Principal explains how collaboration is driving better teaching and assessment
This story by Rhiannon Bowman was recently published in the April edition of Education Matters Magazine.
Principal Ms Alina Page reflects on introducing Quality Teaching Rounds and QT Assessment Rounds at Para Hills High School and the impact on teacher collaboration.
When Ms Alina Page first encountered Quality Teaching Rounds, she was leading Para Hills High School in Adelaide. Today she is Principal of The Heights School, but the experience of introducing the program at Para Hills continues to shape how she thinks about professional learning and collaboration in schools.
Her introduction to the approach was unexpected. “I came across it by complete coincidence,” she says. “[Laureate Professor] Jenny Gore and I were both receiving an award and we just happened to strike up a conversation and exchange notes about what each of us do.”
Professor Gore is one of the architects of Quality Teaching Rounds, a professional development program that has been evaluated through several randomised controlled trials.
Curious, Ms Page began looking into what the program might mean for her school.
“The one thing that was glaringly obvious is how much of a lens it put on teachers working together to improve their professional practice,” she says, “rather than relying on an external observer to come in and provide feedback.”
The concept appealed immediately, but she didn’t introduce it at Para Hills straight away.
“I sat on it for about a year and a half,” she says. “That was purely because the school was just not ready for that.”
For Ms Page, introducing any new professional learning initiative requires careful consideration.
“As a leader, you have to really judge what comes in when,” she says. “Whilst I knew from the moment I looked into it that I wanted to implement it in the school, the timing was really important.”
When the time came, Para Hills High School joined the federal government-funded Strengthening Induction through Quality Teaching Rounds initiative. The first step was small.
“We sent a team of four people – two experienced teachers and two early career teachers – to do the training,” Ms Page says. “They came back raving about how this could work.”
