How to get a teaching position

The best way to find a job is to contact principals directly.

How to contact principals

You have four choices for contacting principals

1. Meet through a mutual friend (like a fellow teacher)
2. Cold-call them on the telephone
3. Send them mail
4. Send in your resume to the their school districts personel department and hope someone draws your resume to their attention

My experiences with each method

Frankly, I didn't have any mutual friends and I didn't have the guts to call them on the phone. In Canada, I found sending in a school district application to be useless - no one ever looked up the records. If you do go the generic application route, be sure to check the school district postings weekly - you often have to reapply or activate your file for every posting that arises or you won't be considered. For me, sending principals direct mail was by far the best method - I managed to find myself a job every year despite massive widespread layoffs and having indifferent teaching reports. Although I applied at all the local school districts and wrote custom resumes for every newspaper ad, four out of the five jobs I found were from mailouts alone.