The beginning of a school year is a good time to survey your funding landscape and make an honest assessment of your time management skills.  Be ruthless, you know you are stretched to the limit, can you rally your troops and form a functioning committee that is helpful to your efforts? You need to be careful, you don’t want to recruit prima donnas, or people who will ride your coattails and then take all the credit. You will get a sense of who the real worker bees are very early in committee formation. If this sounds belittling, that’s not my intent, worker bees are worth their weight in gold.

Fortunately, the fiscal climate for schools is improving, tax revenues are up, but grants will still play a big role in your planning for the near future. One of the only ways many districts will be able to increase expenditures next year or even keep their budgets level will be through an infusion of grant money.  If you are in one of those districts and anticipate that you will need money on a district or even a classroom level, you need to be making plans now in order to win the grant money you need.

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There has been much talk lately about backward design in education and curriculum development. It is a method of designing curriculum by setting goals before choosing programs and instructional methods. Backward design of curriculum typically involves three stages:

• identifying the results desired
• determining acceptable levels of evidence to show that desired results have occurred
• designing  activities that will make desired results unfold

If you’re a grant writer now is the time to think about programs that can improve the educational experience of your students. It’s important to picture successful programs in your mind.  Michelangelo said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

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