Welcome to Teaching the Junior Cycle Coding Short Course. Many of the teachers delivering this course in Ireland are out-of-field, cross-trained from Maths, Science, Business or elsewhere, and asked to lead coding because no formally qualified CS teacher was available. If that is you, you are in good company, not the exception.

Watch this presentation to see the shape of the whole course and to meet the Lead Learner mindset that underpins it.

This survey establishes your starting point across the core areas this course targets. Rate your current confidence honestly. There are no right answers, and lower ratings simply tell us where the course can make the biggest difference. You will complete a matched survey at the end of the course, and the side-by-side comparison becomes evidence of your professional growth in your portfolio.

Watch this presentation of a teacher debugging a student's stuck project live, using an AI assistant that produces a wrong suggestion. Notice not the code itself but the moves the teacher makes: how they stay calm when they do not know the answer, how they read the error first, and how they turn the AI's mistake into the lesson rather than hiding it.

Now make the mindset your own. This reflection joins your baseline audit in your Professional Learning Portfolio, which grows across the course into your implementation plan for delivering JC Coding in your school.

In this lesson you:

• Saw the full course arc across five modules, ending with your own JC Coding implementation plan
• Recognised that many JC Coding teachers in Ireland are out-of-field, and that this course was written for exactly that situation
• Met the Lead Learner mindset and its three shifts: model the lookup instead of answering instantly, curate instead of building from scratch, and use AI openly instead of hiding it
• Established your baseline confidence across coding pedagogy, the language pathway, the CBA, AI content, and engagement
• Located yourself on the coder-to-teacher spectrum and named the Lead Learner response to your biggest worry