Elementary Bilingual Classroom Teacher

Elementary Bilingual Classroom Teacher

Clifford School is a Chinese owned private school. The school is located 30 minutes south of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China, is a private, K-12 School with approximately 3300 students. The school has a Chinese faculty of 300 teachers and a Western faculty of 106 teachers. It is an NCA/CITA-accredited school. Clifford School is very unique, and has been built creatively, taking advantage of both the Chinese and Western learning methodologies. The majority of our students are from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The second largest group of students is from Korea. There are two programs at the school - The Bilingual and the International Manitoba programs.

 This is a position in  The Elementary Bilingual Program .

The Elementary Bilingual Program is primarily a language program working with students whose first language is not English. The majority of our class time is spent focusing on English Language Arts (Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing). Our program also follows themes taught from the Chinese National Curriculum. The students learn the content in Chinese first and then learn it in English class as a language lesson. So, we are teaching maths, science, and social studies linguistically, not conceptually.

We have two classes that we teach for three periods each day (a morning class and an afternoon class) – totaling six forty-minute periods we teach per day. The morning and afternoon classes are generally taught the same lessons. So, we prepare three lessons per day and teach them twice. We have some specialist classes, so teachers usually teach 26 periods a week (plan for 13). Since the students are second language learners, with only two hours of English exposure per day, our students’ language abilities are naturally below what is found in an international school or in our home countries (generally by one grade level).

Our work day begins at 8:30. We have a two hour lunch from 11:45 to 1:50.   Our work day ends at 16:50 each day.

We work a 196 day contract for the school year.  Our school year generally begins the third week of August and goes until the last week of June or first week of July (depending on the schedule).  We have a week holiday in October, two weeks for Christmas, and three to four weeks for Chinese New Year. We follow the Chinese School holiday calendar for National holidays throughout the school year.

The school provides teachers with a fully furnished apartment (see website for photos) and daily transportation on a private bus to and from the school (which is only 10 minutes away).  Some teachers prefer their own mode of transportation and ride a scooter or bicycle.

The school offers an initial two year contract (followed by renewable one year contracts), shared cost on health insurance, utilities allowance, annual end of contract bonus, yearly salary increase, in addition to annual flights and a relocation and documents (those required for your work permit) allowance (see website for more detailed information).

We offer a competitive salary that is dependent on experience and qualifications. The cost of living here is very low, so teachers will save a good majority of their salary.

We have Western teachers from many countries, including, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and UK. Teachers generally stay for an average of over 5 years, with some over 10 years.