ESL Teachers Board Review: Jobs, Forums & Lesson Library

ESL Teachers Board (eslteachersboard.com) is a community site built around ESL/EFL teachers and, to a lesser extent, students. It combines several tools that most ESL sites split across separate platforms:

• Job listings — overseas and online teaching positions, mostly user-submitted
• Teacher forum — discussion threads on schools, countries, lesson ideas, and the industry
• School reviews — community-written reviews of language schools and recruiters
• Scam alerts — user-submitted warnings about suspect schools or job offers
• Lesson plans, printables, articles — a long-tail library of teaching material
• Student services — listings for accommodation, tutors, pen pals, and lessons

The site's design is dated — Perl/CGI-era tables and minimal CSS — which is partly why many users arrive via search-engine queries for specific school or country reviews rather than as regular visitors. The strength of the site has always been the depth of the forum archive, not the visual polish.

ESL Teachers Board works best in these specific situations:

• Job research: scanning overseas teaching listings that smaller sites don't carry, especially in Asia and Latin America.
• School vetting: reading community-written reviews and scam alerts before signing a contract with a language school abroad.
• Country deep-dives: forum threads covering visa, salary, housing, and culture for individual countries.
• Lesson inspiration: pulling printable activity ideas to remix into your own materials (treat as a starting point, not finished curriculum).
• Networking: the forum is where teachers compare notes about specific employers — useful when you're weighing competing offers.

ESL Teachers Board is a useful, if aging, community resource. The combination of free job listings + a forum with school reviews + scam alerts is hard to find on a single site, especially free. For teachers researching overseas contracts, it remains one of the few free places where you can read unfiltered comments about specific employers.

The weaknesses are real: the lesson library is uneven, the site's hosting has been flaky in recent checks, and the dated interface will frustrate anyone used to modern web apps. None of that matters as much if you use it for what it does best — job research and community intel — and pair it with one of the alternatives below for actual classroom materials.

Honest recommendation: keep ESL Teachers Board bookmarked for job research and school vetting, especially before signing overseas contracts. For lesson planning, use it as a brainstorming aid only — go to ESL Brains or Teach-This for ready-to-print quality. For a more polished job-board experience, Dave's ESL Cafe is the original and still active.