OKLAHOMA CITY — Fourteen Oklahoma educators will embark on self-designed professional development experiences this summer after receiving fellowships from Fund for Teachers.
The teachers selected for 2026 fellowships are Jennifer Addison, Union Public Schools; Lauryl Bennington, Jones Public Schools; Stephen Biggs, Tulsa Technology Center; Amanda Bowser, Broken Arrow Public Schools; Tina Casey, Elmore City-Pernell Public Schools; Olga Caulfield, Moore Norman Technology Center; William Ferguson, Bixby Public Schools; Kylee Graumann, Moore Public Schools; Shelly Hale, Edmond Public Schools; Kristyne Hamilton, Union Public Schools; Catherine Johnson, Elmore City-Pernell Public Schools; Akash Patel, Epic Charter Schools; Sarah Rhodes, Union Public Schools; and Julie Valsaint, Wagoner Public Schools.
Oklahoma’s grants are made possible through a partnership between Fund for Teachers, the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence and the Tulsa Community Foundation.
“We are proud to support this incredible opportunity for our Oklahoma educators,” said Elizabeth Inbody, OFE executive director. “We love watching educators design innovative professional development experiences that reflect a deep understanding of their students’ needs. The impact of these fellowships will be felt in Oklahoma classrooms for years to come.”
The grants are available to Oklahoma educators who teach pre-K through 12th grade. Individual teachers may apply for up to $5,000, while teams may apply for up to $10,000 in grant funds.
OFE is a statewide, nonpartisan nonprofit that recognizes and encourages academic excellence in Oklahoma’s public schools. The foundation elevates public education through esteemed honors, mentoring grants, support for public school foundations and partnerships that provide exceptional professional development to educators.
Oklahoma’s 2026 Fund for Teachers Fellows
Amanda Bowser, Broken Arrow Public Schools
Bowser will attend the Building Thinking Classrooms Summer Institute in Davis, California, to engage in an immersive experience centered on implementing the 14 Building Thinking Classroom practices in Mathematics and strengthen student thinking through collaboration.
William Ferguson, Bixby Public Schools
Ferguson plans to volunteer with youth and young adults with severe disabilities through International Volunteer Headquarters in Cordoba, Argentina, to deepen understanding about Hispanic language and culture, learn how other countries serve individuals with disabilities and strengthen personal abilities required to effectively advocate for school students and families.
Tina Casey and Catherine Johnson, Elmore City-Pernell Public Schools
Casey and Johnson plan to research across England, Scotland and France the lives of William Shakespeare and other literary giants to highlight how great authors shape cultures across centuries and demonstrate that curiosity, scholarship and ambition can take them anywhere.
Akash Patel, Epic Charter Schools
Patel will investigate Asian elephant conservation and biodiversity practices across India, Nepal and Thailand to create interdisciplinary STEAM and global citizenship lessons that empower students to tackle real-world environmental challenges.
Lauryl Bennington, Jones Public Schools
Bennington plans to strengthen her language proficiency through the Spanish in the City immersive program in Mexico City to enhance communication with Spanish-speaking students and create an inclusive and equitable learning environment where all students feel seen, supported and empowered.
Olga Caulfield, Moore Norman Technology Center
Caulfield will enroll in a course through Europass in Valencia, Spain, about connecting classrooms to real-world environments through experiential and place-based teaching methods to create curriculum that motivate physics and engineering students to stay engaged, think beyond their immediate surroundings, and be inspired to take risks and explore new possibilities.
Kylee Graumann, Moore Public Schools, and Shelly Hale, Edmond Public Schools
Leveraging the grit of an “Oklahoma Strong” community as the foundation, Graumann and Hale will investigate Iceland’s leadership in alternative energy through documentation of the positive human impact these systems provide to inspire students to view their heritage as a bridge to a sustainable future.
Stephen Biggs, Tulsa Technology Center, and Julie Valsaint, Wagoner Public Schools
Biggs and Valsaint will embark on a tour across America investigating how two of America’s greatest inventors, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, came up with their inventions, and do some personal inventing at the Yestermorrow Design Build School in Waitsfield, Vermont, to better understand the thought process of early American inventors and bring that knowledge back to tech ed and manufacturing classrooms.
Jennifer Addison and Sarah Rhodes, Union Public Schools
Addison and Rhodes will explore literacy’s connection to history through a multi-stop, immersive road trip to historic sites related to America’s 250th birthday to deepen contextual understanding and create rich literacy lessons that enhance vocabulary and student background knowledge with representation in mind.
Kristyne Hamilton, Union Public Schools
Hamilton will research in Austria, Italy and Germany the heritage of prisoners of war during World War II who worked on farms less than 20 miles from the school to create a third-grade unit that uses oral histories to connect the ideological shifts of these specific laborers to the Oklahoma Standard and modern natural resource management.
