Deadline: 2 May 2018
The Misk Grand Challenges is seeking new innovative ideas that transform teaching or school leadership to better prepare children with the 21st century skills they need to succeed in the future. Modern 21st century skills, such as problem solving, leadership, creativity, and adaptability, require a new active, student-centred system for learning. The Challenges seeks ideas that better prepare teachers and school leaders to drive this new active 21st century system for learning.
The Challenges is looking for new ideas that may just be in an ideation stage or may have been tested in a small scale already, but require up to US$100,000 demonstrating their theory of change and potential for impact. Proposals that are selected to receive an initial funding of US$100,000 and go on to demonstrate success will receive further funding to scale up and impact lives across the world.
The Misk Foundation, the non-profit philanthropic foundation established by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have partnered to launch Misk Grand Challenges. This initiative seeks to empower youth both with the skills that they need to succeed in the knowledge economy and with the passion required to tackle the world’s most challenging problems. Ultimately, the initiative hopes to nurture a new generation of leaders who will transform both local and global communities.
The Challenge
- The Misk Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aim to empower the youth and prepare them for success in the future knowledge economy.
- To prepare the youth to adapt and thrive in this uncertain future, and eventually solve these major societal issues, need to help them develop new 21st century skills and competencies.
- This time must ensure every single child, regardless of where they live, receives a quality 21st century education.
- Preparing the youth with a quality 21st century education will be difficult since the current school systems throughout the world are struggling to even achieve basic learning outcomes.
- Therefore, must think beyond incremental improvements and completely transform schools, starting with the teachers and school leaders that run them.
- Preparing the youth across the world to thrive in the future knowledge economy is a daunting challenge, but one that must be and can be solved.
Focus Areas
Ideas may cover one or more of the following areas that impact teaching and/or school leadership
- Reinventing the recruitment process how can schools attract the best people for the role? How are the people with the highest potential identified and selected?
- Transforming training and professional development how are new recruits prepared with essential basic skills? How their craft further is refined and enhanced over time? How is technology used to support growth? What other resources or tools be used to enhance development? How can mentoring and collaboration be leveraged more?
- Improving resources that support high-quality learning how can technology improve performance? How can teaching aids be transformed in line with learning 21st century skills? What other new resources can teachers leverage to improve lesson delivery?
- New forms of management how can new management systems and practices maximize performance? How can monitoring and incentives be effectively implemented?
- Any other area that drastically improves the performance of teachers and school leaders in line with the new competency-based curriculum of the future
Funding Criteria
- All proposals must:
- Be aligned with the challenge outlined above and greatly improve teaching and/or school leadership
- Improve the quality of learning with regards to 21st century skills for children around the world
- Outline the design of the solution to clearly explain how it will work
- Have a plan for using the US$100,000 in 12-18 months to advance the solution.
- Have an implementation plan to ensure the solution is successfully delivered, including a plan for a strong leadership team and implementing organization
- Have a logical path to scale to help millions of children in an efficient manner. This includes measures for maintaining a lean approach and replicating whilst maintaining quality
- In addition, proposals will be prioritized if they:
- Are novel and deploy a unique approach or innovative method to solving the problem
- Have a path toward sustainability either through private or government funding
- Show a deep understanding of the education system in which they operate and outline ideas for integration that leverages the rest of the system, for greater impact
How to Apply
Interested applicants can apply via given website.
For more information, please visit Reinventing Teaching and School Leadership.