There are various options for students wishing to pursue a degree and/or licensure in education. A student may choose to work with young students, birth to age eight, for the EBT major, elementary and middle school students for the KMS major, or may choose to work with secondary education students with a double major in a certifiable area (see options below). For students interested in gaining Montessori license, students are able to major in either EBT or KMS and earn a primary or elementary Montessori license at the same time, as part of a collaboration between Alverno and the Montessori Institute of Milwaukee (MIM).
In addition, there are also ways to achieve teacher licensure outside of weekday college. Please visit the sections on licensure to Master of Arts (LTM) for students who currently have a bachelor's degree and are looking to become teachers.
A word from the faculty
At Alverno College, the teacher preparation programs prepare educators who are committed to developing the abilities of all learners, who are effective in planning and implementing developmentally appropriate instruction and assessments, and who understand and value diversity.
As an education student, you develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions essential to providing overall quality education and effective practical applications in your particular teaching field(s).
The Alverno Education Division believes that the future of the teaching profession depends upon educators who are committed to the success of each and every learner, are able to act on that commitment, and are courageous enough to do so. Therefore, the Alverno teacher preparation programs are designed to prepare educators who will go forth with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow and the hope to sustain themselves as they shape the future.
Our program stresses abilities that are important to teachers:
- Conceptualization is the integration of content knowledge with educational frameworks and a broadly based understanding of the liberal arts to plan and implement instruction. Teachers use their conceptualization skills when they plan lessons and units to meet both current and future needs of learners. Among the conceptual challenges you will face as a teacher are to plan activities that meet the needs of the individual as well as the group and to understand the system within which you work as an educator.
- Diagnosis involves relating observed behavior to relevant frameworks in order to determine and implement learning prescriptions. Diagnosis relates to the teacher’s ability to analyze and solve problems. Teachers need to be able to move flexibly between seeing a group of students as a group and seeing the group as a collection of individuals with varying characteristics, needs, and talents. As a teacher, you must have a working knowledge of the appropriate developmental, pedagogical, and subject area frameworks with which to interpret the behavior of learners so that you can determine how to structure learning appropriately.
- Coordination is managing resources effectively to support learning goals. As a teacher you must identify, allocate, organize, and manage resources as they relate to the total learning environment. Such resource management involves time, space, materials, the teacher as a tool of learning, other educators, professional literature, and the institution as a learning environment.
- Communication requires using verbal, nonverbal, and media modes of communication to establish the environment of the classroom and to structure and reinforce learning. Lesson presentation, room arrangement, motivation, and reinforcement are examples of communication within the classroom; parent conferences and professional presentations are examples outside the classroom.
- Integrative interaction means acting with professional values as a situational decision maker, adapting to the changing needs of the environment in order to develop students as learners. This ability requires a sensitivity to all students, manifested in the way that you create relationships between yourself and students and among the students in a class. It is the ability that brings together all of the above. As a teacher, you use the abilities involved in integrative interaction when you direct learning by guiding inter-student discussion, model learning by making explicit what you are doing, and encourage individual participation while effectively directing a group activity.
