What do I want to give? What can I give? What does the school need? What does the school want? What is my Value Proposition? Each of these is a very different question.  To be truly impactful, you need to master each of them. A question I ask almost all interviewees is “if you could craft the perfect next job for yourself, pay aside, if you could pluck from the job tree whatever set of full-time responsibilities your heart desires, what would that job be?” I have to ask a question like that because I want to get a sense of the teachers’ intrinsic motivators. But after the teacher has the job, and is in the school, after s/he has gotten accustomed to how things work at her/his school and has discovered those ways in which s/he personally connects with the job -- that is, after s/he has figured out how to hitch the wagon that is the job to the raw horsepower that is her/his intrinsic motivations -- she has to ask a much more challenging question:  what is my Value Proposition? So let’s walk forward through this thought process with a very typical example of a very qualified English teacher -- Bob. What does Bob want to give?  Bob wants to teach a class where the students read short stories and vignettes from Hemingway’s In Our Time; and the culminating activity for the semester would be that the students each will write at least one short story, with fully developed characters and a compelling theme. What can Bob give?  Bob has never run this kind of a class.  He has taken this kind of a class, and if Bob is not a deep thinker, he might assume that because he took a class like this, he can teach a class like this.  But if Bob is honest with himself, a more realistic course plan might be to have this be EITHER a creative writing class -- where one or two accessible short stories or vignettes is studied as a model -- but where the real goal is to get each of the students to produce some kind of written work that s/he would be comfortable publishing. What does the school need?  The Japanese English teachers at the school do writing and reading work with the students.  They don’t do it in exactly the way that Bob would do it, so maybe he has something to offer them there.  But one thing that is striking about the school is that in spite of the fact that the students have a record of doing very well on English entrance exams, most of the students do not actually believe that they can hear or speak English, and the school is at a loss for how to address this problem. What does the school want?  The short answer to this question is “just make it fun.”  But if Bob were to really press them on this question, the answers that Bob would get are much more interesting.  For example a lot of their competitors have students participating in debate and speech competitions.  A lot of their competitors have study abroad programs but the school has not been able to get rolling with this program because most of the parents feel that their kids aren’t comfortable enough with English to really gain anything from these programs.  Bob is delighted to hear that the teachers struggle to teach the students how to write compelling paragraphs.  Discourse-level grammar is the main issue, here:  they can teach the kids how to write a particular sentence correctly, but making the correct verb choice so that it fits grammatically with a verb choice that was made three or four sentences away, that is very difficult.  However, the school has a long-standing well-developed grammar-translation approach that the students respond very well to, and it’s hard for them to see where any long-form writing curriculum might fit with what they are doing. So what should be Bob’s Value Proposition?   If Bob equates his Value Proposition to what he wants to do, Bob becomes the drunk guy at the wedding that stumbles up onto the stage, snatches one of the band microphones and starts singing “Alison.” If Bob equates his Value Proposition to what he can do, he is making a much more mature decision -- one I see teachers make all the time.  “I know how to set up an activity where students practice giving each other directions, and so that’s what I am going to do because that is what I do best.”  He is not challenging himself, and he is not showing any curiosity at all about what it might mean to connect his skill to their needs. If Bob equates the Value Proposition to what the school seems to need, then he is just being preachy.  Assuming he knows what the school needs better than the school knows -- an interesting stance to take but in the past, ProGEN has come very close to losing clients by sending in otherwise talented teachers that came barreling into the job imagining themselves as resident experts.  Foreign teachers love to criticise the grammar-translation approach, and of course there are reasons to be critical, but if mono-lingual Bob is going to evolve, he needs at least to appreciate that grammar-translation is an approach that he himself would not be able to take even if he wanted to. And if Bob equates the Value Proposition to what the school says it wants, then he is no-longer a decision-maker.  Whatever else a teacher is, a teacher is a decision maker.  Whatever Bob does, it needs to connect in some way with what he wants or he will not do it well. To truly deliver value, Bob need to respond enthusiastically to those places where what the school wants connects with what Bob can do.  Bob needs to take what the community wants, marry that want to what is immediately feasible, find those places where what is feasible resonates with what he wants to give, and then he needs to make sure, at any given moment, that whatever he is doing is fulfilling a real need -- adding value that the school would not be able to generate without him. Your Value Proposition, as a teacher, is that thing that you add, given the unique needs and wants of the school -- which would not be added, were you not there.