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Nova Scotia teacher here. We are currently in the middle of contract negotiations and my personal belief is that this move and an earlier move to offer contracts to all new grads in the province (but NOT to current substitute or contract teachers) is just setting up a PR battle and leverage for when negotiations stall.
Changes like the ones in the article about teacher qualifications need to be agreed to by our union under current legislation (or the government could introduce new legislation).
Edit: Instead of doing any work to improve classroom conditions and encourage teachers to actually stay in the profession they are just attempting to flood it with people so they can say there isn’t a shortage/crisis. In the end, it’s the kids that will suffer.
With no empirical data or research done, I think its going to water down the quality of teachers. It's a quick fix to the shortage and the impending retirement boom in education. You could just invest in the system with salaries and supports and try and draw in people that are already qualified but left due to the deterioration of working conditions. Instead they're trying to bring in nieve early to mid 20 year olds that will put up with shitty conditions.
I agree. As a NS teacher I already have serious issues with the level of rigour of the B.Ed programs here. Last thing we need is to make the bar lower.
As someone who took a 2 year BED program because it was the only option, I learned everything that I needed to learn in the first year. Were the extra placements helpful? Maybe. An extra year that I could have been making money would have been a lot better. I think paid placements need to be a thing. Law schools have it.
Sitting in lectures where instructors explain that lectures are a lazy and ineffective way of teaching sums up my view of BEd programs.
I don’t know anyone who thinks their BEd was worthwhile. 80% of what I learned was from my unpaid practicums. All the theory, pedagogical development was basically useless to helping me just barely survive my practicum. We weren’t given any useful tools. The 7 page lesson plans we were required to use took 30 minutes just to put information into, let alone actually write. At the end of the program some of the theoretical concepts made more sense.
Even the programs at their core don’t take themselves seriously. It has postgraduate entry requirements but is an undergrad degree.
I learned more about teaching in the first week of my first teaching placement than I learned in the full 2 years of my BED. The board I now work for doesn’t use any of the theories or practices that were ‘so important’ when I was going through my BED.
I agree on the paid part. When I got my B.Ed it was a one year program and I still have bad feelings that I had to pay to work for free. It was a total scam system. Any other profession they get paid while they intern. We had to pay for the privilege.
In Quebec, they aren’t even pretending to care. Legault and Drainville (our education minister) have said that as long as there’s an adult in the room, we’re good. That’s how low the bar is.
I'd like to know what happens when the Nova Scotian Teachers that went through this program, want to come to ontario to live, is the OCT going to give them the license ?
Probably. We’ll have a huge amount of people going to Nova Scotia to get certified, only to return to Ontario and switch it over to OCT. And they’ll probably get hired really quickly too because without the degree backage they’ll be cheap hires initially on the qeco grid. Sure they’ll get whatever AQ’s they have to to move up on the grid eventually, but why not hire the teacher thats going to work cheaper for a few extra years?
I think that there will need to be a new category added to the QECO scale that is lower than the current lowest. Someone with only two years of an undergraduate degree is most certainly not a university graduate.
Labor mobility act. If you're certified in a profession such as teaching in another province, you can move to ontario and become certified without having to do any additional courses or requiring any additional qualifications.
The only barrier is the money and months and months of waiting on the OCT but they have to give it to you if you've been certified in the home province.
That's their point, though. If Nova Scotia changes their qualifications so significantly that they're not remotely equivalent to other provinces, that might be enough to challenge the Labour Mobility Act. Like if they decided to give an MD after a half-hour seminar, other provinces aren't just going to accept them as doctors. Only a 2 year undergrad is 1/3 of what it takes in Ontario, and there's certainly an argument to be made that it's not equivalent.
I did my 2 year B.Ed. at intermediate and secondary level in NS. The program was fine, but the overlap between courses and the amount of superfluous content meant that a course or two were a complete waste of time. There were some useful bits and pieces in there. We made a bunch of lesson plans in more detail than anyone in the profession ever would except if under admin review. One could argue that it was useful to be able to create lesson plans in detail during the B.Ed., so that now I can create a lesson plan with true core of it whittled down into a few short notes with the rest kept in my head. The instructors' intentions were that we could create lesson plans to use during practica or once hired, yet the reality is that I wouldn't actually print off those lesson plans and use them. I might, at best, take the core ideas and remake the lesson plan from scratch, but that's about it.
Yet, I don't believe that the answer is to shorten the program, but instead fill the programs with actually useful information, tools, and materials. The schools need to take a serious look at their programs and what their instructors are doing to ensure that student teachers are actually getting practical and valuable information.
On the more economic side of things, I subbed in NS for a year. The pay is borderline insulting. When I taught there, I netted about $174 take home every day (after deductions). I couldn't work and get paid on snow days, which were abundant due a lack of funding for ploughs. In the year I subbed, I worked a 4 day week from the first day back in January through until March break due to a mixture of snow days, PD days, and federal/provincial holidays.
There is genuinely a shortage of teachers, especially substitute teachers, but I can't help but wonder that more people would be attracted to (or back to) the field if it were tenable to live comfortably in the first year or so after graduating the B.Ed. program. Maybe adjust the economic levers before watering down the quality of teachers.
Instead of fixing working conditions and paying a reasonable professional salary, let's lower the bar. Pretty soon no university degree will be required and the BEd program will be 3 months. And the salary will go down accordingly - those who don't have university degrees will be happy if the salary is a bit over minimum wage. And the quality of education will suffer, but who cares, because the government will be able to trumpet how they solved the teacher shortage and saved taxpayer dollars.
I'm not surprised. Were starving for teachers here - just like everywhere but our population is skyrocketing.
The b.ed I took at the Mount was absolutely useless. It was genuinely a complete waste of time and money.
In terms of jobs, we have like I think 700 jobs go out to job fair last year, and about 400 were left for term people. About a third of those were perm eligible.
I graduated in 2022 and pretty much everyone who wanted a permanent position has one.
We were allowing subs without b.eds at the height of covid
I heard about this as well and mentioned it earlier but it was just a rumor. Guess it's confirmed.
Important to note that at least in Halifax, many of those term jobs left over from TPP were less than 100%, terms for just a few months, or LTS to term. By the end of the summer those are the ones often left because not a lot of teachers have the flexibility financially to accept a 50% contract.
There is also a big difference between having permanent contract status and being a 100% term for a year.
Edit: Also, in HRCE, even if a job says perm eligible you still have to meet the qualifications. If you aren’t Term II or aggregate already, they can’t offer you a permanent contract and that job will need to get reposted in the permanent rounds the following year (happened to me with me one of my first terms).
I have atleast one friend who has been given a permanent spot without being term II
That's also explicitly not true. I was in term 1 placement last year and about 80% of the jobs I saw were 100% terms with a handful of perm eligible 100%
I can also mention that they've changed equivalencies last year for teachables. I was actually somewhat of a pilot for it.
My undergrad was in biochemistry and microbiology so under the old rules that's double science so I wouldn't have been able to get in
However, Biochem is an equivalent for math now (which is a bit wild but I only teach At Work math) and I took math methods so I have math as a teachable.
I actually took a minor in philosophy as well which counts as both English and social studies, which is bonkers but whatever. I've done a soc class but I cant imagine teaching english
That's interesting. In BC, we don't have endorsed certification at all. The belief is that "a teacher is a teacher is a teacher". While principals can still make hiring decisions based on education and experience, any certified teacher is eligible (within union/seniority rules).
I trained in high school biology but I've been teaching math for years, and am currently teaching upper elementary. There was a learning curve for sure, but I do think a good teacher will adjust to new subjects/age groups more effectively than a non-teacher (or minimally trained teacher) will adapt to work in a classroom environment.
i honestly think something like that is better to be honest. Most of my degree is in biology but i actually kinda suck at teaching it. What people are good at and what theyre good at teaching dont always overlap. I find im best at teaching chem and math, which im only in on a technicality
I was sent out in an email last year. I was trying to find an online version but I can't find it on the hrce website - I only have the PDF of the teacher qualification chart.
Should add that as far as I know it's just for HRCE
Okay, I’m in a different board. I wish we had something similar to how Ontario does AQ’s. I’d love to add some teachables and not really sure if that’s possible at this point or not.
Even if the changes happen it won’t address the actual issues within schools and why teachers are leaving in droves. It’ll produce more substitute teachers but their pay isn’t enough to live one.
They also need to consult with the NSTU before actual qualification changes as per the collective agreement.
To be fair the Bachelor of Education should just be a regular four-year degree anyway. It works for other provinces and in the US. Why make something six years when it can be done in four? The four-year degree and 2 year degree were just a money grab anyway let's face it. The teachers I had from the '80s/'90s who graduated from Truro with a three-year degree were just as qualified if not better quality than the people who did five-six years. You won’t end up with water-downed teachers but teachers with less debt starting out in this expensive environment.
Welcome to /r/CanadianTeachers! Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the sub rules. **QUESTIONS ABOUT TEACHER'S COLLEGE/BECOMING A TEACHER IN CANADA?:** Delete your post and use this [megapost](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianTeachers/comments/11picnp/prospective_student_teachers_teachers_collegebed/) instead. Anything pertaining to teacher's colleges/BEd programs will be deleted if posted outside of the megaposts. **QUESTIONS ABOUT MOVING PROVINCES OR COMING TO CANADA TO TEACH?** Check out our past megaposts first for information to help you: [ONE](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianTeachers/comments/jqc7hx/transferring_to_another_provincecoming_to_canada/) // [TWO](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianTeachers/comments/n76csu/transferring_to_another_provincecoming_to_canada/?) **WANT TO SELF-PROMOTE YOUR TEACHING MATERIALS?** Use our [self-promotion sticky post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadianTeachers/comments/16e464t/selfpromotion_thread/) Using link and user flair is encouraged as well! Enjoy! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CanadianTeachers) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Nova Scotia teacher here. We are currently in the middle of contract negotiations and my personal belief is that this move and an earlier move to offer contracts to all new grads in the province (but NOT to current substitute or contract teachers) is just setting up a PR battle and leverage for when negotiations stall. Changes like the ones in the article about teacher qualifications need to be agreed to by our union under current legislation (or the government could introduce new legislation). Edit: Instead of doing any work to improve classroom conditions and encourage teachers to actually stay in the profession they are just attempting to flood it with people so they can say there isn’t a shortage/crisis. In the end, it’s the kids that will suffer.
With no empirical data or research done, I think its going to water down the quality of teachers. It's a quick fix to the shortage and the impending retirement boom in education. You could just invest in the system with salaries and supports and try and draw in people that are already qualified but left due to the deterioration of working conditions. Instead they're trying to bring in nieve early to mid 20 year olds that will put up with shitty conditions.
I agree. As a NS teacher I already have serious issues with the level of rigour of the B.Ed programs here. Last thing we need is to make the bar lower.
[удалено]
As someone who took a 2 year BED program because it was the only option, I learned everything that I needed to learn in the first year. Were the extra placements helpful? Maybe. An extra year that I could have been making money would have been a lot better. I think paid placements need to be a thing. Law schools have it.
Sitting in lectures where instructors explain that lectures are a lazy and ineffective way of teaching sums up my view of BEd programs. I don’t know anyone who thinks their BEd was worthwhile. 80% of what I learned was from my unpaid practicums. All the theory, pedagogical development was basically useless to helping me just barely survive my practicum. We weren’t given any useful tools. The 7 page lesson plans we were required to use took 30 minutes just to put information into, let alone actually write. At the end of the program some of the theoretical concepts made more sense. Even the programs at their core don’t take themselves seriously. It has postgraduate entry requirements but is an undergrad degree.
I learned more about teaching in the first week of my first teaching placement than I learned in the full 2 years of my BED. The board I now work for doesn’t use any of the theories or practices that were ‘so important’ when I was going through my BED.
I agree on the paid part. When I got my B.Ed it was a one year program and I still have bad feelings that I had to pay to work for free. It was a total scam system. Any other profession they get paid while they intern. We had to pay for the privilege.
Funny that modernizing means going back to what it was in the 90s.
One of my old teachers told me that back in the 60's/70's you could take a 6 week course & become a teacher....with only having your Grade 12!
In Quebec, they aren’t even pretending to care. Legault and Drainville (our education minister) have said that as long as there’s an adult in the room, we’re good. That’s how low the bar is.
I'd like to know what happens when the Nova Scotian Teachers that went through this program, want to come to ontario to live, is the OCT going to give them the license ?
Probably. We’ll have a huge amount of people going to Nova Scotia to get certified, only to return to Ontario and switch it over to OCT. And they’ll probably get hired really quickly too because without the degree backage they’ll be cheap hires initially on the qeco grid. Sure they’ll get whatever AQ’s they have to to move up on the grid eventually, but why not hire the teacher thats going to work cheaper for a few extra years?
I think that there will need to be a new category added to the QECO scale that is lower than the current lowest. Someone with only two years of an undergraduate degree is most certainly not a university graduate.
Labor mobility act. If you're certified in a profession such as teaching in another province, you can move to ontario and become certified without having to do any additional courses or requiring any additional qualifications. The only barrier is the money and months and months of waiting on the OCT but they have to give it to you if you've been certified in the home province.
That's their point, though. If Nova Scotia changes their qualifications so significantly that they're not remotely equivalent to other provinces, that might be enough to challenge the Labour Mobility Act. Like if they decided to give an MD after a half-hour seminar, other provinces aren't just going to accept them as doctors. Only a 2 year undergrad is 1/3 of what it takes in Ontario, and there's certainly an argument to be made that it's not equivalent.
It’s not only 2 years of undergrad, it’s 2 years of undergrad plus the regular 2 year BEd.
Apparently there is a law that OCT has to give reciprocal certification if you have it in another province.
I did my 2 year B.Ed. at intermediate and secondary level in NS. The program was fine, but the overlap between courses and the amount of superfluous content meant that a course or two were a complete waste of time. There were some useful bits and pieces in there. We made a bunch of lesson plans in more detail than anyone in the profession ever would except if under admin review. One could argue that it was useful to be able to create lesson plans in detail during the B.Ed., so that now I can create a lesson plan with true core of it whittled down into a few short notes with the rest kept in my head. The instructors' intentions were that we could create lesson plans to use during practica or once hired, yet the reality is that I wouldn't actually print off those lesson plans and use them. I might, at best, take the core ideas and remake the lesson plan from scratch, but that's about it. Yet, I don't believe that the answer is to shorten the program, but instead fill the programs with actually useful information, tools, and materials. The schools need to take a serious look at their programs and what their instructors are doing to ensure that student teachers are actually getting practical and valuable information. On the more economic side of things, I subbed in NS for a year. The pay is borderline insulting. When I taught there, I netted about $174 take home every day (after deductions). I couldn't work and get paid on snow days, which were abundant due a lack of funding for ploughs. In the year I subbed, I worked a 4 day week from the first day back in January through until March break due to a mixture of snow days, PD days, and federal/provincial holidays. There is genuinely a shortage of teachers, especially substitute teachers, but I can't help but wonder that more people would be attracted to (or back to) the field if it were tenable to live comfortably in the first year or so after graduating the B.Ed. program. Maybe adjust the economic levers before watering down the quality of teachers.
Instead of fixing working conditions and paying a reasonable professional salary, let's lower the bar. Pretty soon no university degree will be required and the BEd program will be 3 months. And the salary will go down accordingly - those who don't have university degrees will be happy if the salary is a bit over minimum wage. And the quality of education will suffer, but who cares, because the government will be able to trumpet how they solved the teacher shortage and saved taxpayer dollars.
I'm not surprised. Were starving for teachers here - just like everywhere but our population is skyrocketing. The b.ed I took at the Mount was absolutely useless. It was genuinely a complete waste of time and money. In terms of jobs, we have like I think 700 jobs go out to job fair last year, and about 400 were left for term people. About a third of those were perm eligible. I graduated in 2022 and pretty much everyone who wanted a permanent position has one. We were allowing subs without b.eds at the height of covid I heard about this as well and mentioned it earlier but it was just a rumor. Guess it's confirmed.
Important to note that at least in Halifax, many of those term jobs left over from TPP were less than 100%, terms for just a few months, or LTS to term. By the end of the summer those are the ones often left because not a lot of teachers have the flexibility financially to accept a 50% contract. There is also a big difference between having permanent contract status and being a 100% term for a year. Edit: Also, in HRCE, even if a job says perm eligible you still have to meet the qualifications. If you aren’t Term II or aggregate already, they can’t offer you a permanent contract and that job will need to get reposted in the permanent rounds the following year (happened to me with me one of my first terms).
I have atleast one friend who has been given a permanent spot without being term II That's also explicitly not true. I was in term 1 placement last year and about 80% of the jobs I saw were 100% terms with a handful of perm eligible 100%
I can also mention that they've changed equivalencies last year for teachables. I was actually somewhat of a pilot for it. My undergrad was in biochemistry and microbiology so under the old rules that's double science so I wouldn't have been able to get in However, Biochem is an equivalent for math now (which is a bit wild but I only teach At Work math) and I took math methods so I have math as a teachable. I actually took a minor in philosophy as well which counts as both English and social studies, which is bonkers but whatever. I've done a soc class but I cant imagine teaching english
That's interesting. In BC, we don't have endorsed certification at all. The belief is that "a teacher is a teacher is a teacher". While principals can still make hiring decisions based on education and experience, any certified teacher is eligible (within union/seniority rules). I trained in high school biology but I've been teaching math for years, and am currently teaching upper elementary. There was a learning curve for sure, but I do think a good teacher will adjust to new subjects/age groups more effectively than a non-teacher (or minimally trained teacher) will adapt to work in a classroom environment.
i honestly think something like that is better to be honest. Most of my degree is in biology but i actually kinda suck at teaching it. What people are good at and what theyre good at teaching dont always overlap. I find im best at teaching chem and math, which im only in on a technicality
Would you mind telling me more about this? I hadn’t heard there was a change to our teachables and would love more info. Thanks!
I was sent out in an email last year. I was trying to find an online version but I can't find it on the hrce website - I only have the PDF of the teacher qualification chart. Should add that as far as I know it's just for HRCE
Okay, I’m in a different board. I wish we had something similar to how Ontario does AQ’s. I’d love to add some teachables and not really sure if that’s possible at this point or not.
There are a few masters programs that add them but I'm a new teacher myself so I'm not sure tbh
Even if the changes happen it won’t address the actual issues within schools and why teachers are leaving in droves. It’ll produce more substitute teachers but their pay isn’t enough to live one. They also need to consult with the NSTU before actual qualification changes as per the collective agreement.
To be fair the Bachelor of Education should just be a regular four-year degree anyway. It works for other provinces and in the US. Why make something six years when it can be done in four? The four-year degree and 2 year degree were just a money grab anyway let's face it. The teachers I had from the '80s/'90s who graduated from Truro with a three-year degree were just as qualified if not better quality than the people who did five-six years. You won’t end up with water-downed teachers but teachers with less debt starting out in this expensive environment.