start with my three key big ideas that I want to make sure i get to again so if I
don't finish there I think we really need in thinking about professional
practice to find the right balance between form and substance I think we
will only improve pedagogy with sustained and effective collaborative
professional development and we need to bring teachers on board with an approach
to their development that creates hope and not fear what I want to emphasize in
the 10 minutes I have is the importance of rethinking the professional practices
needed to support teachers and learners if you like a new paradigm for our core
business we know that despite concerns about international rankings Australian
education is actually working reasonably well we also know that aspects of
teachers practice can be improved dramatically and Margot and others have
just talked about that as well as a profession what we don't know very well
is how to judge the quality of professional practice and how to
distinguish what works from what doesn't and especially how to judge how well
certain practices work and then what to do about it and when I say work in this
context I mean in terms of overall outcomes for students both academic and
social and I mean of course for all students in terms of equity concerns my
research with colleagues over the past decade or more and I've just put the
three most recent but I was centrally involved in the work on productive
pedagogy as well our research has produced powerful evidence of classroom
and assessment practices that produce better outcomes for students and
powerful evidence of professional learning activities that contribute to
teacher learning and improve student outcomes I don't have time of course to
share the details of these studies but with literally millions of research
dollars invested in this work and data sets with over 20,000 pieces of student
work more than 600 assessment tasks more than 700 classroom observations and
around the same number of our long interviews with teachers and school
leaders I'm pretty confident that our findings can contribute to how we think
about professional practice both in terms of teaching practice
and in terms of teacher development practice one of the main ideas I want to
leave you with today is the view that in both teaching practice and teacher
development practice we've placed too much emphasis on form over substance
when it comes to instructional practice we've ended up with a host of unhelpful
binaries about teacher director versus student centered learning traditional
versus progressive pedagogy and so on there's now a substantial body of work
some Mayo others you've heard of today that shows that students will do better
if we engage them in intellectually challenging and authentic tasks
cooperative learning experiential approaches direct instruction all have a
place in teaching what matters most is what we're asking students to do and to
learn understanding pedagogy as not only how we teach which has been the emphasis
in many alternatives to traditional category but understanding that how we
teach is inseparable from what we teach and who we teach is at the core of how
we should be thinking about professional practice when it comes to teacher
development there's also too much emphasis on the processes of
professional development and not enough on its substance in the meantime huge
investments of time and money by schools and school systems have had minimal
impact on teaching practice or student outcomes in the swing towards
professional learning communities and processes like instructional rounds and
lesson study teachers have not had sufficient guidance on how to judge and
improve their own in each other's practice I'd also argue that mentoring
and coaching don't go far enough if a new paradigm is to be created imploring
teachers to do better or to collaborate in order to do better or even imparting
the wisdom of talented teachers will not produce the kind of change that's needed
to profoundly improve schooling outcomes we've recently completed a four-year
project investigating what we call quality teaching rounds in which we
bring together the strengths of professional learning communities and
instructional rounds with the powerful concepts and language of the quality
teaching model engaging teachers in taking turns in
groups to observe each other's teaching and engage in deep deep and sustained
professional conversations about the quality of the observed practice and
implications not only for that lesson or for that assessment task or that unit of
work but for teaching practice more broadly comparing the quality of
teachers sorry the quality of teaching for teachers who participated in these
rounds with the quality of teaching among teachers in our earlier
descriptive non-intervention studies has yielded effect sizes / 0 point 5 and as
high as 1 point 8 for every element and dimension of the quality teaching model
these kinds of effect sizes are pretty unheard of in educational research we
also have differences between teachers participating in rounds and teachers in
the same and closely connected schools who are not participating in rounds with
large effect sizes for most of the scales in our survey including a very
important scale that measures teacher's responsibility for student learning an
aspect of teachers dispositions that we've found to be highly correlated with
the quality of their teaching teachers who believe they can make a difference
you believe that kids can learn and who believe they are responsible for
teachers for student learning tend to be better teachers our most recent research
has also found significant correlations between teachers participation in these
quality teaching rounds and students NAPLAN results I've got the quantitative
data but I can't put the massive results up there but there's a quote from one of
the principles in the school talking about the difference that this has made
I have detailed evidence for all of these claims I'm happy to elaborate if I
get a chance as the day goes on but in short this work is at the forefront of
international research on the relationships among teacher learning
teaching quality and student learning in any national framework for supporting
teacher development in Australia we should be drawing on the solid research
evidence that our studies and others in Australia like Julia Margo's work has
produced or more of instructional rounds Frank that Fame acknowledges a major
weakness of instruction around is their lack of an agreed framework for
what constitutes quality Pam Grossman and others using professional learning
communities recognized the problem of teachers are treating achieving
agreement about what to focus on and how to address it the quality teaching model
provides such a framework based on research developed for the New South
Wales Department of Education and Training adopted by the acct Department
and many catholic diocese and independent schools the quality teaching
model enables teachers to notice aspects of practice that might not otherwise
come to their attention to undertake fine-grained critical analysis of the
quality of practice and to identify specific ways to improve individually
and collectively such specificity and guidance is missing from many other
approaches to teach a development and from almost all articulations of
teachers standards using quality teaching in the context of quality
teaching rounds especially if pre-service teacher aid and ongoing
professional development are aligned in these ways of working we have a
potentially culture changing professional practice changing and
outcomes changing approach that works our studies show improved outcomes for
students improved equity for low SES and Aboriginal students improved teacher
satisfaction improved teaching quality and improvements in the learning culture
of schools several studies have shown a plateau and teacher learning after the
first year our own data found no statistically significant differences
between early career teachers and those with more experience using our measures
if teachers don't teach better after the first year this signals a profound
problem with how ongoing teacher learning has been enacted we need a
culture of professional engagement and renewal of collaboration with clear
direction through an approach that inspires teachers through hope rather
than fear and that has at its core the quality of learning for all students I
plan to talk about hope and fear later if I get a chance but in short when
teachers can see there own and each other's practice making a
difference it gives them confidence and hope a new paradigm needs to stop
blaming teachers without providing viable alternatives and needs to stop
pouring precious education dollars into professional development without
confidence that the investment will have a positive impact on teaching practice
and student outcomes thank you