- The question I'm asked frequently from teachers early in their teaching career is, "Why become a department head?" "What are some of the advantages?" "What do you do?" "How do you get it?" So, the first answer is, you really want to become a department head to help in the school's leadership team. Leadership, usually, as we know, comes from the top, and the director of the various boards will usually send some sort of a mandate, if you will, as to what a school should focus on. Usually, it's something like diversity, indigenous studies, maybe literacy, maybe numeracy. This, of course, cascades down to all of the schools, to the administrators. And the administrators ask that we infuse that into our departments. So, you might become part of a school's culture and personality. Another reason to become a department head is that you get to, of course, set department budgets. You get to assist department members with, let's say, curriculum. You provide resources for your members. You're usually offering some kind of advice, but you're not evaluating. You're also helping with things like Grade 8 transition nights, where the Grade 8's for the current year come in transitioning to Grade 9. You get to tell them about your program, tell them about your courses. So, it's really more of also a marketing job that you're doing, especially, if you're the department head of an elective program. Many administrators usually end up becoming administrators because they have first started as a department head, if they so want to go in that direction. There's also things to do, like there's additional meetings that you have to attend. Usually, there's monthly department head meetings from your school that you have to attend. There's also regional meetings. So, all the department heads from all the schools across the board will get together and talk about things like hot topics going on, maybe curriculum changes, how to perhaps do a better job of marketing their programs; so, information that they would want to bring back to the rest of the department. In the spring, when you're setting timetables, when the school is setting timetables, you, basically, get to help decide, or not decide, but, of course, you suggest who is going to be best suited to teach which course within your department. Well, you have to be teaching for two years. And in your schedule, you would've had to take at least half of those two years, would be in teaching those courses that you want to become... get your qualifications in. You, usually, take what's called an honor specialist course. It's usually a onetime course that you take after your second year. And you can take it at any post-secondary institution that offers AQ courses through their continuing ed program.