Teach Abroad Blog

Our mission at Teaching Nomad is to help make the process of finding a teaching job in China a little easier. I know from personal experience how daunting it can be when you are looking for a job in another country and how scary the whole process can be. Our goal is to help make the transition easier. We want to help teachers all around the world find great schools to work for. In addition, we personally interview every teacher to make sure that we know what kind of job they want. We never try to push teachers into jobs that aren’t right for them.

Just as we need to get to know teachers before we place them with jobs, we also need to get to know the schools. We make an effort to visit the schools we work with to get to know the staff and see the campus. We want to make sure that teachers will have the best experience possible while teaching in China.

We most recently went to visit one of our international schools in Beijing. This school is located in the Changping district of Beijing, about an hour from the downtown area. The school includes many benefits such as free housing on the school’s campus, paid winter break, health insurance and great pay. The school is great for teachers with international teaching experience and IB experience as they are now accredited as an IB institution. The campus is huge and almost all of the students from grades K-12 live on campus.

The day that we went to visit the school, all of the staff were getting ready to go on an evening outing into downtown Beijing to watch the Chinese acrobatic show. Since the school isn’t exactly in downtown Beijing, it’s really great that the school makes an effort to make different parts of the city more accessible to teachers. The school arranges a lot of outings like this for their teachers from big dinners with local government officials to trips to the Great Wall. From just the short amount of time that we spent at the school, we could tell that the teachers and staff are really a tight knit community. The school has even opened a bar on the campus for the staff to hang out and spend time in. The facilities on campus really are state of art. When we first walked up to the school, one of the first things we noticed was the huge driving range on campus for the student’s to practice their golf skills. We toured the primary school and were amazed by the quality of the art and the performances the students put on and create. After seeing the effects of the educational budget cuts in America, it is refreshing to see schools thriving with enough money to sponsor an abundance of recreational and extracurricular activities for students.

Overall, we thought this school was excellent and that it represents a great potential opportunity for teachers looking to teach abroad. The city of Beijing itself is a great place to live with an endless number of hutongs to visit, Great Wall trails to hike and Peking duck to eat.

Click here to check out just one of the great positions available!

By Sophia Isis, Business Development Specialist

Teaching Nomad is an American owned and operated education Recruitment Company based in Shanghai, China. Our goal and purpose is to help great teachers find great teaching jobs. Year round, we have hundreds of teaching job vacancies. Whether your goal is to be an ESL teacher or teach in an international school, we have a teaching job for you. You can browse jobs online at www.teachingnomad.com/job-search for the latest job openings. Teaching Nomad is here to make teaching in China easier, so please feel free to reach out and contact us with any questions or enquiries!

Largely thanks to the position of English as the world’s second language, here in the UK we can sometimes become a little complacent about learning second languages. After all, if everywhere you go the chances of someone speaking English is fairly high, there is rarely that much of an incentive.

However, by overlooking the need for further language skills, we could be missing out on the potential benefits of language skills. This is especially true of our children, as it has been proved that learning a second language in developing years has many long-term cognitive benefits.

I came to Shanghai, China in 2011 to teach English and since then, there hasn’t been a dull moment. From all of my experiences, my trip to Guilin is one of my favorite experiences. While in this area, I went with some friends to visit Dragon’s Backbone rice terraces. We had a hotel reserved in the Dazhai area of the terraces, so we took a bus to Dazhai from Guilin. On the way up, there was so much rainfall that it caused a mud slide, which caused the road to become completely blocked by all the dirt. It was a little difficult to figure out what was happening since the bus driver only spoke Chinese, but it turned out that we needed to walk over the land side where another bus driver would come and pick us up. When we finally arrived at the terraces, we were completely lost. From the point where the bus dropped off to our hotel, it ended up being about a 2 ½ hour trek up and down the terraces to get there. I guess it was just lucky that two of us were carrying backpacks. Our friend without a backpack had one of the Chinese sherpas take her bag to our hotel for only 40 RMB.