Blog Assignment # 3 - How to Become a Professional

Becoming a teacher is not something that one can do directly out of high school. Teaching requires a professional degree, certification and membership to the both the provincial union (the BCTF) and a local district union.

Once a person makes the choice to become a teacher, the first thing to be done is to search out a certified professional development program (PDP) at a university. There are two routes into a PDP: one involves getting a Bachelor of Education through a 4 year program, the other is completing a regular four year Bachelor's degree in a program of choice and then completing a one year teaching program. Either way, you will need to know what you want to teach even before applying to the program because teaching high school requires that you have completed a university major in a teachable subject, or teaching elementary will mean that you have completed coursework in all elementary subjects up to a certain university level.

Acceptance into PDP is based on school grades, personal references, volunteer hours and a personal application. Once accepted into PDP, a student can only become a teacher by completing specific coursework, maintaining a good grade point average and successful completion of two in-class teaching practicums. A teaching practicum is when a student teacher goes into an existing classroom over a period of weeks and takes over regular classroom teaching from the classroom teacher. While the students teacher is teaching, the regular classroom teacher and a university PDP instructor watch and critique the student teacher. This process involves constant feedback, reflection, and improvement. At the end of the practicums it is in the hands of the classroom teacher and the PDP instructor to decide whether or not a student teacher is ready adn capable fo having her/his own classroom. It possible to fail practicums and asked to repeat the following year, and is possibelt o be asked to leave the program permanently if perfomance is very unsatisfactory. Controls like this are in place here in Canada to make sure that only qualified and capable people are becoming professional teachers thus maintaining our high quality educational standards.

Here is a link to the PDP requirements at Simon Fraser University: http://http//www.educ.sfu.ca/pdp/admissions/index.html