Professional certification: overcoming hurdles to National Certification.(Association News)

Not long after attaining my national certification in 2002, I became certification chair for Virginia MTA. Appalled that only 13 percent of our members were Nationally Certified Teachers of Music and that we ranked 31st in the United States for the percentage of nationally certified teachers among our members, my committee and I decided on an ambitious goal. While we may never achieve the lofty professional status of highest ranked Rhode Island, with 30 percent of its teachers nationally certified, we can try to emulate our sister state, West Virginia, that ranks second. We are now striving to increase our percentage to at least 23 percent to match their rate. Last year the VMTA board voted to award a fee rebate of $100 to all successful candidates. So far we have added five more teachers to our ranks. To achieve our goal, however, we must overcome three major hurdles.

Hurdle 1--Misconceptions about the process. Due to several procedural changes to certification during the last 10 years, many teachers have outmoded ideas about what the process entails. The MTNA website contains a wealth of information showing that becoming certified is neither expensive nor difficult. Compared to fees for other professional licenses, the $200 fee is reasonable, and like Virginia, many states offer rebates to successful candidates. The process, while appropriately rigorous, can be completed in as little as a few months, or at most, in two years, depending on one's educational background.

Our strategies:

* We include profiles of newly certified teachers in every issue of our state newsletter, recounting in detail the path that each took to certification.

* In local associations, our local chairs contact prospects and recommend as a first step that they visit MTNA.org and click on Certification. Diagrams on the website show alternative ways of demonstrating that one knows what a competent music teacher should KNOW and be able to DO. But we have found that we can't depend on the website alone to motivate people to act. It takes lots of personal persuasion on the part of current NCTMs. Approaching a fellow teacher on a one-to-one basis plants the idea and opens a dialog on the subject.

* Supplementing the information on the website, we are distributing at our state conference a single-page reference chart created by Jill Hanrahan, NCTM, and Barbara Taylor, NCTM, and updated by MTNA national headquarters in July 2007. This chart shows clearly the paths that will take teachers from wherever they are now to the goal of becoming certified. (Please see the Bonus Byte on page 68.)

Hurdle 2--Certification is not a high priority for many teachers. Music teachers procrastinate about earning certification--not out of laziness, but out of "busyness." Students' immediate needs tend to override teachers' long-term goals. College teachers already have titles or positions that convey status; certification is often not a high priority for them. We independent teachers are often so fiercely independent that we resist anyone telling us what we SHOULD do.