You have been teaching students online via platforms. Now you are ready to teach independently. One of the key success factors to be an independent teacher is your thorough understanding of your own strength and assets. In this blog, I will share how to pack your teaching treasure bag – a systematic way for you to do an inventory check, to celebrate your assets and achievements.  This will be a solid foundation to build your success in independent teaching. I will also give some concrete examples so that you can create your own.

Your teaching treasure bag collects the qualification, skills and networks accumulated from your personal background and professional experience. Each element in the bag might look disconnected at times. But the real magic comes when you connect and combine these elements and come up with suitable solutions to serve your target clients.

Your teaching treasure bag shows your expertise and passion. It is one important way to guide your future direction, to build your independent teaching path. Please look at the treasure bag template. We will get to details of the template in the ‘How to pack your teaching treasure bag’ part.

Treasure Bag Template

It takes time to reflect on our achievements and review our strengths. So why do we do that instead of just jumping into the independent teaching trajectory? The reason is doing so helps us understand our value, our passion and helps us discover our best-suited niche.

• Understand your value

When we are working with platforms or companies, we move from class to class, job to job without having the necessary time and space to step back and look at the unique path we have taken. Not having a holistic view of the knowledge, expertise, and network we have built in the past makes us undervalue ourselves and miss the right opportunity in the future.

• Understand your passion

Packing our treasure bag also helps us to uncover our passion and motivation. Why did I choose to work with company A instead of company B, what was really driving my decisions? It is money or my desire to help others communicate, or my love for interacting with children, or my preference not to deal with administrative tasks? Understanding our decision-making mechanism in the past will be valuable in predicting what will motivate us in the future. When we know where our heart is, we will know how to use our heads.

• Discover your best-suited niche

The key to figuring out the best niche is to find where your unique strength and client’s essential needs match. There are three steps: (1) understand your strength (2) understand your client’s essential need (3) match your strength with your client’s need. (Click to read the blog- Build a Successful Online Teaching Career/Business/Path – Figure Out Your Best Niche). So this is the first step to discovering your best-suited niche.

Source of image: https://www.behance.net/gallery/129154179/Hints-From-GradesFixer

Now it is time for us to go through the teaching treasure bag template so you can create your own soon.

The row in the template captures your past experiences:

• Personal background: Where did you grow up? Where have you lived? What is your first language? Where do you live now? Do you have parenting skills that are relevant in an educational environment?
• Education: do you have qualifications in education or the subject area you are teaching? Do you have other educations that will help you in your teaching career, such as psychology, communication, etc?
• Job: Have you worked with brick-and-mortar schools? What other online platforms you have worked with? What is your non-education-related work background? Don’t discount these as they can be very powerful if combined with your teaching experience.
• Business: Have you had experience running your own business? This can be potentially very relevant in your teaching niche. For example, if you have set up your own business while teaching independently, this can be very valuable to entrepreneurs who want to improve their English for business.

The column in the template captures the assets and strengths you accumulated from your personal and professional background:

• Qualification: Your certification or qualification to prove your training and credentials.
• Skills: Skills are broken down into Language and Cultural skills (language one speaks and culture one is familiar with), education skills (content, teaching, parenting), business skills, and others.
• Network: Networks are broken down into Clients, Colleagues (peers), and Collaborators (curriculum supplier, training institutes, influencer, mentor, mentee, etc.)  These networks can be sources of your client, curriculum supplier, knowledge, and further development. A good quality network empowers you to grow continuously.

Please find the teaching treasure bag by teacher Paige. That was her first go with the template and I hope that gives you some good foundation to create a teaching treasure bag of your own.

Our digital course ‘Build a Successful Independent Teaching Path’ empowers you to develop a sustainable and successful independent teaching career. Please register your interest.

Having obstacles launching your independent teaching path? Book my 1-1 business coaching via the link.

Teachers, Be Fearless!