A unique professional experience
GOA teachers are part of a global community of students and educators exploring new ways to learn.
Who we are
Global Online Academy is a nonprofit organization that reimagines learning to empower students and educators to thrive in a globally networked society. Teaching at GOA is a professional learning opportunity that often leads our teachers to reimagine aspects of their approaches to teaching and learning and to become professional learning resources for their home schools.
With a decade of experience offering fully online courses, we have identified (and updated) the Educator Competencies faculty need to thrive while facilitating GOA classes. These competencies anchor our professional learning (PL), our student surveys, our facilitation strategies, and our approaches to ongoing course design and maintenance. As these competencies indicate, GOA courses are rooted in competency-based learning (CBL), an approach we adopted in 2016 and continue to implement and refine.
Who you are
If you are drawn to our mission, the descriptions of our work and the position below, ongoing efforts to improve as an educator, and an opportunity that will enable deep consideration of what learning is and can be as well as when and how it can happen, we welcome your application to teach with us.
The essential qualities we look for in our teachers are captured in the educator competencies, the GOA core competencies (the habits and approaches that students build in all GOA courses, which are relevant for teachers, too), as well as the information below, which adds specifics to the educator competencies.
Feedback and CBL
- You craft clear and action-oriented feedback for students
- Your students would say you give excellent, learning-moving feedback and are prompt with assessing their work; you see the big picture and articulate well what you want students to know and be able to do and take away from an assignment, a unit, and a course
- You believe in and use formative feedback, enabling students to wrestle with and apply what you provide
- You are able to receive feedback, even seek it out, and apply it to grow
Community
- You have thrived on teams, and your colleagues describe you as collaborative, committed to equity, attentive to detail, open-minded, eager to receive feedback and apt at providing it, and eager overall to evolve as an educator
- You have empathy for others and most especially students because you are a lifelong learner and challenge yourself to learn new things and to remember what it’s like to be a beginner
- You can imagine becoming a professional learning resource for your home school, while also sharing the PL from your home school and current initiatives with your GOA colleagues
Problem Solving, Communication, and Organization
- You have outstanding executive functions and are adept at and on it with timely, consistent communication
- You are confident using your computer and various apps and are quick to search for information to answer your own questions and solve your own problems
About our Faculty, Courses, and Structure
Our teachers largely yet not exclusively come from our member schools and typically teach for us in tandem with full-time positions at their schools. The majority of GOA courses have several sections, and a team of teachers works collaboratively on to provide a high-quality learning experience while individual teachers facilitate sections of around 20 students. Teachers frequently strategize with their course teams about best facilitation and feedback practices. The GOA teacher role extends beyond the semester and includes collaboration on course updates, and maintenance with teams and coaches, professional learning during the summer and school year, a commitment to CBL, outcomes-based assessment, and intention about ensuring students develop competencies that will transfer well beyond the semester.
Each teacher has a coach, often an experienced GOA teacher, who works with a cohort of teachers. It’s common that GOA teachers become resources at their home schools, able to lead professional learning workshops on CBL, leveraging the learning management system, and diversifying feedback (and more).
Our Commitment to Equity
We are committed to ensuring that every student has full access to all aspects of our courses, and we believe that such full access and inclusion require our faculty’s cultural competency as well as commitment to examining and improving our practices, course content, and the student experience. At the heart of our endeavors: dedication to ongoing evolution. We strive never to become complacent and always to remember that we can and will get better and do so on behalf of serving students. Further, we believe that excellent student learning comes from excellent faculty learning; the two are inextricably connected.
Onboarding and Professional Learning
Onboarding for new faculty begins when you receive a provisional offer (typically in March/April) and continues during the months leading up to the school year. New teachers complete the first pieces of onboarding during the latter half of the school year and devote about 7-10 hours to onboarding between an asynchronous teacher onboarding course, and a required synchronous Faculty Camp that occurs in August. During the summer, all faculty participate in Faculty Camp as well as work with course teams to prepare for the school year. GOA faculty are expected to participate in ongoing faculty learning throughout their years with us as well.
Compensation
GOA pays a $7,000.00 stipend per teacher-facilitator per semester. This stipend compensates for routine course updates and the facilitation work described above. When GOA asks teachers to participate in our substantive course redesign process, we contract and compensate that work separately from the facilitation pay. Whether you work at a member school or not, we will be reaching out to your supervisors at your school for a reference, so we suggest having a conversation with them about this opportunity.
Global Online Academy supports workplace diversity and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, physical or mental disability, or any other protected class. We are eager to meet candidates from historically underrepresented groups.
Mark your calendars! Application period begins November 1, 2024
Learn more about us
Read blog posts; explore the course catalog for the student program and read about our flex courses; look over our professional learning offerings. Understanding what we aim to do and how we strive to fulfill our mission will enable you to consider whether you see yourself teaching, learning, growing, and thriving at GOA.
