What does your school need from a teaching fellow?
A teaching fellow is a seat you hire for potential and train on the job — the opposite of recruiting an experienced teacher away from another school.
The shape of the role is yours to define, and the posting should say it exactly. Decide whether the fellow carries a full course load or co-teaches beside a veteran, which duties travel with the job — advisory, coaching, arts support, dorm duty at a boarding school — and whether you are filling one seat or building a cohort.
Do not let the seat collapse into a teaching assistant's, either. An assistant's role is built to support a lead teacher's classroom, so if you want the fellow to carry instructional responsibility of their own — with a development plan alongside it — the posting has to say so.
Post and search across the variant titles — teaching fellow, teacher resident, teaching intern — rather than waiting on one of them.
A charter network may run its version of the seat as a teacher residency, pairing the resident's classroom work with a training plan the network owns.
If you are designing a cohort program with rotations, housing and funding rather than filling a single seat, write that design down before the posting — the seat description follows from it.
For the candidate-side picture of the role, start from what a teaching fellow does and adjust it to your school's own expectations.
This page is the teaching-fellow role hub in our library on hiring for private and charter schools; the sections below take the hire end to end.
Looking to hire? Post your teaching fellow role on SchoolHires and reach people who already work in private and charter schools.
Post a Teaching Fellow Job →What qualifications are required at a private vs a charter school?
The credential question splits by sector, and for both the answer starts in the same place: your state decides.
A fellow at a private school is a private-school hire, and the answer runs through your state and through which kind of school yours is. Accredited or approved, a voucher or ESA participant, serving special-education placements, religious or exempt — the rule that binds you is the one your state education agency applies to your category.
Confirm it with your state education agency before you write the qualification line, and read the state detail in our private school teacher certification requirements guide.
Set the degree bar deliberately rather than copying a district template. In NCES's 2020-21 survey, 50% of private school teachers held a postbaccalaureate degree, against 62% at traditional public schools and 51% at charter schools — figures for the whole teaching workforce at every experience level, not for early-career fellowship applicants. Set that bar on purpose, after you have checked what your state requires of schools in your category.
A charter fellow is a different question, because charter schools are public schools and your state's charter law — not another state's — writes the teacher rules your authorizer enforces.
Nationally, 75.3% of public charter school teachers held a regular state teaching certificate in 2020-21 and 11.5% held none, per NCES. Treat certification as a design question for your residency, and confirm what your state's charter law and your authorizer require rather than borrowing private-school practice.
Our charter school teacher certification requirements guide carries the state-by-state detail.
Rules change, and categories differ. Confirm the qualification rules that bind your school with your state education agency — or, for a charter school, with your state's charter law and authorizer — before the posting goes up.
How much should you pay a teaching fellow?
Start from the honest gap: our research found no federal wage table for the role — the BLS occupational tables we checked carry no separate teaching-fellow line — and no published national stipend benchmark either.
The nearest published anchor is NAIS's 2025-26 Facts at a Glance for member schools, which reports interns — the category closest to a fellowship appointment — at $35,000 for the median lowest salary and $36,670 for the median highest.
Read that row carefully: NAIS's "median lowest/highest" is the median across member schools of each school's lowest and highest salary in the role, not a percentile spread, and the data covers NAIS member schools only — a small, higher-resourced slice of the independent-school world.
For the step that follows your fellowship, NAIS's same 2025-26 tables put the median starting teacher salary at $51,500 across member schools.
Sector context comes from NCES, with its year attached: in 2020-21, regular full-time private school teachers averaged $46,400 in base salary, summer earnings excluded, while public charter school teachers averaged $54,400 — all teachers, not fellows, and 2020-21 dollars, not current pay.
If the package includes campus housing, the tax side has its own rules. IRC §119(d) excludes qualified campus lodging from an educational institution employee's income, except to the extent rent paid is less than the lesser of 5% of the lodging's appraised value or the average rent charged to non-employees for comparable lodging.
Whether a particular arrangement meets that exclusion — a dorm-duty apartment especially — is fact-specific, so cost the housing piece with your CPA before it appears in an offer, and ask them how your state treats it too.
Then set the stipend as a package decision: cash, housing and meals where your model includes them, certification coursework funding where your program design calls for it, and internal consistency with your own assistant and intern pay.
Benchmark against the district and charter entry scales and the residencies your candidates actually weigh, and put the number in the posting rather than making candidates ask.
Where do you find teaching fellows?
Run the channels in parallel through the season rather than one after another.
Start the pipeline on campus: education and arts-and-sciences career centers at the colleges whose graduates you already hire, senior-year job boards, and the faculty members who refer their own recent graduates.
Add the sources an experienced-teacher search misses: alumni of your own program, graduate-school applicants weighing a deferral, career changers taking their first classroom role, and former teaching assistants ready to carry a classroom of their own.
Placement firms are one more channel. Carney, Sandoe & Associates' Placement Group is success-based: a school pays a fee only when it hires a candidate through the firm, and the fee amount is not published. Its placement mostly covers teaching and coaching roles, and its listed openings go to accepted candidates rather than public postings.
The firm says it works with over 2,000 independent, private, boarding and charter schools in 48 states and 32 countries, and its services are free to candidates — client schools pay the fees.
Hiring conferences gather candidates and hiring schools into a single event; the calendar section below covers the season.
For open postings, our guide to where to post teaching jobs compares the options — and it is worth browsing teaching fellow jobs to see the listing a candidate sees before you write yours.
How do you screen and interview teaching fellows?
Screen for trajectory, not track record. Expect a thin file — a student-teaching placement, some coaching or camp work, maybe a year as an assistant — and read it for how the candidate responds to feedback, not for a ledger of wins.
A workable sequence: read applications against written criteria, run a screening call, ask for a demo lesson in front of real students, call references, then bring the finalist to campus to meet the people they would work beside.
References deserve a wider net than for an experienced hire. Ask the cooperating teacher from the student-teaching placement, a professor who observed the classroom, a coach or dorm supervisor — people who saw the candidate teach or lead, not only employ.
In the interview and the demo lesson, listen for the things experience cannot yet supply: a lesson planned from clear goals, checks for understanding mid-lesson, a visible adjustment when something lands wrong, and instincts about when to involve a mentor or counselor.
Ask every candidate the same set so your comparisons stay fair, and score the demo lesson against the criteria you wrote before the first one — our guide to the interview process covers the full sequence.
At a school with a faith mission, the faith-alignment questions belong in that same structured set, designed within the religious-employer rules and reviewed by counsel before the season starts — religious school employment law covers the frame.
Run the safety checks in the same pass as the academic ones, and complete background checks before the first day. Fingerprint and background-check duties for private schools are set state by state — confirm the rule that binds your school with your state education agency rather than borrowing another state's or sector's procedure.
When in the hiring calendar should you start?
Work backwards from your start date, then anchor on the market's season. Carney Sandoe describes its hiring-conference season as running from January through April each year.
Its 2026 events included FORUM/Connect Philadelphia on January 30-31, FORUM/Boston on February 13-14, FORUM/West Los Angeles on February 20 and FORUM/NYC on March 6.
The conferences gather candidates and schools for pre-scheduled 30-minute interviews each winter and spring; they are free for the firm's candidates, and schools pay registration, discounted for member schools.
For a fellowship, start earlier than the conference season: build your postings, career-center relationships and referral asks before spring, when seniors are deciding what they will do after graduation.
A charter residency sets its own clock — work backwards from the training year's start date and any certification-partner deadlines your program design carries.
Midyear vacancies run on their own schedule: post when the vacancy opens rather than waiting for the winter cycle. Our teacher hiring timeline lays out the full sequence.
How do you onboard and keep them?
Onboarding a fellow is onboarding plus teaching. The paperwork is whatever your filings require; the design part is a named mentor, a written first-week schedule, scheduled observations with feedback, and a development plan tied to the duties mix you posted.
Structure the first semester deliberately, and hold the mid-year check-in there — it is where you hear which parts of the program are working and which parts need redesign.
Retention is the return on the whole pipeline. Of the teachers teaching in 2020-21, 82% of private school teachers were still at the same school in 2021-22, 6% had moved to a different school and 12% had left teaching, per NCES's Teacher Follow-up Survey, updated May 2024.
NCES reports the public figure — 84% stayed — with charter schools included and no separate charter line, so a charter school is benchmarking on its own records, not a national charter table.
When private school teachers do move, pay leads: among those who changed schools voluntarily between 2020-21 and 2021-22, 36% cited salary and other job benefits as the most important reason, against 9% of public school movers, per NCES.
For a fellow, the pay question and the pipeline question are the same conversation. Set the conversion decision point in the contract itself — when the year-two conversation happens, what a faculty offer would look like, and what happens if either side declines.
A fellow you do not convert is still an asset: a well-treated alumnus refers candidates for years.
Employer information, not legal or tax advice. Certification, background-check, charter and tax rules come from your state, your authorizer and federal law — confirm the rules that bind your school with your state education agency, your authorizer, a CPA or counsel before you act on them.