When I graduated*, Australian (3-year program) graduates required only a 6 month qualification (half of which was teaching practice), but now it’s a 4 year requirement. Out of the 4 year requirement, it’s still only a 3 month teaching practice: the rest of it is writing essays.
In this jurisdiction, I don’t blame just ‘the unions’. It’s also ‘the universities’ that benefit from requiring a 4 year degree for certification.
*And French university graduates had only recently lost the automatic qualification to teach straight out of university.
Here in Alberta, if you already have a degree you still have to complete a one or two year after degree program in education, then you have to get certified, which involves something like 400 hours of clasroom experience. If you want to teach in high school you have to have degrees in the subjects you want to trach, and you have to be able to teach two subjects. So unless you have a degree in science with a minor in math or something, you may have to take a second degree.
Once you jump through all those hoops you have to find a job, and not a lot of places are hiring 50-something brand new teachers. If you do get work, it will likely be in the substitute teaching pool, and you’ll never go further than that.
I knew a guy who had an English degree and was working in the theater industry. There was no money in it, so he went back to school and got his teaching credentials. All he ever got for his trouble was a few substitute jobs, always on short notice and with an indefinite span. Since he had to work full time he eventually dropped put of the pool and found a job outside teaching. My son says he was the best English teacher he ever had, and he’s no longer teaching.
So the time commitment to become a teacher is significant, the hoops to jump through numerous, and in the end the risk that not much will come of it are high.
IME, their is an extreme reluctance to hire part time teachers. Part of this is that because of benefits, 2 part time teachers are more expensive than one full time teacher. But the bigger issue is the perception that if one part time person leaves, it would be hard to replace them because their are so few PT teachers out there. It’s circular.
I do wish part time employment was more of a thing. I know several women who were teachers and left the workforce to take care of children. They’d be thrilled to reenter the profession and make half a professional salary, and would do good work. But even once the kids are in school, full time outside the house work won’t work for their family, and part time non-professional work doesn’t seem worth it. This isn’t just an issue in teaching, of course. Our national disdain for the concept of part time professional is unfortunate.
Teachers in Texas can complete their certification while working as teachers. There are half a dozen programs. We still have a shortage of math and science teachers (and SpEd and bilingual and LOTE and several other things).
I am not sure you understand this. Have you asked the mods to fix your title yet? It is misleading.
It is racist at least to the degree that wannabe teachers who can afford to buy a CBest test prep class pass at a much higher rate. Do we want only people with money to be able to be teachers?
Again, it’s crucial to think about the difference between knowing a subject, and knowing how to teach a subject. I’d put my mathematical competence up against 99% of elementary math teachers: I have a really, really good grasp of elementary school math and why it works and interesting connections between them. But I am straight up humbled by the ability of some of my co-workers to explain concepts to kids in a way that works for them. It’s really, really hard to do, and not at all the same skill as performing math.
Don’t believe me? Okay. I got a fourth grader that’s not entirely clear on the concept of division, much less on the concept of numerators and denominators. It’s time to teach this kid how to compare fractions like 2/3 and 3/4. How do you do it, such that they understand the concept and can use their understanding to compare 6/7 and 9/10?
I agree that’s a pretty high bar to clear. It doesn’t look to me though that you need 400 hours of classroom experience on top of the education degree. That’s to make your certification permanent, which doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Still, if Alberta has a shortage of teachers, some alternative and shorter paths would be appropriate.
That’s not specific to teachers though. Changing careers late in life is always difficult.
And what do you think the solution would be there? I’d expect that if the bar for accepting career changed teacher’s was lower, there would be even more competition for those positions, and they would, as a group, be less attractive hires.
400 hours sounds like a lot, but it’s a semester at 4.5 classroom hours/day (those math word problems!) It isn’t onerous to ask a prospective teacher to spend a semester in a classroom getting observed and getting feedback before they’re let loose with students. How much shorter do you want? Is the alternative proposal that schools should just let people who want to teach in with just a week of practice? None at all?
I meant the 1-2 year degree in education before that, if you have a degree in a relevant subject matter and you’ve been working for a while. As I wrote in my previous post, in Norway you can start teaching, without such a degree, and do the certification degree in parallel, part time, over three semesters.
The Norwegian school system hasn’t collapsed under this, and it’s allowed for easier recruitment of STEM teachers with experience outside of academia.
FWIW I tend to think an apprenticeship program would be excellent. Folks who want to be a teacher should spend a year as a paid teacher assistant. What you’d learn from that would be worth more than any single college course could ever teach.
I’m actually surprised that there are people who don’t immediately grok that arithmetic test is not the same as “arithmetic”, which says something about my background, but having repeated the same thing several times in this thread, I think it’s unnecessary to explain that in every single post.
Yep. Teaching introductory stuff is a skill, and it’s one not everybody has. College example, but I took a chemistry class meant for people who’d never had it before, and who had no plans to continue. I came out of there with a 21% average in tests. 21%. That was a solid C. An A was something like 52%. One person out of our class of roughly 125 got an A. He could teach, but not at a beginning level.
On another note, I’m reliably informed the the University of Arizona medical school is worried because too many students can’t pass the Board exam.
Our school has very few Black teachers, but lots of Black instructional assistants. I was talking with one IA who’s brilliant and great with kids and asked her if she’d ever thought about getting her license. “Sure!” she said. “But I can’t afford to.”
She could swing night classes or online classes. But the idea of being out of work for three months so she could student teach was financially impossible for her. IAs aren’t paid enough to be able to afford to stop being IAs.
Well, this is great debates, so this time I’m not going to bother posting references (I’ve had it with ‘there were references but I still don’t believe it’). Anywhere else, I’d hope that you would recognize the difference between ‘preventing’ and ‘systemic bias’, but here, you can take whatever argument position you want.