Teacher's Skills Tests For Dummies

Colin Beveridge, Andrew Green

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781118661642
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118673591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

If you're preparing for the newly revised Numeracy and Literacy Skills Tests, Teacher's Skills Tests For Dummies is your one-stop for both exams, providing you with subject-matter review, revision and practice tests you need to tackle the tests with confidence and succeed. Written by expert authors in Maths, English, and Education (with the credentials to prove it),  Teacher's Skills Tests For Dummies provides you with:

- A review of the key maths and English concepts you need to know to do well
- Full length practice tests and tons of additional practice questions
- Online accessible audio tests for spelling and mental arithmetic — to better prepare you for the actual test
- Tips and tricks (along with mistakes to avoid) to become a better test taker

With this book — and a bit of work on your part — you'll be positioned to pass your skills tests and gain that coveted place on a teacher-training course.

Part I

Getting Started with the Skills Tests

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part …

• Learn to leap through the right hoops to become a teacher.
• Find out exactly what you need to know to sit and pass the Skills Tests.
• Sit down and study: perfect your revision technique and get mentally prepared.
• Keep yourself calm, stay motivated and succeed!

Chapter 1

Receiving Your Ticket to the Classroom

In This Chapter

Exploring your options for training as a teacher

Understanding the need for the Skills Tests

Like just about anything worthwhile in life, becoming a teacher takes work and needs you to fulfil several requirements. One of these, whether you like it or not, is that you have to pass your Professional Skills Tests.

You may be a superb sports coach, a maestro in the music studio, an excellent exponent for English literature or a genius in the geography classroom. You may be able to inspire your pupils with enthusiasm for equilateral triangles, devotion to design technology or passion for the painting processes of Jackson Pollock. You may, in other words, be God’s gift to the teaching profession, but without passing your Skills Tests you aren’t going to reach even the first rung of the teaching ladder.

In this chapter, we lead you through a quick tour of the paths that you can take to become a teacher, providing information about what’s required of you along the way. We also explain why you have to pass the Professional Skills Tests before you can enter a course of Initial Teacher Education (ITE).

Tracing the Routes to Becoming a Teacher

As the rather unpleasant saying goes, ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’. Likewise, you have more than one way into the teaching profession (and fortunately they’re all less messy and less damaging to the poor felines). Your task is to find the way that best suits you and your circumstances. If you’ve yet to make that decision, this section can help.

Passing the early stations en route to Teaching Central

No matter which route you take to becoming a teacher – and we outline plenty in this section – you encounter a number of common stops along the way:

• GCSEs: Having a Grade C or better at GCSE (or equivalent qualifications from other countries) in English and Maths has long been a pre-entry requirement for teacher-education courses.
• Professional Skills Tests: You’re reading this book, of course, because you need to pass the Literacy and Numeracy Skills Tests to be accepted onto a teacher-training course.
• A degree: To be a teacher, you require a university degree. You either need to hold a degree in advance of deciding that you want to become a teacher, or to earn one as part of your ITE.
• Qualified Teacher Status (QTS): To achieve QTS, you have to demonstrate to the university or school leading the training that you meet the Teaching Standards established by the Department of Education. At that point, the university or school recommends you for QTS to the Teaching Agency (TA), which is the body that awards the status (check out the Teaching Standards at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teachers-standards).

To look into all the available options for becoming a teacher in more detail than we have space for, visit the TA website at http://www.education.gov.uk/get-into-teaching/teacher-training-options.aspx

The information and guidance we provide in this chapter is solid. But your best course of action before making any decisions is to check with the universities and programmes that you’re considering and make sure that you know the rules, regulations and requirements specific to them.

Pursuing an undergraduate degree

If you don’t have a university degree and you want to train as a teacher, you can pursue a degree and work towards QTS (which we define in the preceding section) at the same time at university.

Two types of undergraduate qualification can lead to QTS:

• Bachelor of Arts (BA)/Bachelor of Science (BSc) courses with QTS: These courses provide an honours degree in a particular academic subject (such as English, Maths or Physical Education) alongside working towards QTS. Regular assessed school placements spread over the duration of the degree programme allow you to explore the pedagogic (that is, the theoretical and practical) approaches appropriate to the teaching of the academic subject in the school context.
• Bachelor of Education (BEd) courses: These programmes are honours courses in education. They’re available for primary and secondary education, but given the usual requirement for secondary teachers to possess degree-level knowledge in a particular National Curriculum subject, BEd qualifications (which don’t provide such a specialist focus) are much more common for primary education.

These two courses typically take three or four years to complete.

As with other undergraduate courses, you apply for entry to these programmes via the Universities and Colleges Applications Service (UCAS) at www.ucas.ac.uk.

Taking a postgraduate path

You have two options available if you have a degree in hand and decide that teaching is for you:

• University-based training: Led primarily by university and academic tutors.
• School-based training: Led primarily by a Training School.

These models involve a close partnership between universities and schools, because a balance of academic learning about education and pedagogy and practical application of these subjects through classroom experience is important. Teachers working in schools and university lecturers in education provide different but complementary perspectives on the work of the teacher.

Theory without practice can be abstract and unrealistic, and practice without understanding of the underpinning theory runs the danger of being simplistic and will not provide you with a detailed understanding of the complex processes at work in the classroom.

University-based routes

Postgraduate routes into teaching via a higher education institution (HEI) generally allow you to obtain a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) with recommendation for QTS.

HEI-based PGCE routes are becoming increasingly rare because policy now favours school-based routes. As a result, numbers of training places allocated to universities for PGCE provision have been cut significantly. Check out the later ‘School-based routes’ section for the other ways of obtaining a PGCE.

A PGCE is an academic qualification that’s often studied for and assessed alongside QTS. It allows students to explore philosophies and purposes of education, theories of how teachers teach and learners learn, the history of academic subjects and the ideas underpinning subject pedagogies.

PGCEs are awarded in two forms, though both require that you’ve already completed your first degree (usually in the subject you want to teach):

• Professional level: PGCEs at this level are assessed according to undergraduate criteria.
• Masters level: PGCEs at this level are assessed according to postgraduate criteria and carry Masters-level credits. These credits can be really useful if you want to go on to complete a full Masters in Education at a later date.

Check out carefully with your university whether the PGCE you’re interested in carries Masters-level credits or not, because it can obviously have an impact on potential employers.

Strictly speaking, you don’t have to have a PGCE; QTS is all that’s required in order to work in schools in the UK. But many employers like to see that you also have the PGCE, which is seen as adding some academic rigour to the practicalities of QTS.

To gain access to most programmes you need a good honours degree (2:2 or higher), although the TA has sought...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting Started with the Skills Tests
• Part II: Literacy Skills
• Part III: Numeracy Skills
• Part IV: Timed Practice Tests
• Part V: The Part of Tens
• About the Authors
• Cheat Sheet
• More Dummies Products