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Teachers can get a short stick sometimes. Summers off. Benefits. Retirement. Some people, especially those in business, like to think that schools need to be run more like a business, even though it's pretty hard to figure out how that would work. However, there is a way for teachers to at least offer the appearance of being the professionals that they are, and it involves a resume. Teachers use a resume to get a job initially, but once they get into the classroom, it's kind of something to forget until there are layoffs or maybe the desire to change professions. Teachers don't wear suits, they don't have recruiters harassing them on Linkedin, and they don't feel the need to have an updated resume so the bosses can decide who's going to run the new account.
Besides all that, school districts are terrible at forcing teachers to appear professional to the outside world. This is partially because districts want every teacher page to be the same and housed within the main school page, and that creates limits. And the school districts change the providers of these systems every few years, with teachers knowing better than to invest in too much time to create a great online presence for themselves, their students, and parents. Teachers who bother to create a page outside of the district will often be reprimanded or monitored rather than promoted as an positive example.
Some school districts have made a push for teachers to have professional profiles on Linkedin, and some have even made the mistake of wanting that profile to be a Facebook page. The problem is that social media is social, and there's really no reason for a teacher who is comfortable in a position to maintain a Linkedin profile, or really to create one in the first place. So they link up with the other teachers, two other friends, and call it a network. And it looks weak because it is.
If schools and teachers want to promote educators as professionals, there is a way. Probably the best solution is to have website that ONLY provides teacher profiles. Not social networks and not an intro to the teaching page. Nothing integrated into some cookie-cutter made-for-schools website solution. An actual webpage, dedicated to one person and his or her resume. This can be done with free online website builders like Wix or Weebly, but you could also hire a capable freelance web designer. It would probably work best if every person started with an individual domain. Yes, it can be a free subdomain, like robertmarzano.wordpress.com. It could also be an owned domain ($12 a year), like mariamontessoriresume.com. If yourname.com is available, gobble it up. That's your resume page. All the business people do it, and it looks professional, especially if you use it to show that you are a professional.
Take a look at a resume by a teacher that is better than most if not all business resumes online. It's a self-contained page within a website that has a whole different template for the business end of things. Lots of visuals and links. Much more than a piece of paper or a photo of the teacher visiting The Globe Theater. There's nothing wrong with fun photos of the teacher dressing up for Spirit Week, posted to Facebook. It's also great to have fun links to education sites for students, but that's for another page. Schools and teachers wanting to look as professional as the businesses that criticize teacher pay and professionalism need only beat those entities at their own game, and it's not as hard as it looks. Or as expensive. Probably a better use of inservice time that all kinds of other programs currently being deployed.
Keep in mind that the teacher who created this resume was doing it with other job opportunites in mind. But that's also kind of the point when people argue that teachers can't do anything other than teach, so your teacher online resume SHOULD show other abilities. Teachers certainly have those skills. A new teacher might not have a lot of outside accomplishments to link to, but you do have to get creative when it comes to populating a resume. Maybe most of the links will be to assignments instead of entire websites. Maybe there are videos of the teacher teaching. Maybe some new content needs to be created. That's part of the process, and an online resume can be updated as often as necessary. The point is to claim the page and get started, not to sit around and wait for a school district to come up with a decent teacher homepage that allows a real resume profile to be added somehow. We've never seen one.