- Title
- Building capacity for quality teaching in Australian schools: QTR Digital RCT final report
- Creator
- Harris, Jess; Miller, Drew; Gore, Jenny; Holmes, Mikahlia
- Publisher
- University of Newcastle
- Resource Type
- report
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Australia is a uniquely sparse country, with 46% of schools, 30% of the teaching population and 28% of the student population located in rural, regional, and remote areas (ACARA, 2021). Unfortunately, teachers and school leaders in these areas face significant challenges in accessing high quality professional development (PD) (Mohan, Lingam & Chand, 2017), with 75% of teachers in rural locations reporting that it is difficult for them to select relevant and/appropriate professional learning (AITSL, 2019). High quality, collaborative PD is more often delivered in metropolitan centres, limiting access for teachers in regional and remote settings due to their geographical isolation, the time and cost associated with travel, and difficulties in obtaining relief or casual teachers in small communities (Erickson, Noonan, & McCall, 2012; Maher & Prescott, 2017). For small schools (those with fewer than eight teachers), which represented 68% of schools in this study, participation in collaborative forms of PD, such as Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) can present additional difficulties. In these schools, releasing four teachers to engage in Rounds can be difficult or even impossible (Patfield, Gore & Harris, 2021). Increasingly, digital technologies have been used to overcome many of the challenges that teachers in small schools and those in regional and remote settings face in accessing professional development. A number of the participants in our research, however, expressed concern about a lack of engagement and interactivity in traditional forms of online PD, which they indicated were frequently a ‘box ticking’ exercise. They reported that they had benefitted from the increased availability of high-quality online professional development that has occurred as a response to COVID-19. Developed and piloted in 2019, QTR Digital offers teachers the opportunity to engage in a rigorously tested, collaborative approach to PD, using video-recordings of teachers’ lessons and videoconferencing, regardless of the size or setting of their school.
- Subject
- building capacity; quality teaching; quality teaching rounds (QTR); Australian Schools; Teachers and Teaching Research Centre (TTRC)
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1471857
- Identifier
- uon:48735
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780725909451
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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