Teaching in Beijing
Moved to China alone and taught for three and a half years, building the curriculum where none existed and getting promoted into leading a small team.
Three schools in three and a half years
In January 2016 I moved to Beijing alone and taught elementary school there for about three and a half years. The three schools I worked at ran on completely different levels of structure.
The first was a large public school. I taught grades 1 through 3 in classes of about 40, and there was no curriculum for the foreign teacher — I wrote every lesson and activity myself and worked out the bilingual delivery with the Chinese co-teachers.
The second was an international school running the IB Primary Years Programme. I had my own first-grade homeroom, which suited me better — my own room, my own students, my own systems. About a year in, the school made me first-grade team leader. I ran the weekly planning meetings, kept our curriculum aligned, and managed three other foreign teachers, on top of parent conferences and the day-to-day communication with families.
The third is the one I’d point to first. A businessman there was testing a phonics program, and I got to build it. I designed a systematic phonics curriculum from scratch, wrote the guided readers and materials to go with it, taught it to first and second graders, and tracked their progress across the semester. Their reading measurably improved. I put the materials up on Teachers Pay Teachers, where they still sell.
I built All Language Resources during those last two years and left teaching once it was earning enough to run full-time.
Credentials
- Florida Professional Educator Certificate — Elementary Education (K-6) with Reading Endorsement.
- Massachusetts MTELs — all six passed, including the Sheltered English Immersion endorsement for English learners.
- M.Ed. in progress, through the University of the People.
I keep the certifications current. Teaching isn’t what I’m chasing now; the credential is real, and I’ve kept it up.
