How do I make my potential employer understand my desire for the teaching position without coming across as desperate? How do I explain to him all my teaching skills and teaching experience in one cover letter? How do I convince him that I am the teacher for their school?

These are just some of the likely questions you will have when starting to draft your first teacher cover letter.

It is natural to want to try to squeeze the answers to those questions into a well-written teacher cover letter, but it is also wrong.

You see, the fact is, your cover letter is not supposed to get you the job.

That’s right…I’ll say it again…your cover letter is NOT supposed to get you a teaching job!

Your teacher cover letter has one sole purpose…the purpose of the teacher cover letter is to get your potential employer to look at your resume and call you in for an interview.

It is the interview, not the cover letter, that gets you the teaching position.

Therefore, you must first focus on getting the interview…then you can focus on getting the job.

I have sat on countless teacher interview committees and have read thousands of cover letters and can tell you the biggest mistake teachers make when writing their cover letters is not starting out with a bang.

While teachers teach their students all the time how important it is to think about their audience when writing, teachers seem to forget this when writing their own cover letters.

Teachers should think about who is going to read the cover letter, when are they going to read it, why are they going to keep reading.

A teacher cover letter will most likely be read by an administrator and/or a teacher interview committee that has been put in place.

These people are very busy!

They will most likely be reading stacks of cover letters at a time…possibly as many as a hundred at a time.

Now, if you were ever to sit down and read 100 cover letters in one sitting you would notice something very quickly…cover letter after cover letter would simply start to blend into each other. 

Why?

Simple…most of teacher cover letters start off with a typical boring opening line such as, “I am writing in response to the ad in the New York Times about a teaching position…blah blah blah”

What you need to do if you want to move on to the next step in the hiring process is make your teacher cover letter stand out.

Remember, the cover letter is not about getting the job…the cover letter is about getting you noticed and one step closer to the interview.  Therefore, you must make it stand out from the pack.

A great way to achieve this goal is by actually putting an attention grabbing headline at the top of the cover letter such as “Three reasons why I believe I am the best candidate for the teaching position at…” Then, following this headline, you start your cover letter with, Dear Mr. Jones. Believe me, this will get you noticed and will have much better effect than those dull teacher cover letters that never get a second glance.

However, if this is too drastic an approach for you then you may be able to achieve this goal in a more subtle way by simply starting your cover letter with something other than other than “I am writing in response to blah blah blah.”

Whichever approach you choose, subtle or drastic, you need to make sure your teacher cover letter stands out form the pack and starting out with a bang by grabbing the reader’s attention is the best approach. However, in my experience most do not do this and that is the number one mistake made when writing a teacher cover letter.