Elementary School Teacher Qualifications

Video Transcript

"The traditional route is to go through four years of college majoring in education and when you come out you can take some tests and you're a certified teacher. But there are a lot of alternative certification programs throughout the nation that take anywhere from twelve months to eighteen months where someone who has a college degree can go and get the additional information they need to become a certified teacher. Well the one I know about is Region 4 at Houston ISD in Houston, Texas. And it's and eighteen month program through the University of St Thomas and you take graduate level courses that seem to be primarily in elementary aged students and reading. And then there were a lot of additional classes on classroom management. At the end of that eighteen months including a year of working in the classroom you were given a full teacher certification. I don't know if they still do that because of some of the no child left behind requirements. I didn't go the traditional way and take all the educational classes they think are necessary. I would say if you're aware of what happened to you in classroom management and what was effective and what was not effective that is one of the best things you're going to learn in being able to control the atmosphere of your classroom when you become a teacher. If you know what works for you and you can speculate as to what would work for others. I was a journalist before and the students seem completely enamored with the idea that my name was in print and pictures I've taken are in papers. But I think anything you do outside of the classroom you can bring into the classroom in some way or another because essentially we're teaching the basics of life every day in the elementary age student. I think you need to have effective communication skills. You need to be able to communicate with children and parents alike. You need to like children and there are elementary teachers who do not and they should move on. You need to have imagination and creativity because you're not going to be given all the resources you need to do what you need to do. And you're going to need to find a way to make that happen. So if they don't have manipulative's you might be using dry beans and those are manipulative's and that's fine. So you need to be able to take a curriculum and make it real in the eyes of an eight year old. There are a lot of opportunities for advancement from here. I'll probably stay a classroom teacher for the rest of my life because that's what I want to do. But you could be a reading specialist, a literacy leader. They have math specialists. You could move into administration. I'm trying to think. We have title one coordinators that's an additional administrative position at our school. So there are a variety of ways to move up and stay in education."