Can anyone with a master's degree teach at the college level?
In many places you can teach with a Masters at the university level. You won't be a professor, rather an instructor, and you likely won't get tenured, or research monies, but you can generally instruct. Also, you are often limited to your subject area and lower level courses. ie a masters in Psychology, you'd teach first year Psych. For instance, I had a masters level instructor who taught intro level courses--she taught one higher level course (3rd year) but only after she had been a teacher's assistant for the course several times. Each university and program is different, but there are definitely opportunities for Phd Candidates and Masters Level grads.
How long does it take to become a college professor teaching law?
Take the standard high school college prep curriculum. Engineering, math, and history are the best pre-law majors for the four-year bachelor's degree as they teach the critical and analytical reasoning skills needed for the study and practice of law. Get top university grades and a top score on the Law School Admission Test which is taken at the end of the junior year of university so that you can be admitted to a top-14 law school. At law school, be near the top of your class and be an editor of the school's top law review (student-edited legal journal). After you earn the J.D. degree upon law school graduation (three years), clerk for a federal appeals court judge for a year and, ideally, for a US Supreme Court justice for a year after that. That is a total of nine years. You do not need a Ph.D. and earning one will not help you find a job as a law professor.
How do college and university-level professors learn how to teach? Is it mostly through experience? Are there courses that future professors can take on teaching techniques? Do they mostly learn from senior faculty?
I designed it myselfWhen I started lecturing, I was not sure how to do it? As i was heavily inspired by my research guide in masters, I followed his style of referring almost every book in the library and dumping truck loads of info.Almost everyone would follow the style of their guide or a professor whom they liked very much during their education. Some even write to their professors asking for lecture materials (LOL).But then, i found something was not working in my case…. by the reaction from students.I started to think, i have to change to a winning style, but there can never be one winning style, because every students grasping ability and intention to take up the course are different. Hence i decided to go for a “mixture”. I decided to collect the expectation of each student and draft a style based on that, believing a normal distribution of class.But i had a doubt, as this method would be heavily influenced by the number of students involved in the study.So, i designed a questionnaire with about 25 to 30 questions regarding the expectation of students on how a lecture should be and went on a trip. (I designed the questions based on the positive and negative points that i had observed among faculties during my collegiate education.)The authorities refused for a paid leave. Who cares, when you have already planned for some long rides. I traveled several hundred kilometers on my bikewithin my state and conducted the study among final year students of many colleges, thanks to various persons holding the chairs. By the end of the study i had covered 33% of the colleges running my program in the state.Based on that much amount of data, I started designing my own style of lecture.I guess the study was worth it. It has been 17 years, and i have changed 4 places in 3 states positioned at 3 different corners of my country, and it still helps me to position myself among the top wherever I work.Pic courtesy: google if watermark is not present.
What does it take to become a college professor?
In most schools you need at least a Master's degree in the field you want to teach in. If you want to teach full-time and get a tenured position, then you need a doctorate if such a degree exists in your field (they do in most fields). Unfortunately, you usually don't need any experience to become a professor, just a degree. At most universities, all the professors must do research - in fact usually the research is the most important part of their job, and teaching is secondary (although still important). Some smaller colleges (without a graduate program) don't require their professors to do research - it varies from place to place. I'm a physics and astronomy professor at a small state college. I have a Master's in Astronomy. With my background, they hired me on a tenure-track position, where I would get tenure in 5 years. BUT I had to have a doctorate in order to get tenure. Usually they wouldn't have even hired someone without a Ph.D., but I have a lot of other experiences and knowledge that the college really desired, so they made an exception for me. At my school, professors do not need to do research. At our state University, however, professors do have to do research. They have longer to get tenure, but they have to be published in a peer-reviewed journal in order to get tenure.
Can you teach community college with a Master’s degree?
The Higher Learning Comission that accredits the community college I teach at and many others requires that teachers have at least a Master’s Degree in a relevant field to teach transfer type courses (those you would find at a University). To teach in Career and Technical areas like welding or HVAC or Automotive, there are specific qualifications often including a Bachelors Degree plus certifications or the like.There are several regional accreditation organizations around the country but I suspect all have very similar requirements.
College professor vs high school teacher?
Most states will let you teach high school with a bachelors degree (4 years), but a few require a masters (6 years). You can teach at a 2-year college or university with a masters, but you need a PhD to teach at the 4-year college or university level (8-12 years). It's much harder to get a job as a college professor (there are far more people who want to teach than there are jobs for them), you need to publish a lot, you'd work 60+ hour weeks without overtime, and most colleges start out paying that field in the 40k - 60k range (which, considering the amount of loans you'll probably have by that time, isn't a lot, especially when some high school teachers start out making that much)
Are AP teachers actually qualified to teach a college level class?
Assuming they actually know their subject material, then yes, they are qualified to teach the courses. However…National accreditation standards in the US require that any credits that have the ability to be transferred to and counted by an accredited school be taught by an instructor who holds a degree at least one level higher than the credits being transferred or counted. This means that if one were to teach courses for an Associate’s degree, one would need to hold a Bachelor’s degree, for a Bachelor’s degree, they would need to hold a Master’s degree, etc.This only applies to credits that are to be applied to an accredited institution. If the school is not accredited (think ITT), then they can do whatever they want.Now, the way many schools get around this is to have placement tests designed to determine how much of the subject a student has learned. Once the student takes the test and passes the course that they are placed in based on those test results (and taught by a qualified instructor), all of the previous AP class credits are applied. So, in this way, an AP teacher can hold only a Bachelor’s degree, and the credits would be valid at most institutions.That was the technical answer. The real answer is, a degree doesn’t make you qualified to teach anything, nor does the lack of one preclude you from being able to teach anything. I have worked with PhD’s that have no business running a class and I’ve worked with twenty year old students who are wonderful teachers. If the teacher knows the material, and can present it coherently for students to understand it and later demonstrate their knowledge when applying for college, that’s all that should matter.
Why is it that some colleges have graduate students teach classes instead of professors?
I'm not attacking the OP, honestly; but I do find it a little exasperating that there is the same thread on Quora complaining that professors haven't been taught to teach. How are we expected to learn how to teach without doing so as a student? Some TAs/GAs are indeed quite bad; others are young and have a lot of fresh energy.Having said this, yes, unfortunately many departments do see this as a way to get cheapie instruction and don't care much about how prepared the grad students are. I imagine your last point is the best outcome, that a department give a mandatory pedagogy class while/before the students teach their own, with some oversight from a professor. This is, happily, what my department at UNLV did.