Concordia launches graduate diploma to address Quebec’s licensed teacher shortage

Quebec’s school system is in a difficult predicament: around one-quarter of teachers in elementary and secondary institutions are not legally qualified to hold their jobs. A new Teacher Certification graduate diploma developed by Concordia’s Department of Education is set to address the issue by helping unlicensed educators achieve their credentials.

The program was created from scratch to meet the needs of Quebec’s Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur (MES) through a customized program based on each participant’s years of experience and current classroom challenges.

Dire shortage

At present, roughly 3,000 unlicensed teachers are working in the province’s English school system and another 25,000 in the francophone sector.

The shortage of credentialed educators has been growing for several years. Saul Carliner, professor and chair of the Department of Education, notes that teachers cannot simply be produced on demand — the profession requires interested individuals to earn a four-year bachelor’s degree.

Before the pandemic, the Canadian education field faced an oversupply of teachers, with more qualified candidates than available positions. As a result, many began to view teaching as a less viable career option, leading to a drop in the number of people pursuing a teaching license. This decline, coupled with a wave of retirements in recent years, has left Quebec's schools scrambling to fill classrooms with anyone willing to teach.

“This is a problem. While sometimes teachers without qualifications work out, a lot of times they do not, and this creates a really bad experience for the students,” says Carliner. “We have educators who are not qualified or even able to teach. This dire situation is unfortunately not unique to Quebec, or even Canada.”

“Many of these teachers, hired under a special teacher’s license called a Letter of Tolerance (LOT), also don’t have access to the same benefits as certified teachers. However, with the Ministry’s new regulations under consultation, as soon as a teacher on LOT enrolls in a certification program, they would gain provisional teaching authorization and access to the associated benefits.”

Mentorship, personalization and practice-based research

Concordia’s new Teacher Certification grad program has been developed in response to an MES initiative to increase credential rates among working educators. Multiple Quebec universities are launching similar programs, though Concordia is the only anglophone university to do so. Concordia’s approach, which leverages existing work experience in schools as part of the program, is unique.

Participants are required to have a minimum of five years of teaching experience. As Teresa Hernández González, director of the Teaching English as a Second Language undergraduate program and co-director of the new graduate program explains, “We are going to leverage the fact that they do not have the huge sink or swim experience that new teachers do when they start.”

The part-time program is personalized for each participant, executed through a combination of one-on-one mentorship and action-research projects in the classrooms in which teachers are already working. It is a research-based solution to a pressing societal need in a field rife with attrition due to deep systemic issues.

“We knew we didn’t want to just make an abridged version of our existing four-year programs,” explains Nathalie Rothschild, director of the Early Childhood and Elementary Education program and co-director of the Teaching Certification grad program. “We started from scratch and considered what this particular group of teachers would need.”

“It’s like working with a coach for a marathon,” adds Hernández González. “We know participants already have many years of experience; they’re already running. Instead of saying, ‘This is what a good runner looks like’, we’re saying, ‘Keep running. We’ll work on your technique, which is how we know we can deliver the required professional development in a 30-credit program.’”

The program runs on a flexible schedule — with online coursework, remote mentoring and supervision and two in-person workshops — so participants can continue working while they study. Cohorts of 30 students will begin with a teacher boot camp: in-person sessions where they will learn about the action-research cycle, spearhead their professional portfolio and, most importantly, meet their classmates and create a community of learning.

Upon successful completion of the program and passing a language test, participants will be granted their teaching licenses, increasing their ability to teach the subjects they know best and students with whom they are most proficient. Graduates will have their competencies validated — and increased — for the benefit of students, parents, colleagues and themselves.

Serving kids in schools

The Teacher Certification graduate diploma was spearheaded by Hernández González and Rothschild with substantial support from Dahlia Radwan, curriculum developer in the Office of the Provost and Vice-President, Academic, and Roma Medwid, executive director of the Concordia Teacher Education Council. Senior administrators Pascale Sicotte, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, and Sandra Gabriele, vice-provost, innovation in teaching and learning, also contributed. The program was also prepared in consultation with the entire Department of Education and other stakeholders.

“I sincerely commend my colleagues for fast-tracking the proposal for this program,” says Sicotte.

“They have achieved the difficult task of designing a feasible, competency-based approach to teaching that recognizes that participants are at very different points in their teaching journeys. This program will get them where they need to go. Combined with the personalization and cohort-based connections, the grad program is truly unique and wonderful.”

Hernández González adds that while the MES’s main objective is to get educators licensed, “Our primary focus is helping adults develop into the teachers that all kids in our schools deserve. We are first and foremost serving these young students.”

Learn more about Concordia’s Teacher Certification Graduate Diploma program.