Registrar's Report Making a Difference The College of Teachers is now three-and-a-half years old. Since its inception, your Council and dedicated staff have built the largest professional self-regulatory in the country.

By Margaret Wilson

I would like, in my last column, to thank all those who have contributed to the initial stages of the College's work and identify some issues that, as part of our legislated mandate, the profession will be dealing with in the coming year. The Chair of the first Council, Donna Marie Kennedy, made an enormous contribution to the College. Her sense of duty and her intense interest in teaching as a profession were capped only by her sense of fairness and good humour in tense debates. The Vice-Chair, John Cruickshank, and indeed all members of Council, responded with enthusiasm to the work of the Council and its committees. Their involvement, with excellent staff support, has resulted in some impressive achievements. The College has moved from an error-ridden database to a public register of Ontario teachers, a mammoth task given the size of our membership. Your willingness to provide updates for your individual files was essential to this endeavour.

EXCELLENT STANDARDS

We now have a complaints and discipline process that guarantees the complainant and the College member fairness and due process. The College moved quickly to develop standards of practice, ethical standards and a professional learning framework for the profession that define excellence in teaching and provide solid guidance to continuous improvement for individual teachers. While all these initiatives proceeded, we collaborated with the faculties of education to initiate an ongoing review of pre-service teacher education programs in Ontario. We embarked on an examination of distance learning for teacher in-service, an issue that is critical to thousands of our members. We also developed a language proficiency policy, presented a revised teacher qualifications regulation to the Minister and passed an accreditation regulation which, unfortunately, still awaits cabinet approval. Last, but not least, in addition to our mandated work, we produced a major research paper and a pivotal and very thoughtful report to the Minister on teacher testing that opens up many questions that the next Council must address. Like most of our documents, it remains available for you to refer to at www.oct.ca. What else remains to be done? Once the accreditation regulation is approved by government, the College will have to examine and approve more than 200 different courses, in English and French, offered by 10 faculties of education. The regulation envisions ongoing teacher learning that will expand the range of providers and the types of professional learning — an eagerly awaited development for many College members. Soon, the College will return to campuses across the province for the first authorized accreditation of the pre-service program. Panels will expect to find that College recommendations have been acted upon and the profession will begin to see an ongoing dialogue between faculties, teachers and administrators to build stronger, more responsive teacher education programs in Ontario.

NEED ANSWERS

Important questions remain. If the Ministry goes ahead and develops a detailed performance assessment system, will we — the profession — have the responsibility for describing teacher competency? If teachers want a say in this vital question, the College must work with members and stakeholders on this issue as we did in the development of standards and our recommendations on teacher testing. Will Ontario's teachers set the test for entry to our profession? This and other key measures of teachers' status as a self-governing profession will have major impacts on the future of our schools. I accepted the position as the first Registrar because I believed that we needed a professional body, with roughly equal teacher and public representation, that could be seen to accept responsibility for all aspects of providing a quality education system to the students of Ontario. The well-being and prosperity of our society depends on the quality of our education system. I believed then and believe now that improvements can be made. As a College we have made a good start, but there is much to be done. If we succeed, everyone wins — and nobody more than the essential building block of a happy and successful society, the teacher.

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