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Lessons · Teaching · continuing professional education across the cycle

Keeping it: hours across the renewal cycle

A Texas standard certificate is renewed by completing continuing professional education hours across the renewal cycle and applying before the certificate expires; the number of hours and the length of the cycle are figures the state publishes, so they are looked up and never remembered.

Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.

What it is for

A teacher reached the last year of her cycle with most of the hours undone, and spent a summer buying workshops she did not want in order to keep a job she did. The hours were never the hard part. Spreading them was. Divide the requirement by the years and it is a weekend or two a year; leave it alone and it is a whole summer.

How to think about it

At the start of the cycle, look up the two published figures, the hours required and the length of the cycle, and divide one by the other. That is your yearly number, and it is small. Then keep one file of evidence as you earn it, because hours you cannot evidence are hours you did not do.

Worked example

Say the published figures are 150 hours across 5 years, so 30 a year
The division done once, at the beginning, while it is still cheap.
Hours done 90, hours required 150, so 60 left
A stocktake in the middle of the cycle.
60 left over 2 years = 30 a year
Still the same yearly number, which is the whole point of not falling behind.
Evidence filed as each activity finishes, not at the end
A certificate you cannot produce did not happen.

Your turn

Name what still has to be done once the hours are finished.

Renewal is not automatic: you complete the hours and then you

The trap

Assuming that every useful thing you did counts. The hours have to be of the kind the state recognises, from a provider it recognises, and a teacher who logs a hundred hours of the wrong sort has a full folder and an unrenewed certificate.

Practise continuing professional education across the cycle on HoneA question on it now, a real problem where there is one, and it is remembered for review. Free, no email needed.