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Teaching is a valuable skill to have and it doesn’t just have to be relevant in the classroom. As a trained teacher, you have lots of options when considering a career change. There are specific, unique skills you learn as a teacher that will be very desirable and will stand you in good stead within the private job market.

If you can control a class full of rowdy, screaming children, you are going to be able to control and manage people in the workplace, most of whom might even actually want to be there! People will really value the disciplinary skills you have learnt and will be glad to take you on in a management role.

Other organisation will recognise your ability to teach and will be glad to have you in their training or education departments. You could end up working in fields like staff training, or perhaps in an outreach programme.

Teachers have one of the busiest and most challenging jobs around. Who else can say they have to manage groups of 30 people and make sure they achieve great results, without them even necessarily wanting to be there? You will be incredibly busy as a teacher so you need to manage your workload well.

Luckily, there are lots of steps you can take to make your workload more manageable. Make sure you are incredibly organised and know your priorities. Every day, reorganise your priorities and make sure everything will be done well.

You will also need to rely on other people and use their expertise as well as you can. Ask your department leader and the senior members of staff in your school for support whenever you need it.

Look for new ways to do things. If you find marking takes too long, look for new processes. You could get your pupils to help out.

Being a teacher is one of the most difficult yet most rewarding jobs to have. You constantly have to learn and adapt your approach, making it a demanding environment to be in. This means you will constantly be gaining new skills though, which is a great thing for moving into a new role or event from moving away from the teaching profession in future.

You will have to keep up to date with the syllabus and the courses you are teaching, for starters. This is interesting, as you will be interested in your subject and involved in the subject matter. Read around your subject in your spare time to improve your knowledge and make yourself a better teacher.

You will also learn extremely valuable life skills and pastoral skills, like behaviour management and relationship management. You need to assert your authority with your pupils and gain respect, whilst getting on with and learning from your colleagues.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that learning stops once we leave school. We may learn some new things from our employers but in general, we think that the majority of our learning has finished. This isn’t true as there are always new things that we can learn. You may be surprised to think that many of these things can actually be learned on our own without the help or support of others.

Much of the desire to learn comes from us and will be shaped by our need to find out new things. We can do this every day on our own at work. We can find out new things from the people around us and from the internet, reading around our jobs to find out more about the topics that interest us. As well as finding out new things to satisfy our own curiosity, this will also help us to progress in a job.

The IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) has recently come out with a report that examined how the “wage premium” experienced by graduates changed from the generation graduating in the 80’s and those graduating from the 90’s. Despite a more than doubling of the number of graduates seen in the 90’s, the wage premium continued to retain its value in its wider social context.

This may come as a surprise to many, as it seems to defy common sense. However, what it appears to indicate is that, although the supply of graduates has increased explosively, the demand for them has more than kept apace. (more…)

The have been a lot of moves in Canada, the USA, and the UK within recent governments to privatise education systems, and while many teachers have been known to be very negative towards these changes, the pros and cons of such a move are far from being clear cut. Often times these changes are generally a mixed bag, which often seems to lead to improvements in average results, higher levels of teacher accountability, more community involvement and greater school choice for parents. Clearly, all of this is very attractive to parents but on the flip side, they will also have to contend with higher levels of corruption, a greater spread of investment into education; usually meaning better results for the wealthy and worse for the poor and unengaged. (more…)

A tendency that is growing in prevalence among universities from around the world is the general trend of investing in facilities above improvements to educational standards. It is important that we understand this issue for a number of reasons, but primarily because it is closely related to the increasing cost of university education.

Getting a degree from anywhere in the western world can cost you a significant amount of money, and this has resulted in significant indebtedness for a large number of newly minted graduates. If we can lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of university officials spending their budget on pointless vanity projects rather than on improving the standard of education being provided students so that they are adequately prepared for adult life, then that can only be a good thing. (more…)

A study was recently conducted by MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, into the effects devices like Ipads and Laptops and access to the internet, have on the results students get in the classroom, which shows the general trend of worse results among students who use them in the classroom.

In the study, 726 undergraduates were split into three different groups randomly; one acting as the control with no access to devices, another one where they were allowed unrestricted access to them, and finally one where there was restricted access. The study took place in the West Point naval academy in the USA, where student ranking is determined mostly by exam results and competition is purposely kept at a very high level, so people were very motivated to succeed and ignore distractions. (more…)

Teaching in high school is a demanding job, and depending on what subject you’re teaching, it could be even more so. Subjects aren’t necessarily equal in terms of the demands for marking students’ work, teacher pay, difficulty, or importance. (more…)

There are several reasons why some people choose to become teachers. Several were raised by educators for parents and were inspired to pursue a similar path, several were inspired by a favourite teacher in their younger years, while others still have found within them the passion to form the intellects of the future generations. All of these are respectable reasons for getting into the profession, and the plenty of rewards that go along with working in the education discipline are enough reason for deciding to be a teacher.

Yet, you do not have to be a full-time teacher to enjoy its rewards. By accepting part-time teaching jobs Toronto, you’ll have the chance to assist youngsters achieve their fullest potential while having enough time to deal with your private or family life. If you’re an educator who is also a parent, a part-time schedule is best for you since it enables you to spend time with your own kids and husband or wife. A part-time teaching post probably won’t give you the same paycheck or benefits as a full-time position, yet having quality time with your family is a perk that makes it all rewarding. Those who manage to obtain part-time jobs or become teaching assistants at the school their kid goes to are even luckier because they have the luxury of easily checking on their children when their schedule makes way. (more…)