How to Write a Recommendation Letter for a Student: Teacher’s Guide + Samples

Learn how to write a letter of recommendation for a student using my Teacher’s Guide + Samples. Write a letter of recommendation that makes your student shine. Know an amazing student who deserves some recognition? Let us know over at collegeessay…

When I was a high school English teacher, my greatest nightmare was that my students would form a mob around me and overpower me (thank goodness it only happened once).

Even so, the same overwhelming feeling of angst bore down upon me every year around application season. As your list of recommendation letters for students continues to grow, maybe you can understand.

But fear no more! We’ll show you why writing strong recommendation letters for your students can be one more way to serve them in their future academics. While we’re at it, we’ll also walk you through how letters of recommendation for teachers differ from the counselor letter; then, we’ll offer you two different schools of thought on how to write recommendation letters for students.

Both approaches work well, so we’ll show you how each is done—with examples for your reading pleasure.

In the spirit of this topic, we’ve gathered advice from a number of experts, including:

And I’m Alexis, a high school English teacher-turned college counselor-turned journalist. Ethan (the College Essay Guy) and I serve as your synthesizers and storytellers in this guide, which we’ve chunked into a few parts:

TABLE OF CONTENTS