Elementary Education/ESOL

The NDMU School of Education strives to prepare teacher candidates to respond to the supply and demand of the teacher education workforce and endeavors to prepare candidates who are highly skilled and equipped to teach children regardless of learning style, differentiated or special needs, and racial or socio-economic status. As such, candidates are encouraged to pursue certification in more than one content area or specialization; e.g, Certification in Biology and Special Education; or in English and TESOL; or in Elementary Education and Early Childhood Education. In some cases, candidates can even obtain three or four certifications (e.g, elementary, special education, early childhood education and/or TESOL).

Having more than one certification yields several benefits: 1) Most important of all, candidates are exposed to specific content and instructional strategies that may be unique to targeted individuals or groups of students (e.g, second language generation students whose parents speak only in their native language). 2) Candidates acquire a deeper, richer background in the vast variety of instructional strategies that one might employ, irrespective of the student's classification (e.g, a student in a Gifted and Talented class might respond just as readily to a 'reward and praise' technique as would a student with special needs). 3) Candidates find that, when seeking employment, they are more marketable because principals are afforded greater flexibility in assigning them to teaching positions that fit the needs of their school and student population (e.g, if given two equally qualified candidates from which to select, a principal is more likely to hire a candidate who has more than one certification, thereby giving them more flexibility to assign highly qualified teachers to classrooms based on that certification).

In essence, the teacher candidates enter the education profession with a larger and more diverse skill set of instructional strategies and content knowledge to better meet the needs of the school system, where employed, and the children whom they are entrusted to teach.

Pathways to obtain dual, triple, or even four certifications are outlined in the following tables, based on professional courses needed, content areas, programs and degrees.