About the new Junior Cert 2014

The new Junior Certificate (JC), to commence in 2014, will bring about a sea change in what happens in Irish classrooms. The main focus will be on student learning, the quality of that learning and the respective roles of teachers and students in that process. Teachers will be challenged to discover ways of better facilitating student learning. Teachers will also be challenged to adapt their classrooms to where less teaching and more learning taking place.

This is good news – teachers often express great frustration that they are the ones doing all the hard work in the classrooms (this might, indeed, be an opportunity to begin to replace the word “work” with all its connotations of drudgery and boredom, with language that better describes the richness of engagement, discovery and learning for understanding). Teachers’ energies can be far better used in facilitating student learning, instead of standing at the top of the classroom transmitting content which is available at the click of a mouse.

The new JC will present teachers with opportunities to work differently with their students and to build their professional capacity and competence. Above all this, there will be opportunities for teachers and students to rediscover the profound innate pleasure in learning: engagement, exploration, discovery, collaboration and challenge.

The new JC will encourage innovation and creative learning in classrooms. Students will be expected to learn much more than course content. There will be less emphasis on learning content by rote and more on using content as a vehicle for learning to learn. The NCCA are very clear about this – “The course is no longer an entity to be covered. Rather it becomes the focus and resource for learning”. Students will be required to become aware of not only what they have learnt, but also how they have learnt. In this, they will build key personal capacities around Learning to Learn (L2L).

Learning and teaching practices in the new JC will be very different than today. Among teachers, as well as Principals and Deputies, there is understandable concern about what this will all mean. All change involves leaving comfort zones to face the unknown.

The DES and NCCA promise that CPD for Principals and teachers will commence in 2013. Intelligent school leaders won’t wait until 2014 for their staff to examine the new JC proposals and to begin to explore, and experiment with, a radically new pedagogy. If the new JC expects students to become active participants in their own learning, it might now be timely for teachers to begin to actively engage with the new system in advance of its commencement.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We cannot expect our schooling system to produce different outcomes if we do nothing or merely tweak at the edges. There is a moral imperative, therefore, to change how we organise our schools. The new Junior Certificate will present a welcome and long awaited opportunity to do this.

Visit http://ncca.ie/framework/ for details of the new Junior Certificate.

Click here for full details of the new Junior Certificate Framework issued by the DES/NCCA on 4 October 2012.