Holding an Initial License as a teacher in Massachusetts opens up your career prospects significantly, and is mandated after five years teaching on a Provisional License. Yet updating your license during the pandemic, like most aspects of teaching and learning, has been a challenge. It’s why the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MA DESE) issued an emergency licensure order when teachers could not attend classes to earn the credits and fulfill the criteria they needed to advance. Having been extended once, from June 2021 to June 2022, the ‘grace period’ is now coming to an end, to ensure all teachers are appropriately licensed going forward.

As you know, Massachusetts' teachers holding a Provisional license* are expected to advance to an Initial license during their fourth or fifth year of teaching. The traditional route to licensure (Route 1) requires grad school, intensive study and student-teaching scenarios. For some people, like Katherine Flynn, this felt like a ‘step back’. An experienced Special Educational Needs teacher, just three classes away from her Masters in teaching, Katherine started to research alternative ways to achieve licensure – quickly:

"What you get for your money with Class Measures is worth way more than anything you could get at grad school." 

Before his move to Massachusetts, Stephen Pettit had been a teacher for a long time. His route to teaching was a more unusual one. Despite having always wanted to teach, Stephen graduated from his undergraduate degree in the early 1970s and was advised not to go into teaching, because at that time there was a glut of teachers and no one was hiring. So he began a very successful career in the steel industry, working his way up over the next 30 years: