Enhancing Teacher Professional Learning: The Case for the Quality Teaching Rounds Approach

• In Event: Effective Implementation of Pedagogical Reform Through Professional Development: The Quality Teaching Rounds Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide the theoretical background to the Quality Teaching Rounds approach to professional development. The aim is to construct a persuasive argument about why such an approach makes sense in the context of a field fraught with failed attempts to impact on teaching and student learning. With its emphasis on both the substance and processes of building teacher knowledge about teaching, we argue that it not only meets the criteria for effective professional development outlined in most meta-analyses (Garet, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001; Hattie, 2009; 1999), it also has the potential, over a relatively short time frame, to contribute to significant capacity building and sustainability.
In order to support teachers’ collaborative learning and develop their capacity to reach shared understanding of teaching practice, the approach brings together two key vehicles that have been lauded for their potential in teacher professional development, Professional Learning Community and Instructional Rounds, and fuses them with a pedagogical framework, Quality Teaching (Gore, 2007; NSW Department of Education and Training, 2003). Professional Learning Communities enable a localised and relevant focus for collegial inquiry and attempt to achieve levels of trust and respect that will compensate for the professional vulnerability associated with sharing teachers’ privatised practice. Likewise, Instructional Rounds adopt procedures to reinforce the productive conditions developed in community, while adding a focus on developing skills at objectively describing practice. However, each of these vehicles for teacher professional learning struggles with determining a coherent focus for the inquiry and a common language for describing either problems or the evidence that might assist with problem solving.
Reaching agreement in a collaborative inquiry process requires not only communicative and analytical processes but also agreed conceptual substance. King and Newmann (2000)and Gore, Ladwig and King (2004)have asserted that being able to articulate conceptual understanding and differentiate parts of practice underlies productive collegial inquiry. We argue that being able to think both individually as professionals and communally as colleagues within an agreed conceptual framework requires a common language and a set of conceptual standards, if only to begin the work immediately of refining both. Furthermore, we suggest that the disjunction in teaching between professional autonomy and agreed standards of practice remains at the core of unproductive teacher professional development. The three dimensional Quality Teaching model being used throughout this study to focus both the substance and the form of the inquiry process provides the necessary common language and conceptual standards to underpin teachers’ articulation and differentiation of their own and their colleagues’ practice within a collegial inquiry cycle.
We argue that Quality Teaching Rounds make effective and substantial teacher learning achievable within a short time frame. Its coalescence of PLCs, Instructional Rounds and Quality Teaching attends to the inadequacies associated with each approach used on its own and brings a collective focus to diagnosis and refinement of practice with local evidence.

Authors

• Julie Maree Bowe, The University of Newcastle

• Jennifer M. Gore, The University of Newcastle