Here's a quick introduction to the course — about a minute and a half on what it covers and how it works. It's worth a watch before you begin.
Welcome to Teaching Leaving Certificate Computer Science. This first lesson does three things: it maps the full course so you know where you are headed, it establishes an honest baseline of your current confidence, and it introduces the mindset that makes delivering LCCS sustainable for a teacher who isn't a Computer Science specialist.
A baseline confidence audit and a first portfolio reflection on how you will work as a Lead Learner rather than a domain expert.
Most teachers delivering LCCS in Ireland today came to it from Maths, Physics, Business, or Technology. If that is you, this course is built for exactly your starting point.
Watch this presentation. It gives an honest picture of who teaches LCCS in Ireland today, walks through the six modules and what you carry away from each, and introduces the Lead Learner mindset that underpins the whole course.
Your Course Journey and the Lead Learner Mindset
Rate your current confidence honestly. Lower ratings are not a problem; they simply tell you where this course can make the biggest difference.
Before watching the worked example, pause and establish your starting point. This survey covers the five domains this course targets, Python programming fluency, Core Concepts subject knowledge, ALT delivery, coursework supervision, and written-paper teaching, plus the two Lead Learner habits introduced in this lesson. You will complete a closely matched survey at the end of the course so you can see the distance you have travelled.
The Lead Learner approach asks you to use AI coding assistants openly with students, including when they get things wrong. That can feel risky. This short presentation shows exactly what it looks like in practice: a teacher uses an assistant to debug a student's stuck code, the assistant suggests something plausible but wrong, and the teacher catches it and turns the moment into the real lesson, which is verification.
Predict the bug. A student's loop never ends, the screen has frozen, and they have tried twice with no luck. Take a minute to note down what you think the most common cause of an infinite loop is, and what you would check first. Hold that prediction in mind as you watch, and compare it with what the teacher and class discover.
Debugging Live With an AI Assistant
This reflection becomes the first entry in your Professional Learning Portfolio. Across the course, your surveys, plans, scripts, and reflections compile into a downloadable portfolio at completion: a personal evidence base of your professional learning.
Start it here by locating yourself honestly on the spectrum from coder to teacher, and by naming a specific moment where the Lead Learner stance changes what you would do.
In this lesson you established your starting point and the mindset that will carry you through the course. The frameworks below are what to hold on to.
| Framework / Principle | Why it matters for your teaching | Classroom application |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher as Lead Learner — you model how to tackle an unfamiliar problem rather than perform as the person who already knows everything | The great majority of LCCS teachers in Ireland came to the subject from another discipline; pretending to be a domain expert is unsustainable and brittle, whereas modelling problem-solving is exactly the skill students most need to learn | When you hit an error you don't recognise, read it aloud, search the docs in front of the class, and narrate your reasoning before changing any code |
| AI assistant as a correctable co-teacher — use tools like ChatGPT or Copilot openly, including when they produce something wrong | Students will use these tools regardless; showing them a confident answer that turns out to be wrong teaches verification far better than any warning could | Paste stuck code into the assistant, read its suggestion aloud, frame it as a hypothesis, and test it together; when it fails, make that the lesson on why output must always be verified |
| Your teaching expertise transfers — classroom management, formative assessment, scaffolding and questioning all apply directly to LCCS | The gap you are closing is subject knowledge and a few programming-specific moves, not teaching itself, which reframes the task from impossible to achievable | Use your existing cold-call or mini-whiteboard routine to have the class predict what a short Python loop will output before you run it, then use your usual think-pair-share to surface why their predictions differed from the actual output |
That was the first lesson of Teaching Leaving Certificate Computer Science
Enrol to take the whole course. Your work is saved as you go, and you get a certificate when you finish.
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