Beyond content-focused professional development: powerful professional learning through genuine learning communities across grades and subjects

Articulations of effective teacher professional development (PD) consistently foreground a focus on curriculum content and how best to teach it. Consequently, when teachers work together on pedagogy they typically work with colleagues who have similar specialisations, focusing on a specific subject or part of the curriculum. Arguably, however, pedagogical practices cut across grades and subjects, which signals the possibility of effective PD that includes diverse teachers. In this paper, we analyse the impact of a pedagogy-focused approach to PD called Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR), recently tested under randomised controlled trial conditions. Drawing on post-intervention interviews with 96 teachers and leaders at 24 schools in NSW, Australia, we demonstrate that QTR generated fresh insights about pedagogy and students, enhanced collegiality and led to ongoing professional collaboration, even though it does not abide by the general consensus that effective PD should be content-focused. We argue that pedagogy-focused PD, using QTR, is an important mechanism for improving teaching on a large scale, not just for this grade or subject, but for teaching in general. With a global push for better teaching as foundational to improved student outcomes, building teaching capacity across the entire teacher workforce remains a challenge. QTR offers a way forward.