So is having the big ceremony with the cap and gown necessary to make you an effective home schooling teacher? In a word, no. There are many people who have received the cap and gown who are teaching in schools that aren't effective teachers! Yep. I said it. Just because you have a teaching degree doesn't necessarily make you an effective teacher, and just because you don't have a teaching degree doesn't mean you're not going to be a kick arse home schooling teacher. What matters is your passion and drive to be a great teacher. If you don't have this, there's a good chance you're going to suck. But I'm thinking that if you're reading up on homeschooling, you've already got the passion and drive needed!
So let's have a look at teaching qualifications. I'm calling them 'teaching qualification' because not all teachers have a degree in Education. All teachers will have a degree in something, but it doesn't have to be Education. If you have any degree you could have completed a "Dip Ed" in just one year. This is basically the fast track into teaching for people wanting a change of career. So the teacher in front of a class of twenty five students may have received their teaching qualifications in a year- completing 8-10 units to do so, with a handful of weeks experience in the classroom.
A large percentage of my time in university was spent covering education theories. Piaget, Multiple Intelligences, De Bono's Thinking Hats and more. Most of this was learnt from a book- so it's nothing a non-teacher can't research themselves. With the use of the internet there is a lot more information readily available now than when I was studying. Then there's Maths 1 and Maths 2 units of work. Each unit consisted of a one hour lecture and a two tutorial- so three hours a week in total. Over 12 weeks this totals 36 hours. So Maths 1 and Maths 2 totalled 72 hours. The figures were the same for Literacy 1 and Literacy 2. If you do one hour a day of Numeracy or research on Numeracy teaching, five days a week it's only going to take 15 weeks to 'catch up.' I think that's pretty 'do-able.'
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| Understanding your child's needs. Not the needs of 25. |
The content of the units covered in university consisted mostly of 'how students learn X subject.' Nothing that couldn't be learnt from a book or good website. I'm going to go out there and I'm saying that 95% of what I've learnt about teaching and education has come from my hands on experience in the classroom working with kids. I've learnt about the different ways students learn, and I think this has helped me to be a good teacher. What home schooling parents need to remember is that they don't have to worry about all the different ways kids learn. They just need to have a good understanding of how
their child or children learn. Not twenty five kids, just their kids.
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| Should there be a minimum score to get into teaching? |
Then there's the 'score' you had to get in order to get a place to do teaching. In my first year of my education degree I met a young lass who bragged and joked about that fact that her TER score was so low that if she had scored 2 points lower she wouldn't have actually received a score. True story. Luckily for the education system she unsurprisingly failed every subject in the first semester. Unluckily for the public at large- she went on to start a nursing degree. She's not the only one who has gotten into a teaching degree that just doesn't have the right mind set to be a good teacher. The score required to get into teaching obviously goes up and down depending on how many Year 12 students apply at the end of the year, but I truly believe that there should be a minimum cut off for entry scores for teaching, even if this means there are more places than there are eligible applicants.
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| Giving great teachers a bad name... |
Just like any profession, there are a number of teachers out there, both beginning teachers and experienced teachers, who perform poorly in their jobs. It is very hard for schools to get rid of under performing teachers. In fact there's very little checking up on teachers all together. I've been asked whether I do my work program, assessments and Learning Improvement Plans, to which I say yes, and it is left at that. Of course I do all of these things because that helps me to be a better teacher to my students. However, I know of a number of teachers who don't do these things even though they say they do...I've heard of principals complaining about under performing teachers but also saying there is no way to get rid of them. I have a friend (not at my school) who complained to me one day that she'd forgotten to bring her ipad into work and that she had 'nothing to do' while her students were doing their work... groan. And then there's a Facebook friend who regularly posts things like "just teaching a maths class"... well no, you're not- you're on Facebook. These are great examples of teachers who give all teachers a bad name....
I'm surprised at how many people say to me when they learn about us home schooling, things along the lines of "but how will you teach them?" or "how will you know what to teach them?" This is said to me
by people who know I'm a teacher. I'm serious. I don't respond to such questions with anything other than 'I've got it covered.' So for non teachers out there, be ready for these types of questions. If I get them and I'm a teacher you are definitely going to get them too. Remember that you are their first and most important teacher your kids will ever have. You were capable of teaching them to walk and talk, crawl and feed themselves. For me it's a matter of 'my kid, my responsibility.'
So if you have passion for teaching your kids then you are going to be a fantastic teacher. And when people ask you what you do for a living, feel free to say 'I'm a teacher"- because you are!
I hope you've enjoyed this post. Please feel free to share, comment and like on Facebook. Feel free to message me with any edits or typos.
Love Alexis
I really enjoyed this article. It was well-researched and informative. It seems the biggest qualification to home schooling is loving your kids and investing in their futures. Who better to do that than Mom (or Mum).
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment Mrs Sutko. You've nailed it. Parents have the most invested in their children so yes, if you think it's right for you, you can be their greatest and most influential teacher they have. Happy homeschooling! Love Alexis :)
DeleteWhilst I love that you are supporting and encouraging homeschooling parents, I don't really think that belittling the training of teachers is necessarily all that helpful. As you have stated, a classmate of yours failed all her teaching subjects and dropped out of the teaching course altogether as a result. I think this shows that there is a little more to gaining a teaching degree than just "a big ceremony with the cap and gown". I'm not sure how you managed to get through your degree doing only 3 hours a week of each subject and only studying during your face-to-face sessions, but I assure you, most teachers commit far more time to their studies than simply their allocated lecture and tutorial times. I think it is also worth pointing out that university lecturers are required to be experienced and knowledgeable in their subject areas. Internet bloggers and writers are not. It would therefore be worth pointing out that homeschooling mothers would be wise to be discerning about the sources of information they use to guide their teaching practices. I would suggest that it might even be helpful to suggest that many homeschooling families might find it helpful to form a support network of trusted family or friends who may be experienced in the education field (such as any friends who may be teachers). Most teachers do actually have a lot of valuable and worthwhile knowledge about how children learn and can readily list off a whole raft of activities or ideas that might help develop a particular learning focus. I think it would be great if more homeschoolers were more open to the idea of working alongside teachers when possible, rather than encouraging the animosity that often exists between homeschooling parents and school teachers.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with the idea that a lot of learning to be a good classroom teacher is about learning to cater to the whole range of learning styles, behavioural issues and extra curricular demands that come with teaching an entire classroom full of children at the same time. This is a big difference between the role of the classroom teacher compared to that of a homeschooling parent and is a big part of the reason why parents without any teaching qualifications can potentially be fabulous homeschooling teachers without the need for any formal training.
Surely we must acknowledge that the homeschooling community will be susceptible to the same vulnerabilities as any community, as is the teaching community, and it is therefore possible that some parents will not in fact, mae good homeschoolers, just as some teachers (as you have shown with your anecdotal evidence) do not make very good classroom teachers.
Perhaps as a homeschooler and a teacher, you could help to support a more positive relationship between the professional education community and the homeschooling community, rather than simply adding fire to the pre-existing flames of animosity.
Thanks for your comment. I’m so glad you’ve had a positive experience with your teaching degree. Unfortunately not everyone has such a positive experience. I’m not sure where you’ve done your teaching degree however the teaching degree I completed was substandard at best. I have many home schooling mothers and fathers questioning their ability to teach their own children because they don’t have what they see as being an all-important teaching degree. Why would any parent want to put their child into the same education system that has them questioning their own capacity to educate their own children? I reiterate that 95% of what I know as a good teacher I learnt by teaching children- not sitting in a lecture studying. There was nothing, nothing in my teaching degree that a dedicated, well researched parent could learn themselves.
DeleteAs for my friend who failed. She failed her first semester in her teaching degree because she couldn’t even pass high school. The score she received in high school was 9/100, which means she scored in the lowest 10% in the country. The point of this story is that the standard for being accepted into a teaching degree is rock bottom, but yet some of these people make it through to teach real children in our public schools. This lass was uncommitted to her learning as a high school student and this followed her into university. If she was dedicated to her studies she wouldn’t have failed. It wasn’t because it was too hard. It’s interesting to note that in Norway a person needs to have a Masters of Education or higher in order to become a teacher, and their literacy and numeracy scores are some of the highest in the world. Maybe we need to take a look into their education system to see where we can improve. Teacher education is, in my opinion, one of the areas that need to be addressed.
And yes, three hours a week face to face time and a few hours writing papers is all it took to get Ds and HDs in every single subject for four years. I spent most of my extra time volunteering in schools to get real, hands on experience.
Oh, and I’m not a blogger. I’m a teacher who blogs.
Happy Home schooling
Love Alexis XOXOXXO