The Teaching Council
Who are The Teaching Council?
The Teaching Council is the professional standards body for the teaching profession, which promotes and regulates professional standards in teaching. When a person decides they want to become a teacher, the Council is responsible for each of the steps that person goes through, to become and remain a teacher. They also advise the Minster for Education on many matters such as the criteria that students must meet to gain entry to programmes of Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Standards and trust are core elements of the Council’s work. The Council establishes and maintains the standards for the teaching profession which, in turn, allows parents and the wider public to have trust in the profession.
Watch a video of the role of The Teaching Council here.
What do The Teaching Council do?
The Teaching Council offices are based in Maynooth, Co. Kildare. Here, the Council process the registration and garda vetting of over 106,000 teachers on the register. Other work includes the review and accreditation of all 75 programmes of initial teacher education and the investigation of complaints made against registered teachers under the Fitness to Teach process.
What else do the Council do?
The Council is engaged in many other exciting and innovative projects to help promote teaching and learning.
Cosán
Teaching is underpinned by ongoing, lifelong learning. Through Cosán, the first national framework for teachers’ learning, the Council is seeking to recognise all the professional learning that teachers do. What teachers learn about and how they learn varies from school to school and from teacher to teacher. There is no set way of learning, and we as teachers see this every day in our classroom. learn, and seeks to promote this learning through core standards, values and principles.
Cosán positions teachers as autonomous and responsible learning professionals, and recognises the many different ways that they learn, including formal and informal learning. As such, it values teacher learning through a range of learning processes, including engagement in professional conversations, reading a relevant article, team teaching with a colleague and engaging in collaborative reflection afterwards, attendance at a professional learning event, or mentoring a student teacher or newly-qualified teacher. It is therefore considered to be a very innovative and flexible framework, and it highlights the need for teachers to have access to rich and varied quality learning opportunities that best meet their learning needs and those of their students. It is noteworthy that Cosán promotes reflective practice, whereby teachers are responsible for their learning and have the opportunity to develop their practice throughout their careers.
This graphic highlights the main elements of the framework.
Click on the image above to view this resource.
CROÍ
CROÍ (Collaboration and Research for Ongoing Innovation), is the name given to the Teaching Council’s innovative and practical research series, that supports teachers in engaging in, and with, research. It’s noteworthy that Croí (pronounced Cree) is the Irish language word for heart, and this reflects the fact that research is at the heart of teaching and learning. The following are some highlights from the series:
Click on the image above to view this resource.
Using Research in Our School
We know that teachers’ lives are busy ones, so the Using Research in our School resource makes it easier for schools to find research content that is relevant to them, in a format that suits them. The content is grouped thematically, so that schools can focus on the topics that are most of interest to them. Under each theme, schools can access a webinar, an ezines and eBooks relevant to the theme. To access the series, please click here.
Online library
All registered teachers have free access to an online library and a collection of ebooks. This is a great resource and practical support for all teachers seeking to engage with the latest thinking and evidence on a wide range of educational issues. This is in response to a call from teachers for easier access to, and opportunities for critical engagement with, research. View the CROÍ ebook here.
FÉILTE
FÉILTE is the Teaching Council’s annual Festival of Education in Learning and Teaching Excellence which celebrates the wonderful work that teachers do every day in their classrooms and gives teachers the opportunity to collaborate and share this work with each other and with the wider public. This year, FÉILTE 2020 is taking place online and can be accessed from around the world. Click here to register.
Watch the highlights of FÉILTE 2019 here.
BEACONS – Bringing Education Alive for our Communities on a National Scale
Through BEACONS, the Teaching Council is exploring new ways for supporting more and better conversations between teachers, parents and students at the local community level. The intention is that this work will facilitate enhanced engagement between local communities and national consultative processes on issues of common interest and importance. To date, six BEACONS events have taken place.
Watch a video on the BEACONS process to date.