The Best And The Worst Of International Teaching
Love the adventure, develop cultural understanding, extend your teaching skills, but miss your family. This is what new recruits to international teaching are being told by teachers who have been teaching overseas for a number of years.
International school recruitment specialist Teachers International Consulting (TIC) researched a broad group of experienced international teachers recently. The aim was to find out from seasoned teachers the best and the worst of teaching overseas.
Interviews were performed among teachers of 13 different nationalities that had an average of 10 years experience in international teaching. According to 67% of the interviewed teachers, a clearer understanding of many different cultures is the biggest overall impact of international teaching. Sixty percent of the teachers believed that the experience has increased their knowledge and teaching ability significantly compared to what they would have achieved had they stayed in their home country. Everyone said that they perceived the experience as an adventure. As for the downside of teaching jobs overseas, 37% said it was longing for family and friends, 14% said it was the difficulty of initially making new friends in a new location, 8% said language barriers and another 8% said coping with cultural dissimilarity.
All of the interviewees, at one time or another, had moved jobs within the international school arena. Experience-wise with regards to finding and obtaining new teaching jobs, 43% favoured using specialist recruitment organisations, 26% would rely mostly on talking to colleagues at different international schools, while another 26% would use website and press advertising. A small percentage (5%) of the respondents considered applying at recruitment fairs. The best advice for new international teachers, according to the consensus, was to be open minded and consider obtaining a teaching post in Europe or a teaching job in the Middle East. It would also be a big help if they based their final choice on the merit of the school.
The international schools market has seen the significant increase and arrival of new teachers. Based on a research conducted by the ISC, an organisation that studies the improvements in the international schools market, the number of staff in international schools has increased from 90,000 to approximately 230,000 from 2000. The study predicts the increase to persist where at least 320,000 staff would be working in international schools by 2015 and at least 450,000 by 2020. “The majority of these people will come from English-speaking countries as this is the language for learning in international schools,” says Andrew Wigford, director of Teachers International Consulting. Recruiters from majority of the trustworthy and qualified international schools are always on the look-out for teachers who have good experience and come from English-speaking countries. According to him New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom all have a particularly excellent reputation with regards to learning-focused aptitude of the teachers and their pedagogy.
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