I did a Master's in Education at WGU and graduated within 2 years. I'm keeping the degree title a secret here to attempt to preserve some privacy. Here is the summary of my experience:
I could complete an average of 1 CU a day. Meaning my entire degree, sans the required student teaching, was completed in less than 6 months. If you're going for a degree without student teaching (clinical experience, as they call it), there's nothing to worry about.
The WGU staff is really nice and knowledgeable, I had no issues with them. The curriculum was the same as at other universities, but WGU's is reworded and summarized so you don't have to read in circles to wait for the author to get to the point. I appreciated that. Once I actually "got on the job", there was quite a few things that were important to know at an actual school that I felt the WGU degree was lacking in its curriculum, but to my knowledge no degree teaches that.
The only difficult course I had was one that requires you to know kindergarten through 12th grade math. Math is taught very differently these days, and k-12 math also now contains things I was never taught in school at all. I used Khan Academy and YouTube tutorials to get through it.
Everything went fine until student teaching at a physical school.
The course information once you start doing student teaching (your responsibilities, who to tell what, what to upload where, etc) was confusing and felt like a maze of documents and links, with too many different contact people. The titles for those contact people were sometimes wrong between what staff or paperwork said and what the current WGU website said.
The entire student teaching process also takes a minimum of 11-12 months. You have a minimum of 2 placements (1 observation, 1 actual teaching) and each placement typically takes at least 3 months to get, so that is 6 months or more total of just waiting for placements. You then have the several months of actually doing the student teaching, which gets stretched out between holidays and (if applicable) summer vacation. A Bachelor's degree may have a longer student teaching placement, I don't know.
Student teaching is full time, entirely unpaid, you are not really allowed to take days off, and you still need to pay WGU tuition during it. If you have a substitute teaching license prior to beginning your student teaching, you can substitute for your mentor teacher during your placement and get paid for it, but can't substitute for anyone else. So you may become very stressed about money, your house will get messy, etc. You may also be placed an hour or more away from your home.
Once I got in, I realized it had been too long since I'd been in a public school. Schools are run entirely differently now. At the school I was at there was no homework, no detention, no failing a grade, etc. In an upper elementary class, many students were still at preschool and kindergarten level, but the school was not allowed to fail them. So you were supposed to do things like teach 5th grade math to a class where 30% of kids are at 1st grade level math. This means most students are messing around instead of paying attention, because the material is always over their heads. They also can't catch up via homework because you can't issue homework. I was told not to correct grammar or spelling on any assignments, so the kids weren't learning how to spell. It felt as if my entire day was managing children's behavior instead of teaching, when what I actually wanted to do was teach. I witnessed a lot of bad behavior from students, which would have called for suspension or detention in my days, but I was told that it was normal behavior today. I also witnessed how extremely stressed most of the teachers were -- this was generally due to student behavior, not lesson planning. Students in late elementary school still didn't know what a sentence was or where to put a period or capital letters. For every instruction I gave, I had to repeat it orally at least six times even though I had also written it on the board, and at the end of each lesson I would still get kids who raised their hand saying they had done nothing for an hour because they didn't hear or read what they were supposed to do.
I was not allowed to comment negatively on anything. If a student was refusing to do any work, we couldn't say something like "Why are you ignoring instructions? You need to do the assignment properly, stop messing around". Instead we had to praise them, for example if they were at least holding the pencil but hadn't even written their name then we would have to say "Thank you for picking up the pencil" or "Thanks for getting started". If we were negative in any way, we were written up, because it went against the district standards of behavior motivation. I'll withhold my comments on that. Despite the many studies on how food affects behavior and attention span, the school also gave the kids sugary cereal, desserts, and so on for breakfast, lunch and snacks as a way to entice them to come to school, and it negatively affected their behavior throughout the course of the day. They got more than 100% of their daily sugar recommendation in just one school meal.
The whole student teaching process was severely frustrating and emotionally draining. I was so tired each day I effectively went to the school, taught, came home, fell asleep. I felt like I didn't have enough time awake and alert to properly plan for teaching except for on the weekends, and I spent the weekends trying to earn money to make up for the massive loss of income. I was too tired to be able to self-reflect enough to make fast improvements. My health suffered, I was drinking 4-5 coffees just to stay awake throughout the day and I still felt tired. I expressed my feelings to WGU and other teachers, and everyone told me that what I was experiencing was "a normal classroom these days" and that if I wasn't a natural at handling it, then teaching in public schools wasn't for me.
After several months of student teaching I decided to switch my degree to one where I would NOT get state licensure, and to teach adults instead of kids. Two days after making that decision my health bounced back, I easily cut down to half a cup of coffee a day, I was much more productive, I stopped being so negative... I hadn't realized how depressed being in the classroom had made me.
Without a license, you can teach at:
- Private schools (this can include religious schools, tribal reservation schools, and private schools in foreign countries)
- Daycares, preschools
- Most schools for adults, including community colleges, correctional facilities (which, btw, pay double the salary of a public school teacher!), and corporate teaching positions such as staff training
- Teach English online
- Be a teacher's assistant instead of a teacher
At this point I believe a non-license Education degree is the smartest option for almost everyone. If you get a non-license degree and want a license later, you can either get an emergency teaching certificate from a desperate school district (available to anyone with a degree and clean background check) and eventually convert it to a real license based on years of experience, or you can go through a separate, non-university teacher training program that PAYS you a full salary to student teach and get your license, in which case the student teaching is also going to be longer (1-2 years) and thus you get more training out of it. In some cases or some countries you can also apply for a license after you have taught for 3 consecutive years at a private school while being unlicensed. If your local district allows hiring via emergency teacher licenses, you can "preview" the school and students by being a substitute, paraeducator or volunteer before you take on an actual teaching job there.
If anyone wants to do student teaching for licensure, I highly recommend you go through all paraeducator training you can find at a minimum, as it is more comprehensive than what WGU teaches. I also recommend you begin planning out, in detail, lessons for your classroom for every single day you're in student teaching, as far in advance as possible (before you even get into the classroom) for every subject.
I could complete an average of 1 CU a day. Meaning my entire degree, sans the required student teaching, was completed in less than 6 months. If you're going for a degree without student teaching (clinical experience, as they call it), there's nothing to worry about.
The WGU staff is really nice and knowledgeable, I had no issues with them. The curriculum was the same as at other universities, but WGU's is reworded and summarized so you don't have to read in circles to wait for the author to get to the point. I appreciated that. Once I actually "got on the job", there was quite a few things that were important to know at an actual school that I felt the WGU degree was lacking in its curriculum, but to my knowledge no degree teaches that.
The only difficult course I had was one that requires you to know kindergarten through 12th grade math. Math is taught very differently these days, and k-12 math also now contains things I was never taught in school at all. I used Khan Academy and YouTube tutorials to get through it.
Everything went fine until student teaching at a physical school.
The course information once you start doing student teaching (your responsibilities, who to tell what, what to upload where, etc) was confusing and felt like a maze of documents and links, with too many different contact people. The titles for those contact people were sometimes wrong between what staff or paperwork said and what the current WGU website said.
The entire student teaching process also takes a minimum of 11-12 months. You have a minimum of 2 placements (1 observation, 1 actual teaching) and each placement typically takes at least 3 months to get, so that is 6 months or more total of just waiting for placements. You then have the several months of actually doing the student teaching, which gets stretched out between holidays and (if applicable) summer vacation. A Bachelor's degree may have a longer student teaching placement, I don't know.
Student teaching is full time, entirely unpaid, you are not really allowed to take days off, and you still need to pay WGU tuition during it. If you have a substitute teaching license prior to beginning your student teaching, you can substitute for your mentor teacher during your placement and get paid for it, but can't substitute for anyone else. So you may become very stressed about money, your house will get messy, etc. You may also be placed an hour or more away from your home.
Once I got in, I realized it had been too long since I'd been in a public school. Schools are run entirely differently now. At the school I was at there was no homework, no detention, no failing a grade, etc. In an upper elementary class, many students were still at preschool and kindergarten level, but the school was not allowed to fail them. So you were supposed to do things like teach 5th grade math to a class where 30% of kids are at 1st grade level math. This means most students are messing around instead of paying attention, because the material is always over their heads. They also can't catch up via homework because you can't issue homework. I was told not to correct grammar or spelling on any assignments, so the kids weren't learning how to spell. It felt as if my entire day was managing children's behavior instead of teaching, when what I actually wanted to do was teach. I witnessed a lot of bad behavior from students, which would have called for suspension or detention in my days, but I was told that it was normal behavior today. I also witnessed how extremely stressed most of the teachers were -- this was generally due to student behavior, not lesson planning. Students in late elementary school still didn't know what a sentence was or where to put a period or capital letters. For every instruction I gave, I had to repeat it orally at least six times even though I had also written it on the board, and at the end of each lesson I would still get kids who raised their hand saying they had done nothing for an hour because they didn't hear or read what they were supposed to do.
I was not allowed to comment negatively on anything. If a student was refusing to do any work, we couldn't say something like "Why are you ignoring instructions? You need to do the assignment properly, stop messing around". Instead we had to praise them, for example if they were at least holding the pencil but hadn't even written their name then we would have to say "Thank you for picking up the pencil" or "Thanks for getting started". If we were negative in any way, we were written up, because it went against the district standards of behavior motivation. I'll withhold my comments on that. Despite the many studies on how food affects behavior and attention span, the school also gave the kids sugary cereal, desserts, and so on for breakfast, lunch and snacks as a way to entice them to come to school, and it negatively affected their behavior throughout the course of the day. They got more than 100% of their daily sugar recommendation in just one school meal.
The whole student teaching process was severely frustrating and emotionally draining. I was so tired each day I effectively went to the school, taught, came home, fell asleep. I felt like I didn't have enough time awake and alert to properly plan for teaching except for on the weekends, and I spent the weekends trying to earn money to make up for the massive loss of income. I was too tired to be able to self-reflect enough to make fast improvements. My health suffered, I was drinking 4-5 coffees just to stay awake throughout the day and I still felt tired. I expressed my feelings to WGU and other teachers, and everyone told me that what I was experiencing was "a normal classroom these days" and that if I wasn't a natural at handling it, then teaching in public schools wasn't for me.
After several months of student teaching I decided to switch my degree to one where I would NOT get state licensure, and to teach adults instead of kids. Two days after making that decision my health bounced back, I easily cut down to half a cup of coffee a day, I was much more productive, I stopped being so negative... I hadn't realized how depressed being in the classroom had made me.
Without a license, you can teach at:
- Private schools (this can include religious schools, tribal reservation schools, and private schools in foreign countries)
- Daycares, preschools
- Most schools for adults, including community colleges, correctional facilities (which, btw, pay double the salary of a public school teacher!), and corporate teaching positions such as staff training
- Teach English online
- Be a teacher's assistant instead of a teacher
At this point I believe a non-license Education degree is the smartest option for almost everyone. If you get a non-license degree and want a license later, you can either get an emergency teaching certificate from a desperate school district (available to anyone with a degree and clean background check) and eventually convert it to a real license based on years of experience, or you can go through a separate, non-university teacher training program that PAYS you a full salary to student teach and get your license, in which case the student teaching is also going to be longer (1-2 years) and thus you get more training out of it. In some cases or some countries you can also apply for a license after you have taught for 3 consecutive years at a private school while being unlicensed. If your local district allows hiring via emergency teacher licenses, you can "preview" the school and students by being a substitute, paraeducator or volunteer before you take on an actual teaching job there.
If anyone wants to do student teaching for licensure, I highly recommend you go through all paraeducator training you can find at a minimum, as it is more comprehensive than what WGU teaches. I also recommend you begin planning out, in detail, lessons for your classroom for every single day you're in student teaching, as far in advance as possible (before you even get into the classroom) for every subject.
Finished: 2 AAs, 1 BA, 2 trade schools, 3 ENEB MAs.
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