How Althea Turner Walked, Ran, and Jumped into a Teaching Career
| by Alex Skov
“Teaching never, ever, ever, ever entered my mind,” Althea Turner smiled. “It was just not something I wanted to do.”
As a corporate trainer in London, Turner had found her niche. She was certain of it.
Things changed, though, when Turner moved to the U.S. and was looking for a surefire career path.
“There was a need for teachers and they said, ‘We will give priority to those that want to be teachers or nurses or doctors, or work in IT,’ and I thought, ‘I’m an education major, so let me go that route.’”
Turner spent five years establishing herself as an educator in Tampa, Florida, but she never left behind the tenets of her professional past. In fact, she used them as a bridge into her new career.
“It’s important really to have good communication skills as a corporate trainer. That’s one of the things they do emphasize because you’re dealing with such varieties of different personalities, and the same with schools, as well,” Turner said, “Just really [being] able to communicate with people from different backgrounds, because I’ve dealt with a wide variety of kids from all parts of the world, so that communication skill is really important and the ability just to help them to feel at ease and relaxed in your company.”
Learning the Language of Education
Buoyed by the skills she had developed as a corporate trainer, Turner’s burgeoning confidence as an educator was tested — and ultimately solidified — when she was tasked with leading a group of students who did not speak any English to being proficient in the language.
“They were Spanish-speaking and apparently their skills in Spanish were not good, either. My first thought was, ‘How am I going to teach kids who speak another language? I do not speak Spanish,’” Turner remembered, “so I actually thought the best thing to do would be just to be very animated.”
As a naturally animated person, she spent weeks on end describing her actions while walking, running, jumping, and pantomiming other activities for her class of kindergarten and first grade students, who absorbed the new language through Turner’s visual cues.
“They picked up the language within about 4 months and one of them actually was tested for gifted [classes] and got into gifted [classes] after,” Turner said. “That was probably after about the seventh month because she was advancing so well.”
Turner was amazed by her students’ progress, so much so that she was determined to continue working as an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher when she moved to Atlanta, a city she’s now called home for 14 years.
As her career her grown, so has the variety of students she’s worked with. While she has fond memories of the younger children in that early class, Turner now finds the real magic of education when working with older students.
“My favorite is my high schoolers. I love doing very interactive projects with them,” she said. “I love the fact that I can be like the corporate trainer and have some of those skills in the classroom, doing group work, having question and answer sessions. I’m even more animated with them.”
Professional Growth with Moreland University
After several years in education, Turner knew it was time to formalize her credentials. When Atlanta Public Schools recommended programs for teacher certification, she began asking about the most efficient pathway to becoming licensed.
“There’s a whole variety [of programs]. I [didn’t] know how to choose. I said, ‘I know that I do not want to spend a long time doing this because I naturally have a short attention span — like most teachers — and I need to get this over quickly,’” Turner reflected, ‘and they said the best one and the shortest one is Moreland.”
That was her first introduction to the university that would become her alma mater. Turner soon applied and enrolled in TEACH-NOW Teacher Preparation Certificate Program, a 100% online, 9-month program that proved to be exactly what she needed.
“I’m really proud of my achievements because it was quite a challenging course, in a good way. I got comfortable in my career and so Moreland really challenged me in my thinking,” she shared. “I had some ingrained ways of thinking when it came to teaching and I felt like I needed to just review my skills and see how I can be a better teacher in the classroom. So, Moreland provided me with those skills in curriculum development, teaching in the classroom, general organization, lesson planning, and all the things that are really important to us as teachers.”
Turner took what she was learning and applied it directly in the classrooms she was leading, noticing the difference almost immediately.
“I became more structured and more purposeful,” she said. “I could see a difference in my development during the course and certainly afterward.”
Looking Ahead to Leadership
With her program complete and her teacher certification in hand, Turner is committed to continuing her ESOL career and is eyeing potential opportunities in educational leadership, coaching, and even business operations.
“I think that now having taken the course at Moreland and now having my professional license as a result of being at Moreland, it has opened up many doors to me,” Turner noted. “I can look more into going into some aspect of leadership…and that’s because I have a license and it’s made me feel a lot more comfortable in pursuing those things, whereas before I wouldn’t have thought about it. I thought, ‘I’m not qualified. I can’t do this.’”
As a self-described “bulldog,” Turner’s renewed confidence is a perfect fit for her characteristic determination. It should be no surprise, then, that her advice for aspiring educators and teachers working without full certification is direct:
“Stop hindering yourself. Stop looking at all the negative barriers that come up in your mind and simply go for it. It doesn’t matter at what stage of your life, there’s so many different age groups in teaching and there’s opportunities every day for teachers. Take those first steps, look into what you need to do, and go for it.”
Moreland is ready to support you as you build a thriving education career. Complete your free application to our 100% online 9-month TEACH-NOW Teacher Certificate Preparation Program or one of our 12-month master’s degree programs today. It takes less than 15 minutes to complete and most applicants here back within two business days.
