Brighter Flames Arrayed

So in the last two posts I talked about searching and applying for jobs at private high schools. Now lets talk about interviews. A little warning: at this point I’ve given way more interviews than I’ve had as an interviewee and so most of this post comes from the point of an interviewer. That’s not as useful as it may sound since it means that most of my experiences are with one specific institution. I’ll try to generalize whenever possible but do take everything with a small grain of salt.

Phone Interviews

I define a “phone interview” as any phone conversation with someone who is officially involved in the hiring process. Even if it’s a two minute exchange on logistical details they are judging you. I suppose this applies for all kinds of jobs, really. There are times when you actually skip the more formal long phone interview part and go straight to arranging an on-site interview (via e-mail if phones aren’t involved at all). Usually that happens if you’re awesome and the school that you’re interviewing at is close to your current location. Generally, if it costs the school some money to bring you to campus it will probably want to talk to you on the phone first.

There are many types of phone interviews. Some schools go straight from a short phone call to, if any, on-site interviews. Some schools will have five different people call you during five different times. Some schools will schedule a conversation between you and a committee over speakerphone. And of course schools will also do different things depending on where you are located, who happens to be organizing the search, how much they like you, how much money they currently have, and so on. In general there really isn’t an industry standard and many times not even a school standard and so it is important to ask the first person you talk to how the process is going to work and obtain a way to contact them. Otherwise you may end up confused and dazed.

Cold Calls

You should always expect a phone interview. That is, once you submitted applications and forms to schools either yourself or via a hiring agency you should expect people to call you at random but reasonable times at the phone number you chose to provide so make sure you have your phone (if it’s a cell phone) with you and check messages often. Sometimes schools will first e-mail you to schedule a phone conversation but a lot of times you’ll get cold called as well. The exception here is if you’re overseas, then e-mail will obviously be the first line of communications.

Anyway, the point here is that you should always be ready for a phone interview, even if it’s a short one that will set the stage to a longer one with several people over speakerphone. Be ready to answer questions and ask questions (both important) about a school at a moment’s notice. As I mentioned before it’s a good idea to know the schools your placement agency forwarded your information to so at the very least when someone calls you and says “this is the dean of faculty at school X” you can recall some vital information about school X. For example, which state it’s in. You do have a little leeway if it’s a cold call but it would be a really bad first impression if you sound like you’ve never heard of the school the caller represents. If that is the case—it happens if, say, your hiring agent forwarded your profile to a school but you have not had the chance to check your e-mail yet so you did not know about it—remain calm, apologize, explain what happened and ask the caller to tell you about their school.

Questions

In general, being calm and admitting when you don’t know something is a good thing as they are rather important skills in teaching. In fact, asking questions is in some sense as important as answering questions. Interviewers can gauge where your priorities are and how much research you’ve done by the questions you ask. Also, asking questions also can help you learn a lot more about a school. Schools all have different “hooks”, terminologies, programs and little things that make them special. Knowing more about those things will help you find out how you can contribute to their program and thus sell yourself appropriately.

At this stage, a lot of interview questions are basically just there to confirm things that you have already put down in various documents. Sometimes there will be some clarifications; as I mentioned before if there are irregularities in your application they will probably get cleared up in a phone call. As for other questions I will just copy and paste the list of questions I listed in a file on my hard drive named PhoneInterviewQuestions:

• What courses are you comfortable teaching?
• What are some things you do to help your struggling students?
• What are your experiences with international students?
• What draws you to our school?
• How much do you know about our school?
• For folks with light teaching backgrounds: why do you think you are a good teacher?
• What are your thoughts on and experiences with technology in the classroom?
• What besides teaching math can you offer to the community?
• How can you contribute to our residential program? How do you feel about living in a dorm?

These questions are a little outdated; I’m pretty sure that I have a better list now. But since that’s totally trade secret I can’t find the newer file this is all I have to offer for now. Of course, this is just a list of the common questions and often times a good interview evolves into a conversation.

You can tell from the questions what the school’s or the interviewer’s priorities are. For example, since I was interviewing folks as a member of the math department my major questions are those about teaching. An interviewee can also tell (if she hasn’t already figured it out form our web site) that we have a sizable number of international students from my questions.

On-Site Interviews

Since writing about phone interviews took up over a thousand words already I’m going to leave it for another post. This thing just keeps getting longer than I expected; I guess that’s a good thing?

Wing :: Mar.25.2010 :: Posts :: 3 Comments »

Continuing from the last post, here’s some tips on when and where to apply for a job at an American independent secondary school. (Clever readers would notice that this was originally part of the last post, but I decided to make this section its own post and add about a thousand words worth of extra details to it.) The questions here are when are where to apply to jobs. Let’s start with when.

Hiring Season

Usually, schools hire early in the spring. When I say spring I mean the spring semester, which translates to January to April. If schools in New England only looked for teachers after the snow has melted we would still be hiring in July. Teachers get their contracts renewed, usually, around January to April each year (the exact dates depend on the school) and so that’s the time when schools will know whether they will have enough teachers for the next year. Job postings trickle out. Don’t worry if you see X Academy posting a bunch of jobs, but none of those are ones you want; there may be more jobs coming out on the X Academy careers page in the next few weeks. If you are a really organized person, all your application materials should be prepared by January and your job search should start at that point. If you’re not, don’t worry; many schools extend their searches into April and May even though they may not want to.

What if you’re somehow desynchronized from the academic schedule and looking for a job in the fall or the summer and kind of need a job right now? Well, first of all, you should have a good reason for why you’re desynchronized from the academic schedule (you did not get fired from a teaching job for sleeping with a student or committing some other felony). Second, don’t despair too much. Schools do hire out of season though it is much, much rarer. Unfortunately illness does not work on the academic schedule and so will strike whenever it feels like, so there are many times when a school needs a temporary replacement for a teacher who is out ill. Also, although schools hate doing this sometimes a teacher has to be fired midyear (for sleeping with a student or committing some other felony). So there are openings, though not too many.

Where and How to Apply?

This is, in some sense, the hardest part and is the question I get asked most often. The short answer is to look into a job placement agency. The most prominent one around here is Carney, Sandoe and Associates, which serves schools nationwide. There’s also Southern Teachers Agency for, you guessed it, Southern schools. I’m pretty sure there are others but I am not aware of them personally; we only use CS&A when looking for teachers.

The way it works is that you sign up for an account, give them all your information and they forward it to all the applicable schools they have, and then they tell you where they sent your information so you can follow up with them or sometimes you just magically get phone calls or e-mails from them requesting an interview. Now, when I say “all your information” I mean “all your information”. Pretty much everything from the last post I listed would be requested and maybe some more I’ve forgotten about. It’s like filling out a huge dating site profile. Except you get matched to jobs instead of potential mates.

Also, there is a human being assigned to each account and they will help guide you through much of the process—this is why whenever someone wants a super-quick version of this blog post I just send them the link to CS&A. Be nice to your representative. They know more about this than you do. They know more about this than I do. In fact, why are you even reading this?

This placement service sounds expensive but it is actually free to job seekers. The schools pay for the service and that is how the agencies make money. Basically, this is a huge time-saver for schools because, say, if I wanted a math teacher who specializes in teaching upper level courses who can also do X and Y and Z I can just tell the placement agency that information and then a stack of profiles of teachers who both fit those qualifications and who expressed interest in working in a boarding school in Vermont magically appear over the Internet or through the mail the next day or so. Also, agencies do recruiting work at job fairs and graduate schools so small schools that don’t have marketing money can still take advantage of those things by paying those agencies a reasonable fee.

Where Else Can I Apply?

Just because you’re working with a placement agency who does most of the legwork for you doesn’t mean you should sit tight and do nothing. There are also job boards all over the Internet. For example, the National Association of Independent Schools has one. You can also go to their list of regional accreditating associations and check each individual association for their regional job boards—I’m not sure if all of them have job boards but I know quite a lot of them do. This is helpful if, say, you only want to look at schools in New England. There are also conferences (such as the NAIS annual conference and regional conferences) where school representatives may conduct interviews or where there are networking opportunities; unfortunately I do not know much about them since I’ve never been to one. I do know, however, that every time we’re hiring my boss would come back with a small stack of resumes from people she met at the conference and she is usually pretty enthusiastic about them because she’s met them face to face, even though it may have been brief..

Speaking of job boards, you can also try non-education-focused job boards such as Monster or whatever is popular in the places that you’re looking at. Not all schools list their jobs on general web sites but a lot do. Internships, especially, tend to get listed on job boards accessible through college career centers. Also, remember that your local Craigslist also contains a job board and independent school jobs do sometimes get posted on them. I do not know the general level of expectation you should get from these general job boards; I do know from experience that people get hired from postings on Craigslist and such. Hiring agencies do not have a monopoly in this world; schools give candidates from other sources attention as well. Even though the general level of Craigslist and Monster candidates may be lower (read: quite a few of them use Comic Sans MS on their resumes) because they were not sorted out for schools, good—especially local—candidates surface from them. Also, remember that schools do not need to pay finders’ fees if they hire non-hiring-agency candidates. Although this is not really a deciding factor since the finders’ fees are insignificant in comparison to the cost of hiring a bad teacher it does encourage schools to look at other sources.

In short: you can use those fancy (or not, in the case of Craigslist) career sites advertised to you on public transportation but don’t expect too many independent school jobs on them.

Less Generally…

The thing about the Internet is that it’s made stalking organizations really easy. Stalking, I suppose, sounds pretty bad. Think of it as lying in wait for the hunt or something. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that school web sites are your friends. If you have an idea of what kinds of schools you want to teach at and/or where you want to teach use Google to find them. Pretend that you’re sending an imaginary (or maybe real, since faculty usually get tuition discounts for their kids) child to an independent school and go wild on the search. Schools usually have teams of specialists who make them easy to find. They’re called the admissions office. If they do their job well their school should be easy to find given the qualities you want. If they don’t do their job well, um, do you really want to work there?

Once you have a list of schools, bookmark them (or do whatever Web 2.0 thing you kids do nowadays to save a pile of links) and check their “jobs” or “careers” pages often. Take the initiative if you’re really interested in the job. More importantly, read up on their schools. Even if you’re not immediately applying for a job or perhaps not even applying for a job until the next year it is good to do some research on schools that you’d like to apply to beforehand and perhaps stalk their web sites for job openings. Send the list of schools you’re interested at to your rep at the hiring agency you’re working with and ask them for advice or to hook you up to those schools they represent.

The Interview(s)

Now, what happens when you get called up for a phone interview? Or even better, an on site interview? Well, that’s a whole story to itself and I will talk about that later.

Wing :: Mar.20.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Every spring a few people would ask me this question: how do I get a teaching job at an independent/private school? It’s a good question and my answer went from a quick “do this and that” to an hour-long conversation, depending on how much time I had or how well I knew the asker. Now that I’ve done both job searching and hiring I though I’d write down the long version; hopefully it helps!

Note: I’m writing about applying to American independent secondary school jobs as an American resident or citizen. I have no experience with applying to foreign schools or hiring foreign teachers. This may be useful for foreign schools, nations or middle schools but I’m just not familiar with those areas enough to say anything about them confidently. Also, keep in mind that I work at a progressive, outdoors-focused, casual, not-very-preppy school and although I’m trying to be as comprehensive as possible I may still be unintentionally biased. When in doubt, wear an extra tie.

The Bare Minimum

I’m assuming that you have not worked at an independent school before so here are some basics.

In order to work at an independent school you usually “only” need a bachelors degree. And, by federal law, to clear a background check. The degree is sometimes negotiable if you’re switching careers from something relevant to what you’re teaching or doing something heavily experience-based like teaching art or music. The degree doesn’t need to be in or related to the specific field you’re teaching but if isn’t be prepared to explain why you’re qualified to teach the subject you want to teach.

There is no certification process in almost all independent schools—some schools are accredited by the state they are located in and do need to hire state-certified teachers but most do not and hire on a national basis. US citizenship is also not required to teach in an American private school; I won’t go into that much more because I’m not familiar with how it works.

Boarding or Day?

Independent schools come in two flavors: boarding schools and day schools. Boarding schools usually also have some day students. For new teachers, especially, they are completely different things. Generally a boarding school requires much more time commitment than a day school per day but also has much longer vacations. Currently I work in a boarding school and I work 50 to 70 hour weeks, depending on the week, but I also have a few more weeks of vacation than folks who work at day schools. Still expect to work over 40 hours a week in a day school, though. Also, expect to be salaried either way.

The major difference between boarding and day schools is that boarding schools will usually ask new faculty (especially young faculty) to live in dormitories for a few years. The plus side is that you get “free” housing. The minus side is that you work longer hours in that you need to supervise the dormitories on some nights. The amount of “dorm duty” you have depends on the school. Richer schools hire people specifically for the job so faculty actually do not need to supervise the dorm they live in, although they are expected to interact with boarding students as community members; this is not the norm. Boarding schools will usually also ask their faculty to do more extracurricular work than day schools.

Working at a boarding school is a way of life, while working at a day school is more of a “normal” career. If you want to consider working in a boarding school and you have a family it’s a major family decision. It works out well for lots of people, but sometimes it doesn’t work and can cause a lot of stress on relationships and marriages. I can’t really say more since I don’t have children, but from experience a boarding school is a pretty good place to raise children.

What Are My Chances?

Let’s not talk about the economy. That makes me sad. Let’s talk about what things would increase your chances at getting a job at an independent school.

First of all, being able to coach a sport is a huge asset in this world. When I say “coach” I do not mean the type of coaching you see in professional or college teams. I mean the type of coaching you see a parent do with their children or a teenage volunteer may do with troubled children at the local YMCA. If you can play a sport, have played it extensively and know most of the rules for it then, congratulations, you qualify as a coach. I’ve seen people coach with less. Of course, if you have actual coaching experience and somehow do not want to make that your primary career that is even better.

In general, it is very easy to train someone who has experience playing a sport to coach the sport. In fact it is not hard to train someone who is good at athletics in general to be a coach for a sport that she has never played but is interested in. It is also very expensive to hire real, experienced, dedicated coaches and so many schools that are not sports-oriented will try to avoid doing that if they can find someone who kind of is okay at it from their faculty pools. Schools that hire dedicated coaches may only do that for their varsity teams, but they still need coaches for their JV and club sports so being able to “coach” is an asset everywhere.

What if you’re not a sports-oriented person? Then there are two options: make the schools want you for your other skills or apply for jobs at schools where sports skills are irrelevant. Schools that offer a wide range of extracurriculars or non-academic programs (yearbook and drama are the two big ones that every single school has) need people to supervise or teach those activities. And just like sports coaching you don’t necessarily have to be a master at it to teach it to teenagers who have no experience doing it. Any skill you have can be useful to a school. For example, sewing skills can translate to costuming a school play.

You also need to be creative and apply your strengths with matching schools. If you’re like me and is completely useless in mountaineering you should not apply to a school with a strong outdoors theme in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. But if you, say, have hiked the Appalachian Trail that would be a strong selling point to that same Rocky Mountain school. A school that has a nearly non-existent arts program will probably not care about your Photoshop and desktop publishing background but a school that is strong in the arts but lacking a digital arts program may want you for that in addition to your ability to teach biology. Always look through the offerings and programs of a school you’re interested in and tailor your presentation to them.

Having a masters in either education or in a field relevant to your subject helps quite a bit. I can’t say the same for a doctorate; it does help in some situations but there is also a bit of over-qualification there. In general folks with doctorates get paid more to reflect their education, but it may or may not be the case that the extra money is worth it in the secondary school setting. For example, a doctor of chemistry who spent six years in a lab and not teaching isn’t very useful compared to a college grad who had four years of teaching experience.

Prior Teaching Experience

Oh. Right. The teaching. Let’s talk about that. The truth is that now it is very hard to get a teaching job at an independent school with no prior teaching experience. Training a brand new teacher and giving her proper support is rather hard and costly and schools are sometimes afraid that new, young teachers would leave in a couple years rendering their initial investment useless. You also probably do not want to work in a place that is willing to hire you without providing the support you need.

There are internship programs in many schools where young people with no teaching experience get to learn the craft in exchange for doing a huge amount of work for a third of the salary of a regular faculty member. Usually this means teaching a very reduced load while coaching two sports or so; hence it is really hard to get these internships if you cannot coach. If you can, though, and are willing to work pretty hard for low pay for a year they are good ways of gaining experience. Expect the competition for these internship programs to be fierce, though, since lots of schools are scaling back on them for economic reasons.

Teaching experience can also be found during the summer at summer programs and schools or during the year aboard as ESL teachers, for example. Speaking of summer schools, if a school you’re interested in has a summer program one way of getting a connection to that school and perhaps getting a year-round job there is to apply to teach at the summer school. Usually almost all of the faculty would not want to teach during the summer so it is slightly easier to get in.

Preparing the Portfolio

In addition to the standard cover letter and resume, applying to teach at an independent school usually entails sending in more documents. Here’s a somewhat exhaustive list.

• CV (curriculum vitae)
• college transcript
• list of references / letters of recommendation
• high school transcript
• SAT scores (for recent graduates)
• statement of teaching philosophy
• portfolio/writing samples (for art, English, etc. positions)

Not every place will require everything, but it is good to have most of these things handy. Let’s go through them and talk about them a bit.

Every school will require a resume, a CV or both. While not every school will want a full CV filled with every single teaching job and publication (if any) you had some will and it is good to have one handy. Remember how your college career counselor said you shouldn’t put your high school clubs on your resume? That’s actually not the best advice here. As I said before activities and sports from high school and college are things independent schools want to see, especially if you’re a recent graduate. For the older folks things like “coaching my child’s little league team” could also be advantages here. If your resume is too crowded it may be a good idea to mention these things in your cover letter instead. Be creative. Play to your strengths. Tailor your resume/CV to the schools you’re applying to. For a less sports-oriented school, for example, you may want to deemphasize your football exploits and emphasize your photography hobby.

Many schools and job placement agencies will want a college transcript. This is especially true for recent graduates without much teaching experience. They are not necessarily looking for straight As; someone with straight As and a physics degree would more likely be in many other settings besides teaching high school science. However schools do look at inconsistencies and “black marks” in relevant courses. If all your grades are all Cs and Ds in the subject you’re applying to teach, expect to address this at some point during your interview. Assuming you get one, that is.

Some schools will even want a high school transcript or your SAT scores. I haven’t really encountered one but when I was looking for a job I had them available since the job placement agency I worked with requested them. Personally, I really do not want to work at a school that rejects applicants based on SAT scores since they’d probably do similar things to their students. However, if you had a 1600 (I’m assuming that I’m not that old and nobody who can get a 2400 on the SATs is looking for a job yet) or something like that it wouldn’t hurt.

For many schools a statement of teaching philosophy is a standard part of the application. Sometimes it is lumped in with the cover letter and should be customized for each school. Sometimes a school will not ask for one but do expect to be asked questions like “what are your thoughts on teaching in general” during phone and in-person interviews; it helps to have it already written down and rehearsed as I definitely lost an interview when I stuttered on this question. Unfortunately I’m really bad at writing these statements so I can offer no advice. I can however offer an observation someone once brought to my attention: it is strange that we (as in those who hire people) pay more attention to the teaching statements of those who actually haven’t taught nearly enough to form one.

Where/When to Apply? What About the Interview?

This post already has over two thousand words so I’ll leave these two parts for the next few blog posts. Stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3!

Wing :: Mar.16.2010 :: Posts :: 6 Comments »

Lately I’ve been reading some blog posts about having a lifestyle and budget suitable for traveling. I don’t really see much of the advice as applicable because when I look at my job and my life situation I realize that, wow, my entire life is perfect for someone who wants to travel aboard for a few weeks or even over a month every so often. But I don’t like to travel overseas (something that I will address maybe later) so I’m pretty much completely wasting this opportunity. But you, you can learn from this. So here is my first ever travel-related blog post on why working at an independent boarding school could be a really good idea if you are a (or want to be a) teacher and a traveler.

If you’re familiar with boarding schools (and the secondary level, mostly) in the US you would know that our school vacations are long. Usually there are at least two to three weeks for Christmas/New Years and some two or even three week breaks in addition to the longer-than-public-school summer breaks. The main reason why boarding schools have fewer, longer breaks is logistical: every time students leave school is a logistical (and sometimes financial) nightmare for the school and the families. This is especially true for international students, of which we have many. While it’s the vacations aren’t during flexible times it’s nice to be able to take two or more weeks off at a time so if you do spend a week or two traveling you still have some time to take care of other things.

The independent school hiring season occurs between January and April, so if you want to take a long period of time (6 to 8 months) off to travel but stay in the industry it is in fact possible to leave a job in June and come back to the US in January or so to apply for new jobs and attend interviews. One of my colleagues did that at least twice, though the economy was better when she did this so she got a new job every time pretty easily. With the focus on globalization and diversity experience traveling aboard also looks pretty good on a resume or during an interview.

Then there’s the possibility of free travel in exchange of taking some students with you. Not every school do this but the place I work at offer trips (and financial aid for those trips) during Spring Break to various places around the world. Some of my colleagues are spending two weeks with about a dozen students in Peru right now studying ancient ruins and native wildlife. In past years my colleagues have done trips biking across Holland and building schools in Africa. Traveling with a half-dozen teenagers isn’t exactly easy but it is an all-expense-paid travel experience where you get to share your passions with eager minds.

Let’s leave the big picture and go back to my life. Currently, I’m not paying rent since I am required to live in a dormitory (and work some nights supervising it) as part of my job. I have the same housing available to me during breaks and the summer so I effectively have storage for all my stuff that’s paid for if I travel. (Another way of looking at it is that I’m not losing cash if I don’t live in my apartment.) This is a major advantage of working at a boarding school as opposed to a day school or a public school. If I choose to I can eat all of my meals at the campus dining hall and completely eliminate my grocery bills. Essentially it is possible for me to live with zero expenses most of the time—our dining hall does close, for example, during most breaks.

Being in Vermont also helps in that it costs very little to maintain my car. Insurance rates here are wonderfully low (I keep seeing ads saying “save $200 on your auto insurance” online and I keep thinking “how is that possible since I don’t even pay $200 for my auto insurance!”) and, if you are smarter than I am, you can find a good mechanic that charges a fair rate. This doesn’t quite apply to everyone and, unfortunately, most boarding schools are at places where you do want a car. Parking is definitely not a problem though if you live on campus and park there, though I tend to leave my car at my parents’ (who live closer to a major airport anyway) when I do go away for a while.

Basically, I am living a life where I can save a lot of money if I wanted to (enough to go around the world every year, according to this blog) and have long stretches of time to spend that money traveling should I choose to do that. I don’t, but many of my colleagues (who, unlike me, are not single and do have pets) do and they are spending their spring breaks in Europe, Cancun, Mexico and other places that I have no desire to go to. There isn’t much flexibility in vacation days when you are teaching (or working in a non-teaching position that has similar vacation time), but the upside is that there is both financial stability and large amounts of time and resources available for traveling that a “normal” job doesn’t allow.

Wing :: Mar.10.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »