Teacher Resumes: Creating a Distinctive Teaching Resume

There are perhaps few careers more challenging, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding than that of education, particularly at the pre-school, elementary, middle school, and high school levels.  Charged with the intellectual and emotional development of children and adolescents, educators are often required to balance competing interests, such as modifying inappropriate behaviors while simultaneously maintaining students’ levels of self-esteem.  Most daunting, it frequently falls to the teacher to cultivate the individual student’s aptitude for reasoning problems through to successful conclusions.  Therefore, distinctive teaching resumes must convey all of this data and more – professionally, somewhat succinctly, and most importantly, uniquely.

Every instructor approaches education from his or her own point of view, or individual teaching philosophy.  Consciously or unconsciously, every educator applies this philosophy in developing and implementing lesson plans and promoting the development of student critical thinking skills.  When crafting teacher resumes, then, educators would do well to consider how their individualized approaches impacted their teaching strategies and the implementation thereof.  Once considered, their resumes can be written to reflect those strategies and their effectiveness in promoting student development.

For instance, most elementary and early childhood educators integrate manipulatives into their lesson plans.  Many school districts lack the type of budgets that would allow teachers to select and incorporate all of the resources they truly desire into the classroom.  Therefore, on teaching resumes, educators will wish to state which of those resources they themselves have created, as well as how they utilized those resources and their impact on student learning.  If their student populations included learners with Special Needs, educators will also wish to discuss, on their teaching resumes, how they modified lesson plans in order to ensure that these children received something of value, either in terms of understanding and applying new concepts or material, or reinforcing prior knowledge.

Finally, school administrators are very much concerned that job candidates for teaching positions can maintain order in the classroom, using calm and professional tactics.  This trait is vital, as disruptions during class time prevent every child, even the well-behaved ones, from learning.  So, when preparing teacher resumes, educators should speak to the issue of discipline.  They can, if applicable, articulate specific, incentive-based or other programs that they assisted in initiating or perhaps even conceived.

Among other distinctions, if an educator were able to negotiate the “buy in” of parents and/or fellow faculty members for a particular initiative, such a coup, that may have impacted the entire grade level positively, should also be highlighted to create a teaching resume that substantively distinguishes the individual teacher/job candidate from his or her competition.