Don't Give Up!! Keep Pursuing Your Dream!!

You have just finished college, earned a Bachelor's Degree in Education and are looking for a teaching position. You have taught for a few years, and now have relocated to a new area, city or state and are looking for a teaching position. You graduated with a Bachelor's degree in another degree area besides Education and now have completed your Master's in Education and are looking for a teaching position. No matter what your story is, finding a teaching position in this economy is difficult. Schools are increasing class size, eliminating classrooms, reducing staff and looking for the least expensive teacher to hire.

Talking to principals who are posting vacancies on the online sites, they receive an average of 800 applications for any one position. Can you imagine reviewing or sorting through applications to find the 8-10 candidates that you would like to interview for the first round? How can you make your application stand out? How do you continue to pursue a teaching position AFTER the school year has started? How do try to get yourself noticed in a school?

1. Make sure that your cover letter is connected to the goals of the school or district. In your cover letter, you do not need to reiterate your education, student teaching experiences or how much you love teaching. Your cover letter should outline the goals of the school and how these match your goals and what you can contribute to the school. Your experiences with PLCs, unit development, assessments, student data and the common core would be areas that you should highlight in your cover letter. THOSE are the experiences that principals want.

2. Your resume should outline your professional competencies-- your strengths, what you can do very well. Make a bulleted list: establishing procedures and routines in the classroom? collaborative team work? work with the common core? use of student data to differentiate instruction?

3. Your resume should outline your work experience. Again highlight the experiences that you had in either a teaching position or student teaching. It is not necessary to say, "developed science units on electricity and energy." It would develop more interest to the reader to see, "developed science units identifying essential outcomes for student mastery and designing assessments."

4. Tailor your resume to the teaching vacancy. You should tweak your resume if you pursuing a kindergarten position vs. a 2nd grade position vs. a fifth grade position. There are different literacy competencies that principals would be looking for dependent on the grade level.

5. SUBSTITUTE teach. Get out and get in those schools and sub!!! That is how you get to know the school or district, get to know the goals of a school or district, get to know the teachers and staff, and get to know the curriculum. If teachers see your professionalism, they will request you. They want a sub who can follow their plans and that will continue the learning in their classroom.

6. Know what is going on in education. Professional Learning Communities, Common Core Standards, in IL, the new teacher evaluation process, balanced literacy, formative and summative assessment, collaborative work with a team, are some of the buzz words that you need to understand and be able to talk about. Can you?? Look at the IL state website, www.isbe.net, read my weekly blog on www.theteacherguru.net and check out my Facebook page, The Teacher Guru, for the most up-to-date educational issues.

7. Keep checking the vacancies!! I am so excited that one of my clients just got a teaching position this week, the last week of September!! Schools/districts have vacancies that occur during the year for a variety of reasons: maternity leaves, medical leaves, and increase in state or federal grant funds, to name a few. So check those vacancies every day!!!