I knew that I wanted to become a teacher, but I had no idea what to do next. By my junior year of college, I realised that I had accidentally accrued years of experience, working at my old preschool during summers in high schools, teaching piano to elementary students during my gap year, and my campus job at the university daycare, and all roads led to a career in service of kids and their families via the classroom.
I couldn’t teach at my current job after graduating because my F-1 visa required me to work in a field related to my major, and I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to spin using my Political Science degree into working with babies. A Teach for America Recruiter sent me a message on LinkedIn but I wasn’t eligible as a non-American citizen. I couldn’t teach more formally at a public New York City School because I wasn’t a credentialed teacher. I wasn’t going to get my credential because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay in New York City anymore. As the months went on, I felt stuck on what my plan was going to be, and I really wanted to have a plan by the summer so that I could use that time accordingly.
At the time, I was taking a class as part of my Education Studies minor and at some point during the course of the semester, my professor sent me an email about the Mellon Mays Fellowship that supported undergraduates from historically underrepresented backgrounds into PhD programs. I looked in to it and realised I wasn’t eligible as an international student, but I figured that maybe getting my Masters might actually be the most practical idea. As I meditated on it for a few weeks, the Beyond Barnard career office shared a link in their weekly newsletter to a different graduate school school preparation program, this one held out of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and I was eligible for it. I applied and held my breath.
There are lots of ways that you can become a teacher. You can go through a credentialing program for a year or two that usually includes hours in the classroom, coursework, and licensing tests. You can apply for a position at a private or charter school, usually with an undergraduate degree. You can apply for a position at a public school with a complete or a pending teaching credential. You can join a teaching fellowship program that provides you with some preliminary training before placing you in the classroom and then coaching you as you teach. You can volunteer or substitute teach or work after-school or be a classroom aide and then transition in to becoming a classroom teacher through the aforementioned processes.
There isn’t a consensus around what is needed to become a teacher. Is it enough to have a high school diploma, or a bachelors degree, or some post-graduate experience? How fluent should teachers be in in their subject matter, and what should tests and coursework look like to determine their knowledge? How much prior experience working with kids should one have and what should that experience look like, day school versus after-school, part-time versus full-time, self-directed versus coached? Unlike some professions that either require standard exams or other professions that only call for an interest in the field, the hodgepodge of pathways that one can use to become a teacher reflect a hodgepodge of opinions — What does it take to become a teacher? Or, alternatively, what should it take?
In theory, we would love the most educated, most fluent, most personable teachers in our classroom. In reality, we’ll settle for whoever just wants to be there. As a result, we have a teaching force that is varied in how we all come into the work, and although this accessibility makes it easier to provide students with their fundamental human right to an education, it is not without consequence. Why do different pathways towards teaching recruit and how do others pathways repel? What might the different approaches say what we think teaching is and who we want our teachers to be? How might the ways that different teachers arrive in the classroom ultimately influence the education students receive as well as the field writ-large?
There were twenty-something of us in my cohort at the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers. We were Black, Latinx, and Asian juniors and seniors from colleges around the country, brought together to spend the month of July at Andover to prepare us for graduate school so that we could diversify the teaching force. We spent the mornings reading Foucault, Freire and other foundational theoretical texts, and in the afternoons we would do some sort of prep, like drafting our personal statements, studying for the GRE, or doing practice interviews. By the end of the four weeks, I was even more sure that getting my Masters was going to be the best next step. Going in to my senior year of college, I still loved doing readings and being a part of class discussions and learning as part of a cohort, and so when I started back at Barnard that fall, I did so with clarity and a laser focus on my future.
I needed it because applying for graduate school was more work than I had anticipated it to be, and unlike applying for college with all of your friends, now back at school, I was mostly on my own. I had to write personal statements as well as school-specific essays for those that requested them, I took the GRE and some initial tests required for a credential, and I collected letters of recommendations from my professors and current and former employers. By winter break, I was thankfully all done and as I started my final semester of college, I began weighing my options of where I would go next.
Getting my Masters was how I was going to start my teaching career, and so in considering where I was going to go to school, I also needed to consider in how that choice might influence the kind of teacher that I wanted to be. I had to decide between Elementary Education programs or Early Childhood Education programs and thus what age-range I wanted to teach. I thought about which programs seemed more practicum-focused and which ones looked more research and theory-based, and I considered which one was more important to me as a teacher. I tried to picture myself in upstate New York and Nashville and Los Angeles and Boston and the Bay Area, and tried to imagine what my students would be like based on what I knew about those geographical corners. But, all things considered, I knew that in the end, the deciding factor would have nothing to do with any of this. I was going to go where I could afford to go and cross my fingers that it aligned with all of my values.
If you want it to be, becoming a teacher can be a hard and taxing endeavour. You can apply to be in a program, and study, and complete coursework, and take tests, and pay for the tests, and go into debt. If you want it to be, becoming a teacher can be an easy, almost accidental adventure. You can get recruited, or walk into a school, or get a connect, and get paid whilst you figure out your next step. Certain pathways make becoming a teacher challenging through all the barriers for entry, as others encourage any and all into our classrooms that desperately need teachers. Becoming a teacher can make you money immediately or plunge you into financial stress. You can start teaching in a way that makes it easy to come and easy to stay, or you can decide to take the long and winding road at the start and commit to whatever comes your way.
We have mixed messaging on how we believe one should become a teacher because we lack an agreement around what we think teaching is. We think teaching is something anyone can do and thus anyone should do it, hence the bare minimum is required. We also think teaching is something that requires expertise and mastery and thus, subsequent gatekeeping is implemented. This in and of itself is not inherently negative or positive, and the beauty of teaching is that it is filled with so many of us from different walks of life. The problem comes from the fact that the pathways of least resistance, with the largest revolving doors, tend to lead straight into the classrooms with the most marginalized kids sitting at the desks. The variety of teachers in the workforce is great, but research shows that the teachers with the least training, least experience, and who are more likely to leave after a few years congregate in schools made up predominantly of students of colour and from lower-income households. And because the quality of education one receives hinges so much on the teacher making that education possible, where and how that teacher came to be should be of utmost importance.
We want our teachers to be bright, dynamic and committed, but we will accept candidates who do not meet that bar in communities that need them the most, because they don’t have anyone anyways. At the moment, all it takes to become a teacher is an interest and the Choose-Your-Own adventure begins, but what would it take to raise the bar and demand more than a passing interest from those interested in educating our future? The challenge of course is inadvertently causing more damage by denying students potential teachers, but how is it that certain communities are forced with the Catch-22 of either an unqualified teacher or no teacher at all? What do we allow for some kids that we would never allow for others?
I wanted an Early Childhood Education program that would give me both a Masters and teaching credential. I wanted to be in a program that was small but was cohort style with a focus on practical experience in the classroom. I wanted to teach in city school with students of colour, somewhere not too cold. And I wanted to spend the least amount of money. Stanford checked all of the boxes, except that it was for a Masters in Elementary Education. That was a concession I was willing to make.
So much of life is happenstance, especially upon reflection. Had my professor not mentioned graduate school, I’m not sure I would have considered it in time. Had I not gone to graduate school, I’m not sure how I would have become a teacher. Maybe I would have done something else or gone about it some way else. But like many others who become teachers, it ended up happening because a lot fell into place and a lot fell out too.
I knew that I wanted to become a teacher, and for all its faults, the flexibility of the field enabled me with many different ways for that to happen. That I do love. I graduated from Barnard in May, flew to San Francisco in June, and just like that it started to happen. I became a teacher.
I love this! What you’re talking about is soso important! Teachers were determining factors for sm of my classmates in choosing their IGCSE and A Level subjects, and now even at uni I talk sm about how lucky I am that my department has such teachers who are so good in sm ways and j care sm about the students! It really makes the biggest difference