Episode 1: New Career Pathways for Teachers
Welcome to the very first episode of Educator Forever! To kick things off, I want to share my story of why I left the classroom after discovering all of the new and exciting career pathways for teachers.
My story begins in a way that’s probably very familiar to you. I had been teaching for several years and I was burnt out. The realization hit me that my salary wasn’t increasing, and yet I didn’t have the time or energy to get another job. I didn’t want to become an administrator, so what other options were there? Well, it turns out that there were (and still are) many.
I learned that there were actually countless other career pathways for teachers that allowed me to use my existing skills and still make an impact on the world of education. Better yet, I felt empowered and invigorated in these roles. My skills were valued, and I gained time and financial freedom that I had never experienced before.
These new career pathways are available to you as well. There is a huge need for your skills. Did you know that there are people creating education products who literally have zero classroom experience? They need you! Inside this episode you’ll hear some of the many ways that you too can work flexibly in education to expand your impact and your income.
Topics Discussed:
Why traditional career pathways for teachers are outdated, and why we need to create new ones
A reminder that you have so many skills as a teacher, and you can continue to learn new ones
The story of how Educator Forever began, and how it has evolved over time
Specific examples of new career pathways for teachers
What you can expect from the Educator Forever podcast in future episodes
Resources mentioned:
Take our FREE quiz to nail down your next best career step in education.
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Related episodes and blog posts:
Read the transcript for this episode:
Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.
Welcome to the very first episode of educator forever, I'm so glad you're here. To start us off, I wanted to share my story of how I came to start Educator Forever. Through today's episode, you'll learn why traditional career pathways for teachers are outdated, and why we need to create new ones. You'll also get an overview of some of the many ways you can work flexibly in education to expand your impact and your income.
So let's go back in time, when I was teaching kindergarten and first grade, let's say around 2010, I started feeling pretty burnt out. And I started feeling like I needed some extra money. And I did not have any extra time or energy. I know all you teachers relate. And so I started really looking for things I could do flexibly outside of the classroom. And I kind of fell into curriculum development.
I had been teaching my first graders about novel writing, we were actually doing the National Novel Writing Month challenge for adults, this is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. For kids that we did not do that. But I decided to do it with my first graders because they were super into writing chapter books. So through that process, the folks who ran National Novel Writing Month, which is a nonprofit, based in Oakland, they got word that I was doing this with my students, and they decided to come into my classroom.
And it became this lovely collaboration that they would bring in local authors, we would show them how amazing first graders are with writing. They got my students' readings and local bookstores. And it was just this lovely relationship. I thought it would end at the end of November, I would close the door, and then hopefully see them again the next November, which is kind of how it happened.
But then the following spring, they called me up. And they were like, hey, you know those lessons that you did with first graders? Could we pay you to write those up to share them with teachers all over the world? And this was like a major lightbulb moment for me. Just like what you would pay me to write up lessons that I know work that my kids loved, that I loved and then hopefully make other teachers' lives easier? Yes, please.
So I said yes, even though this was taking on an extra project on top of my very busy days as a kindergarten and first grade teacher. And I pretty quickly realized I didn't really know what I was doing. I had written lesson plans in my credentialing program, but I had never really written lesson plans that would be used by somebody else. And so I had to learn. And I had to test things out. And I went to my colleagues and asked if I could test out lessons in their classrooms. And I gave them drafts of lesson plans that I had written. And I tried all sorts of lesson planning frameworks. And I learned so much about lesson plan writing. And I also learned that I loved it.
The really surprising thing to me was that even though I was doing this on the side, while a classroom teacher, which you think would be completely exhausting, it wasn't, it really gave me this new fuel and like this new energy source, that my skills can be used in a different way, and that I could be creative and that I could sit in a quiet room really leisurely thinking about the best moves when it comes to creating curriculum. And so I found that even though it was something extra that I was doing on the side, it really was sustaining to me, and it was something I wanted to keep doing.
So once I finished that project, I started actively looking for more projects. And for the rest of my time in the classroom, I left the classroom in 2012. But for those last two years, I was always doing other projects, consulting with ed tech companies, writing curriculum, creating assessments, testing things in my class. And I found that they were all invigorating, you know, really having this way to use my skills so differently, but also related not entirely differently, but also just having my skills be valued.
You know, as classroom teachers, we do so much, and we aren't valued for it. So having the chance to really have my skills valued and being able to use them in a different way and being able to make more money, and being able to make more impact was so inspiring to me, and it continues to be inspiring to me. While I still did those projects on the side for the last couple years that I was in the classroom, it came to be 2012 And I found myself pregnant with my first kiddo. And I started really dreading the idea that I would have to go back to the classroom full time while having a little baby at home.
So my daughter was due in February 2012 and I got off on maternity leave a little bit early, and I had some time to really look up for flexible work in education. And I found this posting from teaching channel, which at that point was a nonprofit focused on teaching teachers all over the world through video. They made videos of teachers all over focused on common core math, or social and emotional learning, or whatever grant funded project they had. And they were looking for an education consultant to help them with these projects.
I had never done anything like this before. And I had actually never even heard of Teaching Channel before. But I was super intrigued. So I was nine months pregnant, on maternity leave before my daughter was born, I wrote them a letter, a cover letter that was very from my heart. And I said, Hey, I love what you're doing. I'm a classroom teacher. I've been teaching for seven years, I would love to help with this. But I'm nine months pregnant. I can't go full time in the office. But I would love to do anything flexible that might come up.
I thought that I would never hear back. But I was just putting everything out there I possibly could. And I did hear back. Two weeks after my daughter was born, they called me into the office and they're like, hey, we'd love to have an interview. So I came in, my husband rolled my tiny baby daughter in downtown San Francisco in the stroller, and I went in for an interview.
And it turned out to be my first large contract job. I was offered a contract for 20 hours a week. It could be done flexibly from home, I was really weighing in with my education expertise on these videos saying yeah, teachers would love to see this or yes, ask teachers this question, or don't show this part. This is not best practice.
So really thinking about how we can create the best videos that would be most helpful for teachers. This contract job totally took over my teaching salary that I was expecting to make. So with that, I felt confident not going back to the classroom. I called my school, I regretfully informed them that I was not able to continue on in the following year, I was planning on going back to the following school year. And I went full force into this world of flexible education work.
And in addition to that teaching channel role, which involved a lot of watching videos that involve writing blogs, and I did some social media posts, and I learned about this like Ed Tech landscape, I really started to do anything possible I could find that was flexible that I could do with a baby at home. And that was in education. And I tried it all that first year because I was so committed to making this work.
I wanted this chance to stay at home with my daughter, and I wanted to and needed to continue to work. So I wanted to be able to find a way that felt meaningful to me. So I did all the things. I did instructional coaching, both in person and online. I coached new teachers and I coached some teachers at my old school I used to teach at, I did some more curriculum writing like I had done with National Novel Writing Month that worked with edtech companies, work with nonprofits, and took on curriculum projects.
I did consulting, like I did with teaching channel, I then went on to do some consulting with Edutopia, and various other edtech companies. And I tried all the things. I really found that my favorite was curriculum writing, because that really honed in on all the things I loved about teaching, creating learning experiences that really got kids engaged, that really made teachers’ lives hopefully a little bit easier, because they had amazing curriculum to start with.
So after I worked with the Teaching Channel, I went on to work@education.com as a learning design manager, and really dove all the way in to curriculum development. I worked with an amazing team of teachers to create lesson plans and worksheets and assessments and games and all sorts of things. And I learned throughout the process, I didn't know how to do all these things until I did them.
And so many of the things that we explore outside of the classroom, teachers have those skills, but we also need to learn new ones. But as teachers, we are experts in learning. So the best way to learn is by taking action and figuring things out.
I often give the example of when I started creating leveled readers, people think, Oh, how do you create a Leveled Reader? I didn't know either. But when I first started doing so I got training. And I learned how to use Lexile analyzer and got vocabulary lists and use my experience as a kindergarten teacher to inform the readers that I created. But you don't have to do it alone.
And when we think about applying for flexible work beyond the classroom, sometimes we talk ourselves out of things because we're like, oh, we don't know 100% How to do this. That's okay. You learn by doing it. So back to my story. So I worked at Education.com for about five years also doing other projects, consulting, coaching, curriculum, writing and really found that this flexibility is what I craved.
I had another kiddo, my son was born in 2015. And I was still able to stay at home with him. And I was able to work while my kids napped or while they were asleep, or sometimes their grandparents watched them, or my husband watched them, and I could work then. But that flexibility was amazing, and is amazing.
So around 2016, 2017, or so, I had all these teacher friends coming to me and saying, What are you doing? How are you finding this work? What is out there? What can I do? Because these career pathways that were shown are so limiting.
I know for me, I thought as a teacher, I could be a lifetime classroom teacher, I could become an administrator, which I did not want to do. Or I can leave education entirely, which is also not something I wanted to do. So I found all these teacher friends coming to me being like, yeah, what can I do, and I was showing them, there were so many things you can do outside of the classroom, there was such a need for your skills, there are people creating education products and services, who do not have classroom experience, or recent classroom experience. And they need you. They need you!
And so through having coffee with all these teacher friends talking about my journey, and all the things they could do, I found myself having the same conversations. And I found myself talking to teachers who are expressing the same frustrations. That they felt limited in their careers, that they felt burnt out, that they weren't able to make ends meet.
But they didn't know if they could keep doing this forever. And so out of those conversations educator forever was born, I created our very first program, the Beyond the Classroom course, to really pour in everything I had learned about working flexibly in education. And we've had 1000s of students go through that program. And it's amazing to see them find their way working flexibly in education and really expanding their impact.
Because I believe that when teachers are able to try flexible work and create their own career pathways, we can change the world of education, that teachers are told that we should stay in the classroom forever, we have such guilt I know I did, leaving the classroom, but really, to draw in new teachers and create a healthy teacher pipeline, we need to show how amazing being a teacher can be, how much we learn from being a teacher and how that can help us go forward in our careers.
We don't need to be classroom teachers forever if we don't want to.If you want to, amazing, fantastic. We want to create things to support you in the classroom. But if you're feeling burnt out and like you still want to stay in education, I encourage you to think about how you can really expand your impact, and also change the landscape of education.
We as teachers are best positioned to reimagine teaching and learning. And through finding flexible work, we really can do just that. So through Educator Forever now we run beyond the classroom, we also have a program called the Curriculum Development Foundations program where we teach the foundations of curriculum development, my very favorite thing.
And we have the Grow Your Education Business Accelerator, where we help teachers to really start businesses beyond the classroom and grow businesses beyond the classroom, learning those fundamentals of business and marketing, but with an education slant. And we also have the Educator Forever Agency, because in my heart, as I said, I am a curriculum developer, I love to create learning experiences for kids to get them excited about learning. I love to think about how subjects are connected and really think about real world project based integrated learning.
And so we have the Educator Forever Agency, where we take on large scale curriculum projects for edtech companies, nonprofits, school districts, and more. And I still get to create some curriculum and really oversee many amazing curriculum developers to create curriculum, and get that curriculum into schools and really make a difference there.
Through Educator Forever, people often come to me and talk about being former teachers, and I'm doing air quotes here. But I really named Educator Forever, Educator Forever, because I believe that when you're a teacher, you're always going to be a teacher. It's in your bones, it is your identity.
And even if you're going outside of the classroom to try something else, you're still an educator forever. That experience that you gained no matter how many things were frustrating about it. It's valuable, and you've learned so much from your time being a teacher. So really being able to take that experience and move beyond the classroom can be so empowering.
Thinking about #formerteacher, which I know is all around social media. You know, I think it's okay. If you want to try something that's not education related. That's okay. But again, I think you're not a former teacher, I think you're always a teacher. I think you take your skills with you as you go on. And we really focus on career pathways within education.
Because you know, there's a lot of things that need to change, and teachers are best positioned to make those changes. So here, at Educator Forever, we really focus on creating change in education, and having teachers be the leaders of that change. So through this podcast, you'll hear me talk to many different people innovating education, trying new things beyond the classroom.
At the core of this is really teacher empowerment, respecting teachers, and really creating career pathways where teachers can thrive. Because it's been too long thinking about teachers as martyrs, who are always self sacrificing. We don't need that. Nobody needs that that's not a good model for kids. That's not a good way for us to live.
So we want to really reimagine what it can look like to be an educator forever, how to really prioritize what you're passionate about, what you need, and how to make a positive difference in the world. So I hope hearing a little bit about my story gives you a sense of where I'm coming from, why I've created Educator Forever and why I've created this podcast.
If nothing else, I want you to know that you have options. There are so many things that you can do beyond the classroom that can make a big difference and can be much more sustaining for you. If you ever feel stuck in your career as an educator, know that there are so many ways to use your valuable skills from curriculum design to education, consulting, instructional coaching, to starting your own business. You have valuable skills and can create a career pathway that works for you.
Want to figure out your next step as an educator? Watch our free on demand workshop and embrace a career pathway that works for you. Go to educator forever.com/workshop. You'll get introduced to the many options for flexible rewarding work beyond the classroom and make a plan for landing jobs.