Almost a year ago, I found myself heading back to the school where my international teaching career began in Cambodia. When I left this school in June 2018, I was leaving a senior leadership post for an ed-tech role at a large IB school in China. At the school in Shanghai, I worked with over 190 adults, and the culture was truly international. My job was a dream, and I collaborated with an amazing team to grow the department to the success it is today. However, the lockdown in March 2022 changed the course I had plotted for myself, and it was at this time that I put my family and my well-being first and decided to leave.
Fast forward to July 2022, and I found myself back in an entry-level position as a homeroom teacher, with a responsibility for ed tech. This was a hard pill for my ego to swallow. However, I was back at the school that I loved, working with established educators in a culture that embraced collaboration at a different level. In the beginning, I thought that I would have a bunch more time, but I underestimated how much work a homeroom teacher does. You see, I had been out of the classroom for 7 years. Although I still taught, it was middle and high school, and then for only 4 hours per week at the most! Now, I was teaching all day, every day with grade 5 students. It was overwhelming, but also hugely rewarding. The relationships I built with those amazing kids were awesome, and I was reminded every single day why I got into teaching back in 2004. I found myself working late nights and weekends again so that I could help my students realize their potential. Having said that, and although time was even more precious now than before, I still needed to push ahead with some side projects outside of my schoolwork.
The first thing I did was to restart the master’s program I paused during the lockdown. Aside from scheduling myself time each day for reading, this was fairly straightforward as deadlines (which I need to stay motivated) are set by the university. My next challenge was to remain connected with the tech circles which I had worked hard to become part of back in China, through the ubiquitous WeChat groups that exist there. I tried to break into the tech circles in Phnom Penh but found that it was too difficult and gave more easily like I would like to admit. I did continue hosting PudPD, as I had done in Shanghai for the previous 4 years, meeting some awesome international educators from across the city. Now, I needed to pursue something tech related, that would keep me on top of current trends, and enter ISTE.
Back in August 2022, I had the chance to apply to become an ISTE evaluator. I thought this was in line with increasing tech presence, so I applied and got accepted for the training phase. Over the next few months, I and a group of other hopeful evaluators met with the fabulous ISTE team to learn how to evaluate portfolios. I learned a lot about grading as well as getting to see the amazing work that educators across the world are doing to empower their students. After 3 months of 430am meetings, and practice grading portfolios, I was accepted as an ISTE evaluator. As such, I could now apply to become an ISTE trainer, which I jumped at!
This process was much more difficult, as we had to train with existing trainers online. I found it quite daunting as well, as I was delivering content that I had not created. It required a lot of visualizing the ISTE criteria and anticipating what questions might come my way. I was also training adults that I had never met, which outside of speaking at conferences, was a new experience for me. I found it difficult to build rapport online, but such is the reality of online work. All of the training I was doing really built up my appreciation for andragogy and a newfound appreciation of the complexities of adult learning.
I always find vacation time a chance to find space to reflect on what I am doing and where I am going, and spring vacation was no exception. During this break, I decided that whilst I was loving teaching with my fifth graders, I needed to work towards getting back to a similar role to the one that I had left in China. In that role, aside from being responsible for technology integration and coordination, I was also involved in the school’s gentle push toward coaching. So, I enrolled in a coaching course, run by the Instructional Coaching Group, which has been a real eye-opener for me and has served to remind me of where I hope the next chapter of my education life will be.
This article was submitted anonymously by an ISC member.
ISC is Back! All Members Get Premium Membership Access in July ’23 + Discount Code Offer
Dear ISC members,
June has been a tough month for ISC. We had to do a major upgrade to our website’s code which brought along with it many bugs to fix! I sincerely apologize for the downtime of our website. It took a long time to fix these things, but now most if not all functions are back working at 100% again. But please contact us here if you notice anything off or not correctly functioning, and we can try our best to get it fixed ASAP.
ISC would like to offer free premium membership access to all members for the time our website was down/not fully functioning – around two weeks. So from 1-14 July 2023, all members can just log in to their ISC account and enjoy unlimited access to all the unique features on our website.
We encourage our members to use this time wisely and submit comments on the international schools they know about because we also have another offer. For every 10 comments you submit, your ISC account will be updated with 1 free month of premium membership! There is no limit to how many free months you can earn, so submit as many comments as your fingers are able to (remember each submitted comments needs to be at least 1-2 complete sentences long…the more details, the better informed our members will be). * Email us here if your account isn’t automatically updated with the free months as we are still making sure this correctly functions as before.
And there is more…
In addition to the free premium membership access for all ISC members, we would like to offer an astounding 50% off coupon code on all premium membership subscriptions. Select the type of subscription you’d like and then enter this coupon code: JU23LY50 on our payment page to receive 50% off of any of the 3 subscription offers. This coupon code will expire on 14 June at 23:59 GMT.
In the meantime, here is an overview of some of the unique ISC features that require premium membership access:
Keyword Search Feature
Let’s say that you want to read some comments related to the topic of “teaching couples“. Simply enter the keyword/s in the Search Bar at the top of our homepage (or at the top of any page of our website) or go directly to the Comments Search page on our website to search your keyword directly there.
School Comparison: School vs. School
On this page we place two schools’ submitted comments side by side so that our members can make an easy comparison. It is a common request to know “which school is better?”, especially if you are considering two job offers at two, sometimes very different, schools.
The School Comparison page does just that. It places two schools “against” each other to see which one comes out on top. We are not aware of another website that does this!
Compare School Salaries
Yes, we have 1000s of comments about the salary details of 100s of international schools on the ISC website. However, we took it further and made a unique page so that our members can compare these school salary details side by side with other schools. If you are considering working in Shanghai, China, you can now easily search for only schools in Shanghai on this page and quickly compare which school has a better salary package for you.
Job Vacancy Page
Our Job Vacancies feature was launched just over three years ago, but its popularity already exceeds all our expectations. With our members submitting these job vacancies, each of their submissions helps another teacher find new and interesting positions at international schools worldwide. Every job vacancy submission helps schools around the globe reach new people who might just be the perfect fit for the position.
So tell your friends to log in (or join if they are not already members of ISC) so that they can enjoy the
• Two weeks of free premium membership from 1-14 July, 2023
• The submitting comments promotion (10 comments = 1 free month of premium membership)
• And the 50% coupon code: JU23LY50
We appreciate our 26000+ members, and we can’t wait to welcome even more!
We are so happy that ISC is back!