Earning a bachelor’s degree in Physical Education is only the first step.
Standing between Anderson Hall and each K-12 gymnasium is a successful job interview.
But future teachers in Jim Ressler’s classes have a leg up on their competition.
Ressler, professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education and program director for Physical Education Teacher Education, hosted a Career Day Seminar to provide his licensure majors with a practical glimpse of how to get hired.
“This seminar is part of a sequence of sessions – both face-to-face and virtual – to supplement the student-teaching experiences of our candidates in K-12 settings across the region,” Ressler says of the Oct. 19 event. “We try to be strategic and timely with these offerings to include the most relevant topics, readings, guests and pertinent information.”
Activities included a talk by Teri Schmidgall of NIU Career Services, small-group speed interviews conducted by NIU clinical supervisors and a mock interview and debrief session facilitated by Staci Hale, P.E. teacher at Kingston Elementary School.
Hale also joined Jason Harper, superintendent of Rochelle Community School District 231, and Brian VanMersbergen, Kinetic Wellness teacher at New Trier High School, in a panel discussion of career readiness.
VanMersbergen then delivered a keynote address on “Job Search Processes and Experiences from the Field,” providing the NIU students with his insider advice on acing the job interview and career advancement.
That included worksheets with plenty of blank spaces to help students think about, and organize, how they will present themselves to potential employers and what information to share.
For example: “What accomplishments am I most proud of in my career, education and student-teaching? Be sure to make these interesting, memorable, measurable, believable, honest, concise and related to the job you seek.”
Another page prompted students to list 10 personal descriptors about themselves, choose three of those that they feel are most beneficial to an employer, think of actions that support those traits and provide the results of their examples.
Ressler calls his motivation “quite simple: We want students to get more access to current professionals.”
“These teachers and administrators come in and share their experiences and answer questions that our students are thinking of while being in the middle of student teaching,” he says.
“At the time of this panel, our students had been in schools for eight weeks,” he adds. “This is plenty of time to be reflect and generate ideas and questions for the full-time teaching career that many of them aim to begin in January.”
Some of the learning, he says, “will come from the direction of the questions asked, such as résumé and cover letter advice, types of interview processes per district, negotiating with a future employer, and beginning salaries and benefits.”
Other takeaways might relate “to the actual practice of teaching, the motivation to be great, to advocate for yourself, your students, and your program,” he adds.
“At times, these sessions may feel a bit like a pep talk. It may feel like an assurance that they are on the right path,” Ressler says. “And it could also be a nudge in the direction of prioritizing their next steps after earning their NIU degrees and teaching licenses.”
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