Hi, so I’m potentially interested in becoming an elementary school teacher down the road, and I understand it would be much easier to major in elementary education. However, there are 2 reasons why I’m hesitant to do this.
I'm not completely sure if this is what I want to do yet, and I don't want to be confined to this narrow major should I decide to change my focus down the road.
All of the schools that I could see myself realistically going to don't have an education major, which is a huge bummer.
So my question is this:
Would it be feasible to major in Human Development or a social science with a minor in Educational Studies, and after undergraduate school, go to graduate school for Elementary Education?
I want to leave my options open for now, so I feel I’d be better off maybe majoring in a social science like Human Development, which would still allow me to learn a lot of potentially useful things should I decide to go into teaching. Also, if I minor in education or educational studies, that should help me stay somewhat on course, right? ***I probably would want to get a masters in elementary education anyway, even if I were to major elementary education for undergraduate school.
Is this a realistic idea for me, or will I regret this down the road? Thanks in advance for any help.
Yes! There are a couple different ways you can do this:
Go straight into a traditional elementary education master’s program after college, or after working a few years if you wanted. These typically take 2 years.
Go into an credentialing-only program or a master’s program that’s designed for earning the credential, specifically. Those tend to be just one year in length. UW has an example: https://education.uw.edu/programs/teacher/elementary-tep.
There are many state- and national-level programs that allow you to teach while earning your teaching credential, usually to fill some kind of need area. There’s Teach for America, of course, which is famous for that. On the state and city level, there are programs like
Some states have far less formal programs, where you can apply for alternative certification by setting up your own arrangement with an elementary school.
One way that you can make yourself more competitive for these types of programs is to learn another language, to make yourself eligible for bilingual certification. You’re also way more competitive for jobs with a bilingual endorsement, too. Spanish, of course, is the most valuable and widespread language, followed by Chinese (a more distant third, and there are several dialects). But depending on what city in the U.S. you’re interested in teaching in, other languages might be applicable.
My recommendation would be to major in either American Studies or Environmental science, to have a broad background either in social studies or science (science will likely be rarer and more valuable) with a foreign language minor including a semester abroad (ask the major school districts what languages they need: Spanish may be necessary, in some areas Somali, Arabic, French/Haitian Creole…)
You may take a few classes in History or Philosophy of education with that.
In some states, a BA+Master’s in education is the only path.