The New Teacher Project has a prestigious fellows programme that recruits and certifies new teachers.
In 1996 she was awarded a "genius grant" from the MacArthur fellows programme.
The MacArthur fellows programme director, Daniel Socolow, said the 23 new fellows were all "explorers and pioneers at the cutting edge".
It added that the senior fellows programme was "designed to strengthen the connection between theory and practice", as the centre examines and develops policies at the intersection of business and government.
Esra'a Al Shafei is a 24-year-old Bahraini woman who, says Tom Rielly, the head of the TED Fellows programme, "looks like she still shops in the junior high school section".
In New York, the David Rockefeller Fellows Programme lures a dozen busy high-flyers each year out of their offices for two mornings and one evening a month and shows them round their city, introducing them not only to the mayor but also to areas such as Harlem and the Bronx.
For example, I work on the Gatsby Teacher Fellows Programme.
It should also consider setting up an 'INDEPTH Fellows' programme, tapping into resources from donor institutions that actively support capacity-building such as Fogarty, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Development Research Centre IDRCC).
We then opened it up to the entire school, instead of just the fellow's programme.
Dr John Swenson-Wright is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, and Senior Consulting Fellow, Asia Programme, Chatham House.
