Transforming the teaching workforce

• In Event: Quality Teaching Rounds: An Elegant Solution to Enduring Problems in Education?

Abstract

The imperative to sustain teaching as a respected and attractive profession is more critical than ever. With teacher shortages globally and with many nations struggling to recruit and retain enough teachers, recent efforts to attract ‘the best and brightest’ (Gore et al., 2016) have been replaced by embracing almost anyone. In this paper, we highlight three key elements discerned from our substantial body of evidence that, we believe, are central to making teaching more attractive.
First, teaching must be understood and treated as intellectual work. Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) puts pedagogy at the centre of professional development. In so doing, we challenge the emerging consensus that ‘effective’ PD needs to be content-focused (Gore et al., 2023). Instead, our focus on pedagogy provides principled flexibility. It conceptualises teaching as requiring not only complex judgment but wisdom that can and should be passed on (Gore & Patfield, in press). QTR provides opportunities for teachers to share their knowledge and insights and build the kind of collective purpose that is critical for school improvement.
Second, teachers require a clear, coherent, and contextualised account of what constitutes quality teaching to anchor their practice and professional identities (Gore, 2021). Our studies show that even experienced teachers lack confidence, partly because they have received little meaningful feedback on their practice (Gore & Rickards, 2021). Participation in just four days of QTR professional development quickly deepens teachers’ understanding of good teaching, changes aspects of their practice, and builds robust relationships with colleagues. The result is enhanced efficacy, belonging, job satisfaction and professional identity and, importantly, decreased burnout. We have found such results with a diverse range of teachers including beginning and experienced teachers, casual relief and student teachers, and teachers in inclusive education settings.
Third, teachers must be treated respectfully. QTR creates respect by attending carefully to the power dynamics – rooted in experience, seniority, and positional authority – that often get in the way of critical analytical work among teachers (Bowe & Gore, 2017). Underpinned by a Foucauldian understanding of power as productive and circulating (Foucault, 1980), QTR deliberately flattens school power hierarchies. It creates multiple opportunities for all teachers to be heard and builds trusting professional relationships. These processes not only empower teachers to drive the PD with minimal external input – a feature that adds to its scalability, sustainability, and impact – but contribute to rebuilding teaching as an attractive profession.
QTR’s applicability across grades, subjects, and at all career stages (Gore & Rosser, 2022) contributes to the scalability of the approach and makes it viable in the resource-constrained environments facing many nations. Multiple studies have been conducted, or are now underway, in Sweden, Albania, Indonesia, Japan, and Ireland, with funding currently being sought for studies in England and Wales.
We argue that efforts to improve the attractiveness of teaching, especially across international borders, will only yield fruit if anchored in the kind of compelling evidence we have amassed (and discuss) in this paper.

Authors

• Jennifer M. Gore, University of Newcastle

• Andrew Miller, University of Newcastle

• Sally Patfield, University of Newcastle

• Leanne Fray, University of Newcastle

• Brooke Rosser, University of Newcastle

• Jacquie Briskham, University of Newcastle

• Julia Vagg, University of Newcastle

• Skye Gibson, University of Newcastle