Pedagogy is the art and science of teaching. It includes a teacher’s ability to:
- know students and how they learn
- know the content and how to teach it
- plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
- create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments
- differentiate the curriculum and accommodate for a range of ability
- analyse data to understand student engagement and learning growth
- provide feedback and report on student learning
- evaluate the effectiveness of teaching practices,
The NSW Quality Teaching Framework (QTF) is a model that explains pedagogy as three dimensions:
1) Intellectual quality which is about teachers creating lessons that produce a deep understanding of important concepts, skills and ideas. It includes providing students with opportunities to engage in higher-order thinking and to communicate substantively about what they are learning.
2) Quality learning environment which is about teachers creating classrooms where students work productively in an environment that is clearly focused on learning. It includes providing students with high and explicit expectations of what they need to do to achieve their expected growth and providing them with feedback for where to next.
3) Significance which is about teachers knowing how the experiences that students bring to their classroom affect their ability to meaningfully engage in learning. It includes providing students with learning that is relevant and accessible, according to their diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The QTF has been included in the Ashfield Public School Improvement Plan 2021 – 2024 as part of Strategic Direction 2 Professional Learning, with teachers using the QFT to improve their teaching practice. The initiative is called Quality Teaching Rounds, and it involves small teams of teachers observing the three dimensions of QTF in action in the classroom. Quality Teaching Rounds provide the opportunity for teachers share practice, analyse teaching and engage with other teachers in consistent and comparable judgments about the impact of quality teaching practices on student achievement.
Research consistently shows that, of all the things that schools can control, it is the quality of pedagogy. The QTF is therefore used at Ashfield Public School so as to maintain an effective and high impact pedagogy that is used by all teachers in all classrooms to powerfully affect the quality of learning outcomes, and teaching practices that work best to improve student learning.
As a self-reflection tool, the QFT supports teachers at Ashfield Public School to take a shared responsibility for improvement and contributes to a transparent learning culture which includes the observation of each other’s teaching practices. The QTF supports teachers to develop a repertoire of effective teaching strategies and use them to implement well designed teaching programs and lessons so that every student achieves expected growth.
