School’s vision of teaching and learning

All too often, we hear discussions about ‘How to teach’, but less often do we hear ‘What are we teaching?’, ‘Why are we teaching?’, ‘Why should students learn?’ and ‘How is our teaching and assessment affecting student experience?’

In Cork Educate Together Secondary School, we aim to prepare students for life, as well as for further academic study and/or work.

Whilst great attention must be paid to state exams, in particular the Leaving Certificate; we also feel the need to emphasise the following:

• Promoting inter-student cooperation rather than competition
• Finding cross-curricular links between subjects, rather than seeing them as distinct blocks of knowledge
• Supporting teachers to work on energising cross-curricular projects
• Giving students some autonomy over what and how they learn
• Promoting intrinsic motivation as a model for life-long learning (‘I do it because I want to..’)
• Promoting individuals' personal growth, intellectual freedom and moral development
• Providing a wide range of teaching materials and thus avoiding a reliance on text-books

With this in mind, we have developed our student-centred model of education for Ireland.