The Indiana State Board of Education has recently approved changes to Rules for Education Preparation and Accountability (REPA III), which now states that applicants can begin teaching without teaching degrees, as long as they have a bachelor’s degree and 3.0 GPA in the subject area they want to teach, pass an exam in that subject and have 6,000 hours of work experience. After completing pedagogy training, they can then obtain a teaching license.

According to Tracy Hadden, social studies department chairperson, the changes to REPA III will not have a significant impact on certain departments.

“Departments where there are shortages of teachers with that specialty, say physics or some of the foreign languages, may have more trouble finding people available (to teach),” Hadden said. “There are a lot of social studies teachers out there, and we have a lot of people who are very highly qualified, in both the history and then knowing how to teach the material as well, so it’s not going to impact me as much as other departments.”

In addition, science department chairperson Jennifer Marlow said the science department, in particular, will be affected by the changes to the law.

Marlow said, “Well, each year we get more and more applicants that are coming out of industry and coming into teaching, and it’s a great thing from a standpoint of people that have a lot of content knowledge and want to share their content with students. I think it puts a little more pressure on schools to mentor new teachers because the art of teaching is an art, and it’s not something that you just pick up and do naturally without a lot of practice.”

Despite the various impacts that REPA III will have on different departments, both Marlow and Hadden said the ability to teach is just as important as content knowledge.

Marlow said, “(Teachers) definitely need the content knowledge, especially when they’re teaching upper-level courses—AP courses, junior and senior level courses and honors courses. But, at the same time, if you don’t have the strategies to be able to relay that content knowledge you have to the students, it doesn’t do a lot of good to have that knowledge, so I think there’s an equal balance between the two.”

However, junior Natalie Ciresi said the ability to teach is not as important as content knowledge.

“As long as you are familiar with the subject, it shouldn’t really matter,” Ciresi said. “If you really want to teach then it shouldn’t matter whether or not you (have) a degree specific to teaching.”

Marlow said, in her experience, she has seen examples of this.

“We actually have hired, in the past, teachers without a license because they did have either a master’s (degree) or PhD, and they’ve adapted very well,” Marlow said. “I think the key is it’s a two-fold process (because) the teacher has to be willing to learn teaching strategies, and the school and the department have to be able to provide mentoring to that teacher to help them.”

Although the new changes will not affect quality of education, Hadden said someone with a teaching degree does have an advantage over a career specialist in regards to hiring teachers.

“If I had to hire somebody who had no experience in education or never had any teaching training, I would be concerned,” Hadden said. “They may be absolutely a brilliant historian or a brilliant political scientist, but they might lack skills in teaching. You have to have a little bit of that science of teaching to take what you know and teach somebody else to know it as well.”

Marlow said she agrees with Hadden.

“I think they probably do have an advantage; however, we let the interview process play itself out,” Marlow said. “We believe strongly that through the interview process, you get to know people, and you try to then figure out who’s going to be the best fit for that position. So sometimes that might be a person coming out of industry, sometimes that might be a person who has a teaching degree and already has a license.”