Jobs Reviews

Teaching is a great profession for many. With great diversity of niches, and an ongoing shortage of teachers, there is plenty of room for great newcomers to find work they love. Before becoming a teacher, however, you must meet the professional requirements placed on you by the system you want to join. If you don’t research and verify the professional standard in your region and your stratum of education you will soon find yourself at a dead end.

Different standards are expected at different levels and in different institutions. Most public schools from K-12 require a combination of a bachelor’s degree plus some level of professional training specifically aimed at certification. To determine what the certification and licensure process requires in your locale check with your local board of education. You can also get good information online from official state department of education sites or from such educational programs as the University of Kentucky’s site of ongoing certification criteria: http://www.uky.edu/Education/TEP/usacert.html.

Private schools can differ quite radically from public schools. Many place the stress on academic excellence within a subject, or on specialized theoretical training programs like Montessori. But the pressure to compete with public school systems can create a double bind for schools as they demand classic certification to satisfy parents used to seeing certification as a guarantee of at least minimal competence, and then academic excellence, special program training, or exceptional experience to satisfy their own desire for a different kind of excellence. Be sure to read carefully in job listings and school boilerplate to determine the expectations of particular schools.

The rule of thumb applied to most college level teaching jobs are that you need an MA in your subject to be hired by a junior college, and a PhD to be hired by a four year college or a university. These rules, however, are bent in very many ways. TAs, assistants, and other support teachers not on tenure track may be of a lower level of training than expected for their school. Likewise there are exceptions made for those with exceptional real life experience. This particularly applies to those in the arts and in trades, where the educational background may have been acquired through apprenticeships, studios, or through direct on the job involvement. A highly successful writer, law enforcement officer, or welder may serve as a professor in some programs on the basis of applied knowledge and skill rather than academic background.

There are also routes to professional teaching that allow alternate routes to be followed. In areas suffering a severe teaching shortage a qualified applicant with a strong BA and experience in teaching or tutoring may be considered by a public school even without certification. Likewise a successful substitute who has given good service can become a candidate for a permanent hire.

If you want to teach K-12, do expect to need a BA, a post graduate program in education, and to pass a certification test. This is the commonest route to professional teaching. If you can, combine a strong background in a subject with graduate level certification. This leaves you with the greatest flexibility and offers a school the dual advantage of a great subject teacher with the publicly expected certification.

Posted in Education jobs | | No Comments »

Teaching is quite a profitable job option. If you teach English abroad, then you will be allowed to discover different new things as well as to make more money compared to when you teach in your local school. For the beginning you could get to explore different countries. As well there are a lot of different cultures that could be discovered, a lot of people to make friends as well as a lot of towns that you could explore.

But, all these benefits come together with some responsibilities. For sure, you get to teach English abroad and make money, but it will not be easy at all. Actually, there are some things that you have to learn. In addition, you have to be able to adjust better to the country of your own choice as well as you have to know all the things that are waiting for you there.

First of all, you have to know how to teach English to foreign students. In fact, there are a lot of different approaches to teaching students of different language levels, if they are non English speakers. There are some specific approaches that you have to do and some additional strategies that you have to learn.

Some of the employers abroad require their English teachers to have certificates in TOEFL and ESL. It is needed to make sure that they are credible teachers of English to foreign students. As well some of the employers could require you to take an additional qualifying exam as a part of their application process.

Besides teaching English abroad involves some mental readiness that has to be taken into account. Only as you think that you are qualified for the job, does not mean that you are going to adjust easily to working conditions, the climate and culture of the country and many others. And thus before you consider yourself ready to teach English abroad, you have to take all these things into account.

Posted in Education jobs | | No Comments »