How to become a teacher in Florida

Florida is focused on the preparation of high-quality teachers and other professional educators. The state has placed an emphasis on ensuring Florida’s students are prepared for lifelong success and are college and career ready. In 2020, Florida adopted the Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.) Standards, which represent the highest-quality, knowledge-based standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) in the nation. The B.E.S.T. Standards were created by Florida educators and subject matter experts and are content-rich and developmentally appropriate; go back-to-basics; build a foundation beginning in the early grades; and are understandable, concise and set clear expectations for students, teachers and parents. The B.E.S.T. Standards for ELA embed civics in kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) and include the only comprehensive K-12 reading list in the nation. The B.E.S.T. Standards for Mathematics streamlined the coding scheme to be consistent with other content areas and streamlined strands to be consistent throughout K-12. The B.E.S.T. Standards offer flexibility for teachers with a focus on content, while including clear expectations for progression from year-to-year through course alignment. Every year since 2020, the Florida Department of Education (Department) develops and delivers summer institutes along with other professional learning opportunities to equip K-12 educators with literacy instructional practices grounded in the science of reading. Additional professional learning was provided in mathematics, computer science and civics as the transition to the new standards progressed.

In March 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation that eliminated the Common Core-based, end-of-year, high-stakes Florida Standards Assessments, and created the new Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST) plan. This plan monitors student progress and fosters individualized instruction in the classroom. During the 2022-23 school year, FAST, which is aligned with the B.E.S.T. Standards, was administered in grades prekindergarten through grade 10 (PK-10). FAST assessments are administered three times during each school year: once at the beginning of the year (Progress Monitoring [PM] 1), once in the middle of the year (PM2) and once at the end of the year (PM3). PM1 is designed to provide a baseline score that teachers use to track students’ progress for learning the B.E.S.T. Standards from PM1 to PM2. PM2 provides a mid-year score to compare to the baseline score from PM1, and PM3 provides a summative score that will accurately measure student mastery of the B.E.S.T. Standards. Beginning with the 2023-24 school year, PM3 is used for school accountability purposes. With this transition to statewide progress monitoring for school accountability, Florida empowers parents and teachers to engage in impactful conversations about student progress, enabling parents to support their children effectively throughout the school year.

Florida’s state-approved teacher preparation programs are aligned to the Florida Educator Accomplished Practices (FEAP), which are Florida’s standards for effective educators. Florida’s public school educators and candidates in educator preparation programs are expected to know and be able to demonstrate mastery in these standards. Based on principles that focus on high expectations, knowledge of subject matter and the standards of the teaching profession, these practices also establish a common language and statewide understanding of the expectations for the quality of instruction and professional responsibility. In 2023, the State Board of Education (SBOE) updated the FEAP to require that effective educators provide classroom instruction to students in PK-12 that is age and developmentally appropriate and aligned to the state academic standards for students as adopted in Rule 6A-1.09401, Florida Administrative Code (F.A.C.).

The high standards of the Florida Teacher Certification Examinations (FTCE) ensure the preparedness of teacher candidates to meet the demands of today’s high-performing Florida classrooms. The purpose of the FTCE program is to provide the state of Florida with an assessment tool for prospective educators to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in the areas of general knowledge, professional education competence, educational leadership and/or subject area knowledge. The tests measure prospective teachers’ achievement of the benchmarks established by the SBOE as stated in Rule 6A-4.0021, F.A.C., and published in the Competencies and Skills Required for Teacher Certification in Florida. The FTCE plays a critical role toward maximizing the number of Florida educators who possess the requisite knowledge and skills along with the capacity to become highly effective educators. Recent test development activities focused on the alignment of the FTCE competencies and skills to the SBOE-approved K-12 B.E.S.T Standards, particularly those competencies and skills related to Mathematics, as well as ELA and Reading. These test development activities are all part of ensuring that individuals who become teachers in Florida have sufficient knowledge of the standards and how to teach those standards in their own classrooms. This, in turn, ensures Florida’s students are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to be ready for careers and college-level coursework.

Florida has high standards and strong accountability systems for our educator preparation programs and recognizes that decisions on the continued approval of teacher preparation programs must be based on program completers’ impact on student learning. Each state-approved teacher preparation program receives an Annual Program Performance Report (APPR) that is accessible by the public and contributes 50 percent of the continued program approval decision. (This information can be accessed at https://www.florida-eipep.org.) Florida reviews state-approved programs through a rigorous site visit process and requires programs to provide a plan for continuous improvement. In 2021, the Department worked with a third party to conduct an audit review to reevaluate the impact of the continued program approval process for Florida’s state-approved teacher preparation programs. Based on feedback provided from the audit and legislation passed by the Florida Legislature in 2022, the SBOE revised the APPR and continued program approval criteria in 2023, thus improving the quality of teacher education programs and, ultimately, improving outcomes for Florida’s PK-12 students.

The APPR is composed of Candidate Readiness, Workforce Contribution, Impact on Student Learning and Annual Evaluations as stated in Rule 6A-5.066, F.A.C. Performance metrics not applicable to a program are not rated. Initial Teacher Preparation programs (ITPs) receive annual APPR summative rating scores, known as the Initial Teacher Preparation Summative APPR, averaged across all of the provider’s state-approved initial teacher preparation programs. The rating score is then weighted by the total number of completers used in the annual calculation of the APPR summative rating. Each APPR will include a summative rating score between 1.0 and 4.0 that is weighted between all performance target level scores received by a program. The summative rating score for the program is weighted and calculated as follows: Candidate Readiness (30%), Impact on Student Learning (20%), Workforce Contribution (30%) and Annual Evaluations (20%). If a program does not receive a score in one or more of the performance metrics, the weight of the unscored metric(s) will be evenly distributed among the scored metrics. The minimum requirements to receive a score for each performance metric are as follows:

1. For the Candidate Readiness metric, the program must have one (1) or more completers in the cohort;

2. For the Impact on Student Learning metric, the program must have three (3) or more completers in the cohort;

3. For the Workforce Contribution metric, the program must have three (3) or more completers in the cohort; and

4. For the Annual Evaluation metric, the program must have three (3) or more completers in the cohort.

Site visits for continued approval of teacher preparation programs utilize the Florida Site Visit Framework. The framework was revised by the SBOE in 2024 to prohibit the use of the three-cueing system model of reading or visual memory as a basis for teaching word reading. The framework also expanded the requirement for literacy training for both educator preparation institutes (EPIs) and ITPs.