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There are a variety of ways to meet the requirements to become a New York State certified teacher. The traditional pathway to certification involves completing a traditional teacher preparation program at a bachelor’s or a master’s degree level. New York State has a two-tier certification system. The first license issued is the Initial License, which is valid for 5 years. Professional License is the next and terminal license tier in NYS, which is issued to the educator upon completion of a master’s degree and meeting professional development requirements. Career-changers transitioning to teaching from other career paths can take advantage of the intensive alternative preparation programs, available to experienced professional with a bachelor’s or a master’s degrees. Currently, certification areas for “Language other than English (5-9)” and “Language other than English (7-12)” exists in 38 languages. In addition, a NYS certified teacher is eligible to provide Bilingual Education instruction to students by adding a Bilingual Education Extension to the existing NYS certification. The bilingual certification extension is available in the following languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese Chinese, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Yiddish.

For additional information about certification, please, consult the State of New York Office of Teaching Initiatives.