What Jobs in Education Are Not Teaching? Real Roles You Might Not Have Considered
The charcoal grill at our neighborhood back-to-school BBQ smoldered so much it made my eyes water last month, and I was just reaching for a paper towel to wipe them when my neighbor Lila pulled me aside behind a folding table of chip bags. Her 20-year-old daughter Mia, a college junior with an education minor, had just turned down a student teaching placement, and Lila was baffled. Mia loves kids—she’s coached a 10U soccer team and runs after-school garden clubs at the local community center. But she says the idea of standing in front of 28 8th graders every single day, grading 50 essays a week, and handling all the paperwork that comes with modern classroom teaching makes her want to change her major entirely. Lila kept asking me, “If she doesn’t want to be a teacher, what even is left for her in education?”
I get the question. Most of us grow up only seeing the classroom teachers in our kids’ schools, so it’s easy to assume that’s the only education job that exists. But I know so many people building fulfilling careers in education who never lead a full class of kids every day, and most of these roles barely get any attention when students are mapping out their career paths.
My old college roommate Sam is a school occupational therapist, for example. She works at an elementary school outside of Portland, and her days look nothing like a classroom teacher’s. Half her time is one-on-one with kids: working on holding a pencil correctly, tying shoes, helping kids with sensory issues learn to handle the feeling of tag on their skin. The other half is problem solving for the whole school: last month she spent three afternoons rearranging sensory corners for 12 classrooms, and convinced admin to swap out harsh fluorescent bulbs in the kindergarten wing for softer ones. She told me a few weeks ago that one of her nonverbal students started using a communication board she helped pick out to ask for snacks, and that was the whole win she needed for the month. She never has to grade a math test, and her caseload is only 28 kids total for the whole school, not 28 a period.
My aunt Marnie has been a school library media specialist for 13 years at a middle school in Ohio. A lot of people think librarians just check out books now, but that’s not true. She runs three after-school book clubs, one specifically for kids who only want to read graphic novels, helps teachers pull primary sources for history projects, and spends a lot of her time teaching kids how to tell the difference between a real science article and a fake ad for weight loss tea online. She gets to see the same kids for three years in a row, so she knows which kids hate nonfiction and which ones will read anything about dinosaurs. When I asked her what she likes best, she said she never has to write 120 progress reports in a week. She gets to focus on connecting kids to things they love, not managing daily behavior for a full class.
Tim, the dad down the street from me, is a behavior interventionist. He covers three small elementary schools in our district, and he works with kids who have persistent behavioral challenges that classroom teachers can’t support on their own. He meets one-on-one with kids every week to practice breathing exercises and other coping skills, works with parents to put simple consistent routines in place at home, and helps teachers adjust expectations for kids who need more breaks or different assignments. Last semester he worked with a second grader who was running out of the classroom at least twice a day, and the simple change he suggested was a printed cool down pass that let the kid go get a drink of water and walk around the hallway for two minutes whenever he felt overwhelmed. Within two weeks, the running out incidents dropped to once a week, and the teacher said the kid was finally starting to finish his reading work. Tim’s caseload is only 18 kids, so he has time to actually get to know each one and their family, instead of rushing from one thing to the next.
My cousin Jessa is a school nutrition services coordinator for our regional district, a role most people never even connect to education. But what kids eat directly impacts how they learn, after all. Jessa plans menus for 14 schools, works with local apple and vegetable farms to get fresh produce in every month, trains cafeteria staff to handle severe food allergies, and spends a lot of her time helping families sign up for free and reduced price lunch who don’t know they qualify. A couple of years ago she noticed that kindergarten kids were throwing away almost all of their raw carrot sticks because they were too big to bite easily. She started having the kitchen cut them into bite-sized pieces, and now 60% more kids eat them. She loves that her work impacts every single kid in the district, not just the ones in a single classroom, and she’s never had to write a lesson plan in 10 years on the job.
After we talked at the BBQ, I put Mia in touch with Jessa, since Mia already loved working on garden and healthy eating projects with the community center kids. Mia shadowed Jessa for a day last week, going from school to school checking in with cafeteria managers, helping set up a taste test for new whole grain pizza crust, and meeting with a group of parents to talk about allergy accommodations. She texted me that night saying she had no idea a job like that even existed. She gets to work with kids, make a tangible difference in their daily school experience, and never has to lead a full class lecture. She’s already applied for an internship with the nutrition department for next semester.
I saw Lila at the grocery store yesterday, and she said Mia hasn’t stayed up until 2 a.m. panicking about her future in three weeks. We don’t know if she’ll stick with school nutrition long term, or if she’ll end up trying something else like behavior intervention or library science down the line. But that’s okay. The field of education doesn’t only need classroom teachers. It needs people with all kinds of interests and strengths, people who love kids but don’t love the structure of daily classroom teaching. There’s a place for them, you just have to know where to look.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Jobs in Education Are Not Teaching