Master’s Degree in Education

Education Administration Degree

Masters in Education Administration

Education Doctoral Degree

Master’s of Education

Graduate Teacher Training/Alternate Certification

Master’s of Special Education

Master's Degree in Education
If you're interested in any aspect of teaching or academia, a master's degree in education is often the standard certification required for entry. The exact focus of your education, however, ultimately depends on your career aspirations and interests. Numerous disciplines exist in education, ranging from a master’s of arts in a school level or curriculum and instruction to administration, special education, or counseling.

Master's Degree in Education for Teaching
Degree requirements for teaching differ from state to state and district to district. Therefore, you will find that through your training you learn the tools necessary for connecting with students, designing lessons, and coordinating activities.

Master's Degree in Education for Research
If you are more interested in curriculum development and psychology, you might consider pursuing training that arms you with the necessary tools (research, statistics, writing) to help advance innovative solutions within academia. This field should become especially useful in the coming years as computer technology continues to open up new paths to learning.

Master's Degree in Education for Counseling
Students are complex individuals whose needs extend beyond the confines of the classroom. They require career advice, emotional support, and behavioral guidance. This degree focuses on outreach, social work, and psychology.

Master's Degree in Education for Administration
Providing quality education requires organization and discipline. By securing a master's in educational administration, you learn everything from budgeting and policy to hiring and firing. Your training prepares you to become a superintendent, dean, principal, or school official within the larger education system.

When choosing to gain a master's degree in education, you can focus on any of the above areas. With sufficient tenure and additional coursework, transitioning from one specialty to another is quite possible.

Master's in Education Administration
Though schools typically aren't normally for-profit institutions, they must run like businesses to ensure that students receive optimal instruction. This requires a level of supervision and organization that is well beyond the scope of traditional instructors. While schools turn to educators to teach students, they turn to those with master's training in education administration to handle the various non-academic aspects of the program. Making sure that students have the best materials, teachers, resources, and opportunities is a full time job.

Career Options after a Master's in Education Administration
Though some graduates go on to teach or conduct research, the majority of degree holders seek positions as superintendents, principals, deans, fund-raisers, headmasters, and school officials. Securing these upper-level positions, however, often requires sufficient tenure and experience in addition to advanced training and advancement requires demonstrable success, such as rising test scores, high retention rates, and regular community involvement.

Master's of Education
As a teacher with a bachelor's degree and a teaching license, you may find that you'd like to enhance your skills in certain subject areas, specialize your teaching practice, or simply give your salary a boost. To achieve these goals, you'll need a master's of education degree.

A master's of education gives in-depth training in any number of subject areas, such as technology in the classroom, teaching English as a second language, literacy and learning, educational leadership, curriculum development, administration, or specific issues related to grade-level teaching, as with elementary or adult education. Your coursework might include studies in literacy, educational psychology, computer instruction, technology tools, analysis of data, management, and certain aspects related to diversity and social sciences.

With your master's in education firmly in hand, you'll have a number of career options opened to you, including positions as a teaching specialist or administrator. You'll also find that postsecondary education positions teaching future teachers become available to you, as many colleges and universities accept candidates with master's degrees to teach certain courses. Postsecondary education positions are expected to grow by 23 percent through 2016, which is higher than the average for all occupations. Salaries among postsecondary teachers are substantially greater than those in K–12 positions.

Even if you plan to remain in your current area, earning your master’s of education places you in a higher salary bracket, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. After all, advanced training updates you on current theories and teaching strategies, shows willingness to grow professionally, and expands your knowledge and experience—all of which enhance your work as an educator.

Master's of Special Education Degree
As a special education instructor, you work with students whose needs are more complex than those of traditional or mainstream students. Due to learning disabilities, behavioral problems, or emotional disorders, special education students typically require modified approaches to learning and instruction. Using a range of media and innovative curricula, your job is to connect with these students and help them grasp the core messages behind each lesson. It's a challenging field that often requires 5 years of bachelors training or, more commonly, a master's of special education degree.

Careers with a Master's of Special Education Degree
Career prospects after graduation should be favorable, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. As understanding of childhood disorders and disabilities improves, so does the ability to diagnose and surmount these conditions. In some instances you'll work in traditional classrooms helping students with special needs keep pace with their classmates. In other cases, you might work in schools entirely dedicated to special education. Regardless of the setting, demand exists—and many districts are low on— for special education teachers from preschool all the way through to the university level and beyond.

Education Administration Degree
Teaching isn't the only way to be a part of educating our nation's children. Education administrators play a key role in leading schools to success, by developing curricula, establishing policies and procedures, building partnerships with businesses and community members, and managing schools much as you would a business, including handling complex budgetary issues, allocating resources and dealing with regulatory agencies and governments.

Administration positions include principal, assistant principal, department head, dean, superintendent, or even school board member–all of which are essential in guiding our nation's schools. Being an education administrator takes you out of the classroom for the most part, a reality to consider seriously when contemplating a move from teacher to administrator. However, being an administrator also means you play a significantly larger role in determining a school's overall goals and direction.

Because of the many duties involved in education administration, eligibility for such a position generally requires a teaching background and an advanced education administration degree. Coursework for a degree in administration augments teaching skills while incorporating topics such as, curriculum-building, public policy, educational psychology, management, budgeting, and legal issues. With an education administration degree, you can advance your career to a leadership position that generally pays more than the average teaching post.

Education administration jobs are expected to grow by 12 percent through 2016, meaning that roughly 496,000 new positions will become available. Clearly, now is an excellent time to earn an education administration degree.

Education Doctoral Degree
While a bachelor's degree and licensure is generally enough to earn you a K–12 teaching position, these often don't provide sufficient training for developing policies and procedures, creating curricula and instructional methods, formulating pedagogical theories, and conducting research into highly specific or technical areas. Neither will a bachelor's degree and licensure allow you to teach at the college level. Postsecondary education is expected to be one of the fastest growing and highest paid professions of the coming decade.

If you want to be involved in higher-level decision-making positions at the K–12 level, conduct educational research, publish scholarly articles, or get postsecondary education job, then plan to pursue an education doctoral degree. As the highest level of training one can earn in the field of education, an educational doctoral degree enables you to explore educational theories in your chosen field, whether it’s educational technology, literacy, or educational management. For this degree you also study public policy and various legal matters related to education.

Whether you choose to teach younger students or those at the college level, an educational doctoral degree gives you the greatest amount of flexibility in where and what you teach, opening up the field beyond the classroom to leadership positions such as superintendent or dean. Looking outside the school, an educational doctoral degree is the most widely respected and sought after educational level for serving in the federal government. those aspiring to leadership at that level will find an educational doctoral degree a valuable credential.

A typical doctorate of education in the U.S. usually requires several years of course work as a doctoral student, achieving generally 15 courses beyond a Masters degree, a comprehensive exam, and at its conclusion, a dissertation.  Majors within the Ed.D. include: Curriculum and Instruction, Curriculum and Teaching, Education Policy, Higher Education, Educational Administration, Educational Leadership, Counseling, or Language/Linguistics.

Most U.S. colleges and universities that offer doctorates in education give the degree options of Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Doctor of Philosophy in Education (Ph.D.), or both.  Several of the top schools of education in the United States offer only Ed.D.s (e.g., Teachers College of Columbia University, Harvard University, and George Washington University). Stanford University and University of Michigan, however, are among the top schools of education that only offer Ph.D.s in education. Some highly ranked schools of education, UCLA, UC Berkeley, University of Oregon, University of Pennsylvania among them, offer Ed.D.s for degrees in applied research and Ph.D.s for theoretical research. Finally, in rare circumstances, a school of education may offer both degrees, but structured as a project-based Ed.D. and a research-based Ph.D. St. Louis University is one of those schools.

Graduate Teacher Training
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, teaching positions should be quite favorable in the years to come as many baby-boomer educators retire. With the current trend of changing careers several times during one’s professional life, teaching is one of the professions that career-changers are pursuing. Career-changers becoming members of Kappa Delta Pi has increased in the last 10 years. If you currently possess a bachelor’s degree and have an interest in pursuing a career as a professional teacher, you should consider what graduate teacher training, or Alternate Certification can do for you. Though the exact details of your curriculum vary depending on your discipline, intended age group, and state or school district, some general subject areas are common to all graduate teacher preparation programs. These include educational theory, teaching methods, educational psychology, classroom dynamics, communication, and counseling. In addition, you might be required to take extra course work in your chosen discipline or field, depending on how recently you received your bachelor or master’s degree.

The benefits of securing graduate teacher training are quite obvious. Once you have completed all relevant course work, you will be qualified to teach in a wide range of environments, school districts, and age groups. And because most public school systems require, at some point, a master's in education (or related field), it's easy to see how graduate teacher training can play a crucial part in your employability as a licensed educator. Additionally, career advancement becomes much easier with good graduate training that you apply in your teaching. Furthermore, if you have aspirations for teaching at the postsecondary level, your graduate degree will serve as a useful steppingstone to doctoral work.