Quality teaching resources and support
Whether you’ve just heard about Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR), or you’re already deeply involved, we can support your QTR journey.
The School Improvement Tool (SIT) was developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research for the Federal Department of Education. We have developed a document that demonstrates the alignment of QTR and the QT Model with the nine domains of the NSIT. This provides school leaders with a summary, detailed mapping, and evaluation instruments for schools.
We’ve helped school leaders integrate Quality Teaching Rounds into their strategic plans by mapping QTR to the NSW School Excellence Framework and What Works Best documentation. This interactive resource provides a comprehensive analysis of how and why engagement in QT Rounds can connect teachers and leaders and strengthen and evaluate practice in line with NSW Department priorities.
The NSW Department of Education has also produced a Strategic Improvement Plan Implementation and Progress Monitoring (IPM) sample on Quality Teaching Rounds.
For teachers, the planning might start when you approach your school executive for approval to attend our QTR workshop. Use our short research summaries to help build your case for why your school should invest in Quality Teaching Rounds.
We also encourage you to use this briefing pack to provide your executive with an overview of QT Rounds.
Participation in QTR helps teachers to identify and demonstrate their accomplishment of the Standards and reflect on areas where they can enhance their professional knowledge or practice.
In our QTR Foundational workshop, participants are given time and resources at the end of the professional development to start mapping out how they will implement QTR in school.
Workshop participants receive a free, six-month membership to the QT Academy through which they may access key documents, videos and webinars. Alternatively, you may register or renew your membership without participating in a workshop.
You can also get advice directly from our QT Advisers, researchers, or other teachers through our Facebook group, QT Community.
Implementation of QTR begins with two teachers attending a QTR Foundational workshop. During the workshop teachers learn the knowledge and skills to be able to form PLCs and implement QTR in their school.
Once teachers have completed a set of Rounds, they can create PLCs with new teachers to “ripple” the Rounds process across the school (see the diagram below). Doing QTR like this is a sustainable and scalable way for schools to gradually implement Rounds with minimal impact on staffing and resourcing. However, more teachers can attend a workshop and schools can get everybody on board with tailored PD webinars and whole-school staff development day sessions.
Contact our team to organise a staff development day for your school.
This is the process that under rigorous scientific analysis has produced the outstanding results on improving teaching quality, morale, school culture and student academic achievement.
Attending a workshop also gives you six-month access to our Members Area where you can find detailed information including suggested timetables, essential QTR features and PLC norms.
In a climate of teacher shortages and budget constraints, releasing four teachers for four days of QT Rounds can deter or prevent some schools from implementing or sustaining QT Rounds. We’ve produced a comprehensive guide that outlines simple adaptations to QT Rounds, their benefits, and considerations for ensuring the fidelity and integrity of the process.
These adaptations are grouped into three categories: PLC composition, Scheduling, and Technology, and include case studies where these innovations have been successfully implemented by schools.
QT Academy members get exclusive access to tools and resources to support implementation, like this comprehensive two-page guide which provides an overview of common strategies for embedding the QT Model, QT Rounds, and QT assessment and programming in a range of school contexts. Members can also liaise directly with our QT Advisers, researchers and other members via our Facebook group, QT Community.
The QT Pulse survey and report provides school leaders with timely and insightful data on their staff’s perceptions of teaching and learning, morale, and school environment. The results are tracked across time at set points in the year to generate powerful evidence on the direction of your school.
We have several freely available tools that you can use to support your evaluation, like these teacher and student surveys, and reflection and analysis documents.
Additional resources are available in our Members Area.
