Basic Requirements

• All teachers must, at minimum, have completed an undergraduate course of study in which they took a comprehensive array of primary, elementary or secondary education classes. Most states require an internship of some sort, usually shadowing a professional educator as a student teacher. Upon graduating, the student must sit for the state's certification exam. A prospective educator may also complete post-graduate degrees or certifications that automatically lead to professional certification when she graduates.
  
  

Undergraduate Studies

• All states require a bachelor's degree from candidates seeking employment as a public educator. Almost all private schools require this, as well. A common approach for students is to seek certification in the subject areas on which they concentrated as undergraduates. For example, a prospective math educator would major in mathematics as an undergraduate. Most states also require that a candidate for educational certification take a basic body of courses in elementary or secondary education, including courses in subjects pertaining to the field, such as lesson planning, classroom management, and child and adolescent developmental psychology. If a student wants to enter a highly specialized field of education, such as special needs education, her undergraduate career is a good place to start laying the educational foundation for that goal. Typically, an undergraduate degree takes four years to complete.
  
  

Student Teaching and Certification

• All states require that a person seeking certification as a public educator spend some time interning in a classroom at the educational level of his choosing. Typically, this involves two sequential semesters, or an average school year. A person seeking to become an elementary teacher may be a student teacher for a third-grade classroom, for example.
  
  How a student seeks this field experience varies from state to state. Some states allow you to fulfill this requirement as an undergraduate course, finishing the internship at the same time as your undergraduate degree. In these cases, the internship doesn't prolong the certification process; the student may seek certification after completing the four-year course of undergraduate studies. In other states, the prospective educator must fulfill the student teaching requirement separate from her undergraduate studies, as a full-time student teacher. For certification candidates in these states, this adds another year of training.
  
  In a few states, a student may count student teaching internships toward the fulfillment of a postgraduate certificate in education, prior to seeking certification as a teacher.
  
  

Teaching at the University Level

• Universities typically require, at minimum, a master's degree in the field in which you seek to teach. Many universities require a doctorate-level degree for full-time and tenured employees. This post-graduate work must be in the field in which the candidate seeks to teach. Seeking postgraduate credentials may lengthen a student's schooling years by two to six years, depending on the types of degrees he seeks and the coursework he must fulfill to graduate.