Reference Letter for my employee teacher

a reference letter on Sari's behalf

To Whom It May Concern

I am writing to you with regard to Sari Amara, who has requested that I write a reference letter on her behalf. Sari and I discussed her recent decision to pursue graduate study and I support her decision and strong desire to take her dedication and skill to the next level.

I have worked with Sari since I was assigned as the Principal of SMA PKP in May 2015. Specifically, I am a part of Yayasan Ibnu Abbas Leadership Team - the Governing Body of SMA PKP, and Sari was our Sr. Teacher. Her devotion in gaining every task done completely, her ability to position herself suitably towards other teachers and students, and her out-of-the-box English enhancement and character-building program are few of her excellencies as I assigned her as the Vice Principal of Curriculum the second year on July 2016. Her responsible are ranged from curriculum engineering, facilitating comprehensive teaching and learning environment to ensuring effective school management and budgeting.

Over the time that I have known Sari, she has consistently performed her duties with competence and often goes the extra mile, doing more than expected. The biggest challenge last year was on the Comprehensive End of Semester Weeks Program, which became one of SMA PKP top priority. The Vice Principal of Student Affairs of SMA PKP had left the country and headed to Saudi Arabia for Umroh in this time. Sari had to take over the responsibility of the Comprehensive End of Semester Weeks Program Lead, which covers English Presentation Guidance & Mentoring Program, Quran Public Hearing Program, English Presentation - Oral Exam, Final Semester Examination Program, and Accelerated Memorizing Quran Program. She collaborated with very limited teachers, but was able to proportionally list detail job descriptions and arrange any necessary key performance indicators for each task for each teacher and placed the right teachers on the right duties. She also supplely created the mix-and-match formula of teachers in charge pairs for each task. She led a weekly preparation and evaluation meeting with the whole team and did a thorough monitoring activity. Despite of many challenges, our team accomplished many achievements. First, the students' average score of English Presentation - Oral Exam is 80 out of 100, which means that the English Presentation Guidance & Mentoring Program had run effectively. Second, there were 20% of students following Accelerated Memorizing Quran Program had reached 10 pages of Quran although few teachers got sick during the time. Quick response towards the situation made the teachers fought the disease and continued the program. Hence, the program obtained 4 out of 5 of students' satisfactory rating. Third, since Sari had reminded the teachers to work on students' answer sheet directly after Final Semester Examination, the reports of it were given to parents only after a week of processing time. Sari had shown the spirit of unleashing the power of people, kept the team motivated, to achieve our common goal.

Taking a look at the mid of 2016 as I saw her ability in writing, I pointed her as the Liaison Teacher for End-Year Book of 2015/2016 Academic Year. She successfully led a team of five teachers, three students, and one graphic designer. She not only advised them to write and inspired them to produce articles in English language, but also did a great editing work on them, produced her own magnificent short story and helped our graphic designer by designing every page of the Book. Since the articles were varied from an action class research excerpt, tips on how to internalize Islamic valued in daily basic, to short story, the Book serves as an artistic documentation of our school first year journey, delivers more value-add to our school's long-term interest, and feeds sufficient information for future students and parents of new academic year 2016/2017.

Since there are very few play scripts themed Islamic values and Indonesia diverse culture available on the internet or in the library, Sari had demonstrated excellent strategic actions in producing more Islamic value scripts that embrace many cultures in Indonesia. In producing play scripts, she learnt from the internet, did some modification on the stories by integrating Islamic values, so that our school was able to produce on-stage dramas that was performed by our students in school fund raising activities. Her idea to integrate Islamic values in play scripts as one of school fund raising performances had improved our students' perception of Islam Rahmatan Lil Alamin, reinforced more positive values and improve our students' mental well-being.

Sari, your reference letter is improperly written. It does not contain the correct references, structure, nor information that is required of a recommendation letter. It is important that you write a totally new letter that properly addresses the content of an authoritative reference letter.

Make sure that the person writing the essay identifies himself at the start of the letter. That will include the position of the person writing the letter, how long the person has known and worked with you, in what capacity the two of your work or worked together, and finally, his recommendation reference. With that said, I have to highlight the fact that a reference letter cannot be written by a person of lower rank than you in an office or academic setting. These letters are normally written by supervisors, team leaders, not people who were your student or something even lower than that. From the way your letter is written, it seems like the person writing this is a subordinate of yours. That will not work for a recommendation letter.

Focus the letter only on the direct work relationship that you had with the person recommending you. Just highlight your traits that make you a good student for this masters degree. Now, you are assuming that the reviewer will be highly familiar with the terms you are using this essay, that is the wrong assumption. Try to keep your technical terms in reference to your country specific educational tests and the like down to a minimum. Do not make it sound like the overall success of the students who took the test rested solely on your abilities as there were other teachers involved in their education and training prior to the test.

The list of mistakes in this letter is too long to cover in this single post. So let me just tell you this, write a new letter. One that covers your character as a teacher and your accomplishments in the field that can be credited to you alone. Do not take credit for group work, that is the wrong approach to this essay.