Saima AfrozUnited States
Trained as a doctor. Licensed to teach.
Earning a US teaching license with a single qualification.
- Now
- Teacher in a public school, United States
- Before
- Medicine degree, teaching at a private school in Dubai
- Programme
- PgCTL, her only teaching qualification
She was a doctor by training, teaching in a private school in Dubai with no teaching qualification at all. PgCTL became that qualification, converted into a UK level six diploma, and it carried her into a government school in Dubai and then a US public school classroom.
A medicine degree, nothing else.
Saima Afroz introduces herself as a doctor. “I have a medicine degree,” she says, “and I was working as a teacher in Dubai.” In 2019 she was at what she calls a medium private school in the city when she got the opportunity to complete PgCTL with Suraasa. She is plain about what she held on paper apart from it. “I don’t have any teaching qualification,” she says. “That’s the only teaching qualification I have.”
It mattered because of the licence. “To work as a teacher, even in UAE and even in US, you must have a teaching licence,” she says. A degree in another field, in her account, does not stand in for one.
Since I did the PgCTL, my life has changed a lot.
A licence on one qualification.
The next year, in 2020, she got a job in the Ministry of Education, a government job in Dubai. Later she moved to the United States, and she says that move too was “on the basis of” PgCTL.
She describes how it worked. Her PgCTL was converted into a UK equivalency, a level six diploma of teaching, “which is globally accepted”, she says. “And I got the teaching licence of US, the United States teaching licence, on the basis of PgCTL.”
She now works as a teacher in a public school. “Working as a teacher in a public school is a big thing here,” she says. She calls it “the best learning experience of my life”.
