Signs Of A Bad School

Tesall.com pointed out a new article entitled Consider Your Teaching Job Carefully: Bad English Language Schools Can Happen To Good Teachers at Transitions Abroad; information like this is long overdue in the EFL world. Read on for my impressions of what’s spot on and what’s not from this article, and find out what you can do if your school treats you badly.

What’s spot on:

• “[ELT job] sites are businesses first and foremost”: they list jobs which have paid for ad space. Don’t assume a site’s posted jobs have been checked out or are endorsed by the site.
• I might take issue with this though:
  “Nothing they [ELT job sites] do can reasonably be considered to be in the best interest of teachers.” As above, know that these sites do not exist to investigate quality opportunities for teachers…but I’d say they are in fact quite good resources: they provide a wide variety of jobs, so teachers can do their own research (compare advertised salaries and conditions, etc.) before departure. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend finding a job online, I wouldn’t necessarily advise against it across the board either…and I would most certainly recommend visiting online job boards. I can’t imagine that the situation would be improved if teachers were limited to in person queries; I suppose every teacher would feel obligated to use a placement organization in that case.
• “Carefully read all of the job advertisements for several months before you even apply for any openings.” So you aren’t chosing a job in a vaccuum – good advice.
• “Read the job advertisements several times with a critical eye. Ask yourself if the listed job requirements or benefits could be read in two different ways. Read job advertisements defensively!” Get the TEFL Logue’s insight here too.