High School Teacher Resume Examples, Skills, and Keywords
High school teachers are in high demand. Writing a solid resume can help you get a position where you'll receive the pay and respect you deserve. Here’s how to produce a resume that can help you get a job you'll love.
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High school teachers are an essential part of the educational world. They help teach teenagers, run extracurricular activities, and handle administrative tasks around their schools. As a teacher looking for a new job, you need to demonstrate soft skills like classroom management and hard skills like knowledge of your subject area.
You can do more than just state the facts in your resume. It’s better to demonstrate your skills than to explain them, but doing both is best of all. With the right strategy, you can develop a resume that gets the attention of school administrators without sounding generic.
This high school teacher resume example shows how the writer used their work history and skills section to both show and tell the reader about their experience in the field.
Seattle, WA 98101 • (555) 876-5432 • willowobrien@email.com • linkedin.com/in/willow-obrien
HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER
Dedicated educator with 5 years’ experience and a proven ability to ensure student success through differentiated instruction and creative methods of motivation. With a compassionate drive for student success, consistently crafts engaging lesson plans and supports students in exceeding expectations (even their own) and achieving goals.
Lesson Planning | Classroom Management | Performance Assessment | Student Development Student Rapport & Relationship Building | Cross-Functional Communication | Conflict Resolution Microsoft Office 365 | Smartboard | Chromebooks | Google Classroom | Zoom | Quizizz | Kahoot
Plan and coordinate daily classroom activities, design rigorous lesson plans to meet student needs, and deliver instructional activities utilizing appropriate curriculum resources and incorporate district standards. • Conducted ongoing assessment of student achievement and compiled and analyzed student performance data to guide further instruction
- Provide opportunities for all types of learners and direct daily classroom discussions by asking compelling questions and taking the time to work with students to clarify points of confusion
- Consistently cultivate a positive educational climate and facilitate classroom activities which engage students by blending levity with learning and making math engaging and useful in every lesson
- Arrange teaching materials, develop lesson plans, conduct assessments of student achievement, and assist students in improving work techniques and study methods
- Serve as Chess Club Coach and attend school extracurriculars and activities to support students
- Conducted ongoing assessment of student achievement and assist students in analyzing and improving study methods and habits
- Worked collaboratively and communicated effectively with students, administrators, teachers, parents and community members in order to ensure student success
- Served as an integral part of the educational team, consistently developing and improving on teaching expertise while maximizing the learning experience for students
- Maintained a positive and invested attitude toward academic direction and progress of students, and the goals, objectives, and mission of each school
- Taught curriculum and lessons which were age- and skill-level appropriate, fostered student engagement, and focused on student success
- Served as Chess Club Coach, provided after school tutoring, facilitated learning opportunities for all types of learners, and encouraged student ownership and accountability of their own learning
Assisted primary Teacher in all aspects of daily operations, classroom teaching responsibilities, and after-school tutoring.
- Prepared classroom for each new day, readily assisted with unexpected issues, and provided support in preparing assignments for each lesson
High School Teacher Resume Skills and Keywords
School administrators have a lot on their plates, and adding hiring to the mix only makes their jobs harder. To lighten the load, many schools use applicant tracking systems (ATS). These filter out applications based on specific high school teacher resume keywords. Administrators only need to look at the candidates the ATS has chosen, saving them time. If you want to make it past these filters, you need to include the right resume skills in your application.
Top HIgh School Teacher Resume Skills
- High school education
- Lesson planning
- Curriculum development
- Classroom management
- Standardized testing
- Instructional skills
- Smartboards
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Leadership
- Critical thinking
- Verbal and written communication
- Microsoft Office
- Learning management systems
- Attention to detail
- Patience
- Resilience
- Differentiated instruction
- Parent/teacher relationships
- Student assessments
- Diverse classrooms
- Student accommodations
- Conflict resolution
- Subject knowledge (chemistry, math, history, etc.)
- Organization
- Time management
- Digital media
- Tutoring
- Spring framework
- Behavior analysis
5 Resume Writing Tips for HIgh School Teachers
When you know what skills and keywords will get your resume seen, you can build a better resume by putting these five tips to work.
1. Focus on formatting
As a high school teacher, you understand the importance of following standards and producing documents that are easy to read. Just like you expect your students to turn in quality work, school administrators expect to receive well-written resumes. Following standard resume formatting makes it easy for administrators to read your application. It also ensures that you’re not ignored because of bad design.
Along with checking your formatting, you should always proofread your application before you send it off. Typos and errors aren’t acceptable to most schools. High school teachers are expected to pay attention to detail in the classroom and when grading. Administrators assume that mistakes in a resume show that you’re not the right fit for their school.
2. Use your resume summary to make an impact
Your resume summary, or personal statement, is the first full paragraph after your header information. Like the introductory paragraph of an essay, this is where you introduce yourself and your skills. Many school administrators use the resume summary to decide whether to keep considering a candidate.
This is a great high school teacher resume summary: “Knowledgeable and enthusiastic high school teacher seeking to provide differentiated education at West High School. Seven-plus years of experience include implementing two new AP courses, raising average SAT English scores by 6%, and managing parent-teacher relationships.”
The writer has achieved several goals with this summary. It offers a strong resume objective right off the bat, explaining what they want out of the job. It also lists achievements using hard numbers so school administrators understand what the applicant has done. This combination gives hiring teams a solid motivation to keep reading.
3. Adjust your resume for the job
High school teachers are called on to teach many subjects. During your job search, you may apply for positions with wildly different requirements. Submitting the same resume for both a math teacher and English teacher position will probably lead to at least one school ignoring your application.
Always take the time to refine your resume to make it relevant to the job posting. If the description mentions specific skills or qualifications that you have, mention them verbatim in your resume. When you make minor adjustments to your resume before applying somewhere, you give yourself a better chance of getting hired.
4. Separate your skills
Every high school subject requires its own skillset for teachers. Adding a dedicated skills section to your resume lets you highlight your most important abilities. You can use keyword variations to target ATS filters or mention skills that may not have been relevant in your recent positions.
Your skills section is also a great way to separate them from the rest of the document. When your skills are neatly collected, school administrators can quickly scan your resume to check for the abilities they require. This is the perfect place to mention things like speaking multiple languages or understanding a learning management system.
5. Use action words
Keywords aren’t the only words that matter in your resume. Once someone is actually looking at the page, you want to keep their attention. That means replacing bland and generic terms like “responsible for” and “participated in” with more specific, energetic words. This swap helps school administrators understand what you actually did in your past jobs instead of leaving them guessing.
For example, swap out generic phrases for active verbs like:
- Managed
- Developed
- Accomplished
- Guided
- Implemented
- Improved
- Wrote
- Reviewed
- Designed
- Assigned
- Increased/decreased
