on NIET’s proven best practices, shadowing our expert senior specialists in different schools, and writing a blog for our national platform online. The combination of ownership and support offered through NIET leverages their leadership skills and deepens their knowledge to apply in their schools and districts, scaling out excellence. In addition to transferring excellence to their own communities, fellows highlight creating a new community within themselves - and an experience that one fellow said wasn’t anything short of “life-changing.”

The distribution of the fellows’ learnings doesn’t just happen in their schools and among the cohort. Their leadership makes impacts beyond the structures of the systems they are in every day and continues to reach new names and faces outside of their own schools to their districts and communities. NIET knows effective leaders take the initial step to model practices and brave the forefront of trying new strategies to share with others and generate success. Through building the capacity, comprehension and confidence of fellows, they are equipped to have a resounding impact. Most importantly, fellows exemplify the final and most critical step of the work NIET does with our partners by effectively transferring knowledge and learning back to the classrooms to provide all students the opportunity to succeed. The NIET Fellows Program helps establish a space and platform for incredible education leaders to be conductors of excellence within their classrooms and communities.

Interested in being a fellow? Join us in going first and apply today. The 2025-2026 NIET Fellows application window is open until April 11, 2025.