Welcome to The Teaching Abroad Podcast. I am glad you’re here. As a podcast lover, I have long dreamed of having my very own podcast. I love to talk about Teaching Abroad and now I get to do it every week. I thought it prompt to introduce myself a little and talk about why I love teaching abroad as well as give 3 tips to get you started on your teaching abroad journey. 

So Hi, I’m Kirstie, the host of The Teaching Abroad Podcast. I’m an Aussie primary teacher with a masters in International education. I am currently teaching in an International School in Hong Kong and before that spent 2 years teaching in London. I am so glad you here to take the next step in your teaching abroad journey.

Welcome to the Teaching Abroad Podcast, talk about the big wins and the hard truths of teaching abroad. 

Teaching abroad is a wonderful, wild ride. I say all the time that moving to teach internationally was one of the best career decisions I have ever made. I highly recommend it. But in saying that, it’s not easy. Teaching Internationally isn’t as easy as clicking your fingers and magically making it happen. It takes time and effort and a whole lot of patience, planning and dreaming. This is why this podcast exists to help you on your way to your teaching abroad dreams. 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• All about how I fell in love with international teaching 
• How I started on my teaching abroad journey 
• How I ended up in Hong Kong 
• 3 tips to get you started on your teaching abroad journey

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Blog Post about International Teaching Placements

Blog Post about the benefits of Teaching Abroad

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Find the transcript of Episode 1 “Meet the Host and 3 Tips to get you Started on Your Teaching Abroad Journey” below

00:00

Hi, welcome to the teaching abroad podcast where we talk about the big wins and the hard truths of teaching abroad. 

I’m your host, Kirstie, an Aussie primary teacher with a masters in International education. I am currently teaching in an International School in Hong Kong and before that spent 2 years teaching in London. I am so glad you here to take the next step in your teaching abroad journey.

00:39 

In this episode, you will hear all about me and my journey to becoming an international teacher abroad and my three biggest tips to those who want to teach abroad. 

00:49

Welcome to the first episode of the Teaching Abroad Podcast. I’m so glad you’re here. We have great episodes planned for this season full of tips and tricks and some great interviews with international teachers. You might even recognize it from Instagram or Tiktok, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise. I thought that this first episode. I should let you know a little bit about me and my teaching abroad journey so far. So my story begins in the far Northern Queensland where my mom met my dad and fell in love. I kid, but this is the injury to my model, right? For my autobiographies with my Gear, five class in London this year. But this story is influenced heavily by my parents. My parents loved to travel. 

They met travelling and had taken my family on many adventures in Australia. As I grew up. Travelling wasn’t some pipe dream, it was just something that was expected. Both my brothers studied abroad so it made sense that I would too. That is where my story about teaching abroad begins. In far northern Sweden at a university town where I could see the Northern Lights from my bedroom window. It was my second year of university for a Bachelor of Education. I wanted to do university exchange so badly, which I highly recommend. 

01:30

By the way, I just wrote a blog post on this that I picked my uni not just for, which provides me with the best education degree, but also which gets me an exchange faster. University exchange was such a mindset altering time for me. It was the place where I fell in love with international education, both in theory and in practice. I studied a double degree in psychology and education, So most of my subjects were psychology subjects, But the two education subjects completely changed my trajectory of where I thought I was going. I discovered how international policies and politics influence Australian education and how education systems influence each other. But most of all I got to do a placement in a small country school about 2 hours south of the Arctic Circle. 00:49

During this placement, I mostly hung out, which is what I call being placed in the class with the year six class. I also got to spend quite a bit of time with fösta klass which is first class which is not to be confused with first grade. I guess it’s kind of more like reception or prep or kindergarten in Australia or the UK.

03:00

 I loved getting to teach English maths and art to the year 6 students

and getting to play and observe in foster class. And amazingly, I also got the opportunity to interview heaps of different teachers, leaders and school counsellors. I learned so many things from this placement. If you want to know more about international placement then you should check out my blog post on five amazing reasons you should do a teaching placement abroad next year. The link to this will be in my show notes. I then returned home, changed universities, did placements in all kinds of schools from large inner-city Catholic schools to small rural remote schools in far Western NSW, to schools that taught the International Baccalaureate often just called the IB. 

Now, if you don’t know what the IB is, is an international curriculum that is grounded in concepts rather than content. It focuses on developing students who are reflective inquirers, who will be balanced, rather than students who can, just, I guess, pass a test. I am a huge fan of the IB curriculum, especially for primary schools.

04:10

This is what led me to my masters and international education and bilingualism, but more on that in a bit. During my 4th year of university, I knew I wanted to teach abroad. I know so many teachers who had taught in London and I thought it would be the perfect place to start before eventually moving somewhere else. I know for a lot of international schools prefer at least two years of experience I’ve since lent that there are positions for first years, but most people I know recommend at least two years before you go, especially for Australians. 

A lot of us learned that the hard way about accreditation. I signed my contract with a teaching agency to teach in London in April and then eight months later, two weeks after my final exam, I flew to London. Teaching in London, especially as a first-year teacher, was an absolutely wild ride. I had to learn all about a new curriculum teaching in a different culture. All the teachers speak the school culture or within a couple of weeks. I laughed, cried, stressed and I cried some more. Then laughed some more, made great friendships, discovered who I am as a person and as a teacher.

05:00

I travelled. I made memories, I made friends from all over Europe. Then as my time in London came to a close, I began to look elsewhere for teaching jobs. I know a lot of people who choose to get sponsored and lots who went home. But I wasn’t ready to go home. I found myself not really a fan of the British education system. I craved more freedom, freedom to make decisions. That was best for my students to teach. The whole student, not just to the test, to teach students to be reflective, to be inquiries to be balanced in all areas, their life.

So after my time in London, I found myself at an International School in Hong Kong where I currently work and live. I absolutely love my job and the students that I teach. Now. Nothing is ever perfect, but I get to enjoy the parts of the job that I love and the rest is much more manageable. Now I know I spoke very briefly about my time in London and about my job here in Hong Kong, but don’t worry, I have so many great episodes in store for you that will answer every question that you could possibly have and probably or hopefully those you didn’t even know to ask yet.

06:07

Now before we finish up, I wanted to share my top three tips on how to get started. know that teaching abroad isn’t as easy as clicking your fingers and magically making it happen. My first tip is to figure out why you’d want to go travel to experience a different curriculum to save money. The benefits of teaching abroad are endless. If you want to know what kind of benefits there are to teaching abroad, check out my blog post on 10 of the best reasons you should teach abroad this year.

Now, this blog post is specific to London, but a lot of these reasons can relate to any kind of country and any kind of school. My second piece is advice is to sort yourself out. How much experience do you have? Are you accredited? Who can you get his references if you have none of these things? How can you get them? As I said before, you don’t really need to have the experience to teach overseas. After all, like I didn’t but like any job you would need to have references and to be able to sell yourself the journey to teaching abroad isn’t quite as easy as clicking your fingers, so take time to position yourself well. It’s not like you can decide to teach abroad one day and go the next.

The journey to teaching abroad takes months if not a year to plan ahead. So first you need to figure out where you are now. What are your strengths? Know how to sell yourself to make up for your weaknesses. Honestly, I didn’t have a great job history most of the time I taught in London it was COVID and a huge part of that was locked down. What I did have to make up for that was amazing references and the ability to communicate my strengths and my passion for teaching as well in interviews. So you need to figure out what you have and how to use it to get where you need to go. Now teaching abroad. 

08:00

Obviously, you can teach pretty much anywhere in the world, but lots of places are significantly more likely to take the first year or second year, or people who don’t have as much classroom experience. So depending on where you want to go really depends on what kind of experience you need.

So if you from my first tip, if you thought I really want to go to this particular country, then you need to figure out what kind of experience you need to get there. Or alternatively, you can do. What I did is when this is what I have. Where can I go and start from there? Now my last tip sounds a little bit brutal. But remember there is no magic trick to getting overseas. You either do it and persist and learn from your mistakes or you don’t. It’s one thing to say that you want to do it, and it’s another thing to actually put in the time and the effort to make it happen. You have resumes to write references to get applications to fill out, and many, many, many interviews to do. But at the end of the day, there is no easy way through it. You just have to do it. And that’s why I’m here. to hold your hand through the process. To say, I know it sucks, but follow me. I know the way through.

09:14

Thanks for joining us this week. I hope this episode inspires you to start thinking about where you’re going on your teaching abroad journey. If you want any of the resources mentioned in this episode, just head over to innovativeglobalteaching.com podcast for the show notes to find everything you need. And if you’re enjoying this podcast, I’d love to ask you to leave a review. Reviews of one of the major ways that different platforms rank their podcasts. So even though it only takes a few seconds, it really does make a difference. Thanks again for joining me in this episode of the Teaching Abroad Podcast. I’ll see you next time.