Minimum of 100 words, maximum of 200 words
Paragraph 1
The Teaching and What Grew From It
Describe your core professional role and one concrete thing you built or expanded within it. Let the numbers and specifics carry the weight rather than commentary about their significance.
What to include in your essay:
- Your role and how long you have held it.
- A specific initiative you started or grew, with concrete evidence of its reach.
- What the initiative actually did, named specifically rather than described generally.
Paragraph 2
The Work Outside the Classroom Walls
Describe a professional experience outside your main role that sharpened a specific skill or changed how you think. Keep it honest about what it actually taught you.
What to include in your essay:
- The role, where it was, and how long it lasted.
- What the work involved at a practical level.
- The specific thing it taught you that formal training had not.
PARAGRAPH 1
I've taught literature at Greenfield College for four years and spent two of those running an after-school reading circle that grew from five students to nineteen, reading writers our syllabus never touched: Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ben Okri. Last year I put together a small anthology of student essays on those texts, printed forty copies, and sold out within a term at two other schools that heard about it.Technique:
This paragraph lets the facts do the arguing. The growth from five to nineteen students, the named writers, the anthology selling out at schools that were not even part of the original circle- none of these need commentary to land. The paragraph is confident because it does not explain why any of this matters.
Breakdown:
"Writers our syllabus never touched" names the gap the reading circle was filling without turning it into a grievance.
Naming Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Ben Okri is more persuasive than saying "African writers" because it shows the choices were deliberate.
"Sold out within a term at two other schools that heard about it" shows the work travelled on its own, which is more convincing than any claim about impact.
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