Letters of Recommendation

[Roberto]

What about letters from colleagues? Are these useless? What if we as teachers, all started including them in our applications? Maybe this is naive but for folks out there with bad administrators, it might be something worthwhile.

[PsyGuy]

It depends on the colleague, and their professional role in relationship to you, and just what they are addressing in this letter. If they are just another teacher in the department your in and had their classroom across the hall from yours and they say basically your just a good person and a good teacher those are pretty useless. If they mentored you at some point, or they worked with you in some professional formal role, then they may have some value. Generally though, the majority of recruiters and administrators wouldnt give any value to a colleauge reference.

[Roberto]

in most cases, colleagues have a much better understanding of each other than the overwhelming majority of administrators. I am not talking about a blah blah letter but something significant that accurately describes your performance and contributions to the school.

[PsyGuy]

I agree with that comment, though it does have some problems. The issue though isnt who makes a better reference, but which reference a recruiter/head is going to value more, and administrators will weight more heavily the opinion of another administrator over that of a colleague.

[expatteacher99]

I have no idea what most hiring administrators think of colleague letters of recommendation. I can only say that I have used such letters in the past, and they were well received. These were colleagues I worked with closely. They could better judge my abilities than most of my administrators. When I used colleague references, they were in addition to the standard 2-3 supervisor recommendations, not in place of.