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This section provides updates on licensing and qualification requirements, notification of Council resolutions and reports from various Council committees, including reports on accreditation and discipline matters.
The College's Investigation Committee considers all complaints made to the College about its members and reviews all information resulting from investigations. The committee can dismiss a complaint or refer the matter, in whole or in part, to the Discipline or Fitness to Practise committees for a hearing.
The Investigation Committee may also caution or admonish the member in writing or in person, or provide written reminders or advice, or ratify a Memorandum of Agreement reached through the complaint resolution process.
By law, cases under investigation are confidential. For the education of members, the following account, based on facts from real cases, raises important questions about teacher conduct, such as what is appropriate and what is not. Details have been altered to respect confidentiality.
The College received a complaint from a school board regarding Linda, a high school teacher. It was alleged that she behaved in an unprofessional manner and failed to maintain the standards of the profession when she photocopied and distributed multiple pages from the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test.
The literacy test is administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO). The EQAO received an anonymous report that a practice test was administered in a number of Grade 9 classes. The practice test had questions on it from the previous year's test that were not publicly released for practice on the EQAO website.
Linda stated that she photocopied five or six pages from the previous year's EQAO literacy test to prepare a scoring guide for marking purposes. She indicated that she did not need the pages and thought that she had destroyed them.
The board's investigation revealed that the pages were not destroyed and that some questions that appeared on the preparation sheet were taken from the literacy test.
If you were a member of the Investigation Committee panel, what would you have issued to Linda?
The panel decided to caution Linda in writing. It was concerned that Linda contravened EQAO guidelines and breached her responsibilities as a teacher under the provisions of the Education Act. For this reason, the panel felt it was appropriate to caution her for behaviour inconsistent with the standards of the teaching profession.