Questioning dominant ways of thinking about quality

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

Abstract

While ‘quality’ education is espoused or sought by most governments around the world, as a profession we are far from agreeing on what we mean by quality (Gore, 2021). To this end, some governments seek greater control over teachers and/or over teaching practice. Some seek to reform initial teacher education. Some seek to emulate the successes, or perceived successes, of other nations (Weale, 2019). We argue that such strategies often fail to take a systemic perspective, instead creating a piecemeal jumble of desperate ideas, often aligned with political cycles, that fail to make a meaningful difference.
By contrast, we call for a concerted focus on the quality of educational provision for all children and young people – a task that requires embracing teaching as a complex task and questioning some of our field’s most tightly-held, taken-for-granted notions.
What is pedagogy? Is there a difference between classroom practice and classroom practices (plural)? What is quality? What is effective PD? How effective is mentoring? Or coaching? How do PLCs work? Or do they? What does good instructional leadership look like? Arguably, these and many more un- or partially- answered questions have hampered efforts at educational improvement. In our view, dominant answers to such questions in recent decades have moved the field little, often harking back to research and scholarship (some of it important) from the 1980s and 1990s.
Drawing on our program of research, in this paper we demonstrate that the success of QTR stems from: (1) taking a fresh perspective on these questions; and (2) conducting large-scale, longitudinal, and experimental studies while simultaneously carrying out case studies and other fine-grained qualitative work and drawing on diverse theoretical positions. We illustrate that research conducted across the spectrum of methodologies creates powerful evidence without being drawn into the vortex of the now caricatured ‘what works’ agenda. In doing so, we expose how the critical discourse on ‘what works’ has fuelled a turn away from intervention, experimental, and implementation forms of research and how ‘evidence’ is so often poorly understood and utilised in current educational debates. We also highlight the (frustrating for researchers) tension between the evidence ostensibly sought by jurisdictions and their failure to set up systems that enable the production of such evidence.
This paper foregrounds the underlying mechanisms of QTR (Patfield et al., 2022) to deepen understanding of the approach and why it appears to work. In this way, we draw out key principles of the approach that, we argue, offer an elegant solution to many of the challenges facing education around the world. We encourage further engagement, debate and testing of these ideas.

Authors

• Jennifer M. Gore, University of Newcastle

• Sally Patfield, University of Newcastle

• Leanne Fray, University of Newcastle

• Andrew Miller, University of Newcastle