Early Childhood Educator in Toronto, Ontario

I am writing to express enthusiastic interest in the position in your center. I view this as an outstanding opportunity to continue my career as an early childhood educator and extend my own professional learning that has spanned from North America to the Middle East. From the attached CV, you will see that my education and experience has nurtured my teaching skills in ways that blend learning theory and cognitive science with hands-on approaches to student learning, and that meet the developmental needs of our youngest learners. I am a highly energetic and skillful early childhood program teacher with more than 20 years of experience with early childhood learners. In fact, I developed a love for children in this age group in my very first position in this field as a nursery worker in a hospital for 6 years, beginning at age 17. This passion helped motivate my success in the college classroom up through the completion of my early childhood education diploma from Centennial College (Ontario, Canada). As a Canadian of Lebanese descent, I was interested in multicultural aspects of my profession early in my career as much as or more than the curricular learning goals that were focused upon in teaching in the daycare setting while I was concurrently raising my own two children. As a result, my family moved to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where, at that time, I could work in my respective field and I settled into highly professional early childhood programs in reputable international schools as a full time, ministry-approved teacher, and in what was considered certified roles in that jurisdiction. My services to youngsters in the UAE spanned 10 years as a Junior (PK, age 4-5) and Senior (K, age 5-6) kindergarten teacher. Each experience had increased my appreciation for the challenges of working with children from different cultures, ages, and in different countries and settings. During my years as an educator I have learned how to identify and respond to the various learning styles and abilities of different children. I have been an enthusiastic and active partner with colleagues, parents, administrators, and external institutions in a collaborative effort to serve students effectively. My sense of initiative and collegiality was rewarded in an important and intangible way while teaching in an American school in Dubai. Through my participation in professional development sessions and informal hallway conversations, my Deputy Principal felt I was ready for some schoolwide leadership exposure and entrusted me to chair an accreditation subcommittee as the school prepared its exhaustive self-study to submit to the accrediting body. In this role, I led our committee of 15 colleagues from various subjects, grade levels and operational departments to develop what was considered by our administrators to be the exemplar report among the 10 schoolwide subcommittees developing reports that comprised the full self-study. In other words, I feel I can be of service to program-wide or school-wide goals for the administrative team in your institution in addition to the immediate, day-to-day, direct classroom services to my students. Pedagogical and leadership skills are scaffolded in a continuous learning mode that never ends throughout one’s career. I have benefited from abundant professional learning opportunities in the international school context in formal (workshops, seminars, etc.) and informal meetings/sessions in non-instructional time and that also continued into what I consider an extraordinary honor bestowed upon me by an American-based accrediting body, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). I was invited to serve on two visiting teams to other international schools being assessed by NEASC for deciding on their worthiness for being awarded accreditation. I served on visiting teams to schools in Lebanon (2018) and the UAE (2019), where I was among 7-10 international educators recommended by their institutions to serve on NEASC teams. Seeing the way in which an entire team conducts an exhaustive, week-long, review of an international school and all its sub-programs (including early childhood, my reporting responsibility on each team) was “as good as it gets” in terms of professional learning and my coming of age as an internationally-recognized early childhood educator. I am an active listener in my efforts to keep an open mind to new ideas and am a person that is always well-organized and prepared for whatever is expected of me. I believe that my students have always, and will continue to, achieve their learning objectives through my engaging and developmentally-appropriate lessons. I have an extensive amount of work experience that involves teaching children whereby English is their second language. I have employed various teaching and assessment strategies to develop students’ intellectual, emotional, and physical skills through all of the early childhood developmental stages. It is with this context and the attached CV detailing my professional background that I respectfully request that you strongly consider my application as you determine who to advance to the next phase of the hiring process. I am grateful for the opportunity to apply and I wish your institution success in its hiring process and achieving its program-wide goals for the benefit of all students.