These are intended as follow up to a previous post. If you are considering teaching, what should you do to help you decide if it really is the career for you? What should you do to prepare yourself? These two questions have very closely related answers. Much of what you do to help you decide will also to prepare you. Ultimately, you should do all or most of these things on your trajectory to become a teacher.
Key activities to prepare you and help you determine if teaching is right for you:
- Work with kids in a mentoring, teaching or coaching capacity. This is the single most important thing you can do. Before you go on to student teach, you will want some of this experience to be in a school setting, but it doesn’t need to start there. Working in summer camp settings, for example, provides great experience. As you do this work, think about (and perhaps write about) what it is you are helping them to figure out. What makes it hard to figure out what kids are figuring out?
- Evaluate what aspects of teaching will be most challenging for you and seek out experiences that will help you to grow. If getting up in front of a group makes you nervous, initially find ways to work with smaller groups and build up to larger groups. Coaching, summer rec programs and camps are good places to get this kind of experience. Of course, so is volunteering in schools. This is a common concern, but teaching is much more than talking in front of a group. You need to understand content deeply and in different ways than other professionals. You also need to understand understanding and how it is built. That means you need to learn about learning and learn about kids (or adults, if that’s who you will teach).
- Always work on building content knowledge — and think about how new knowledge is generated. Most content standards give good attention to ways of immersing students in the activities of the discipline, whatever the discipline might be. Elementary teachers need to think about this across disciplines.
- Build understanding of how you learn. Think beyond the idea of “I’m a visual learner.” (Most people claim that they are). That idea goes primarily to information input. How do you organize information? Consider the reports from National Research Council’s Committee on How People Learn. Links to all of those reports are found in the Learning Links section of this site.
- Analyze the teachers you have and have had. What characteristizes the best teachers you’ve had? What characterizes the worst? Did your classmates generally agree on teacher quality related to these teachers? What are the implications of that?
- Watch videos that show good teaching. Many fascinating classroom video can be viewed online. My favorite site for this is Annenberg Media (formerlythe Annenberg/CPB Channel). It’s URL is easy to remember: http://learner.org/. There are many other sites, including some that are specific to certain subject areas. Engaging examples of middle school math teaching can be found at the Modeling Middle School Mathematics Project site.
- Consider carefully the differencs between learning and teaching. What are somethings that you understand well? How did you build those understandings? For many people much of what they understand well they learned in ways very different from traditional schooling. I believe this is an indicator that schools should change.
- Think about what motivates you. Some great teachers are driven primarily by their passion for the content they teach. Others are driven more by the fulfillment that comes from working with young people and the promise of changing the world through enriching young people’s lives. I think most good teachers have a mixture of these passions (though some won’t admit it). I’ll admit that I began exploring education because I saw that becoming a physics teacher would allow me to play with toys in front of an audience. I still like that, but once I saw that I was helping kids make sense of the world, my primary purpose changed. If you want to teach because you think it will be easy, you should look for a different career. Please.
- Familiarize yourself with requirements in the state where you wish to teach. For most undergraduates considering teaching, completing a university-based teacher education program will lead to certification that is transferable to many other states. This is true for non-traditional students as well, but they are often more constrained financially or geographically. New York State has a reprocity agreement with most other states making it fairly simple to gain licensure in the new state. New York State requirements can be found here.
- Look at the job market where you want to teach. In much of the Northeast, there is a substantial surplus of elementary school teachers, for example. There are ways you can make yourself a more attractive candidate to schools in fields with a surplus of certified teachers. Math and English are the focus of much elementary teaching and many elementary teachers and have weaker science backgrounds. Majoring or minoring in one of these areas can help build strengths not common to the applicant pool. At the secondary level, math, special education, Spanish and certain kinds of science teachers are generally in higher demand. While generally science teachers are in high demand, this is considerably less true in biology. Talk to professionals in the kinds of schools you would like to work. Find out what they think makes candidates stand out.
What do teachers reading this list suggest? What to future teachers wonder about?
