How do the dimensions of quality teaching relate to inquiry learning and project-based learning approaches?
Inquiry is central to modern pedagogy. How else to engage the affective domain, involve students to have skin in the game, or make learning meaningful to the learner.
The approaches of Guided Inquiry, in which collaboration between Teacher Librarians and Classroom Teachers guide students through curriculum based inquiry units, or the Project Based Learning that allows longer engagement with multiple areas of the curriculum and various ways of working can both be linked to the Quality Teaching Framework. This framework seeks to position classroom teaching, assessment practices, critical reflection, and analysis of contemporary teaching practices within 3 dimensions and 6 elements within each of these dimensions. These 18 components are then so broad that it would be difficult not to be able to connect any other educative practice with them.
It seems with the standards of AITSL for teachers, the standards of ALIA for teacher librarians, and the Quality Teaching Framework’s 18 dimensions there is not going to be much room for teaching or library work that does not revolve around justifying oneself continually.
Reflection is an essential component of self improvement but the extent of the growth of managerialism with its flowcharts and grids, distrust of the individual teacher’s agency and intent, as well as the neoliberal empasis on creating the next model different from the others and selling it as the answer to all of the education systems issues leads to a cacophony of administrative obligations that will not all be fufilled and shortcuts will be sought in order to make time for actual teaching.
The positives of a coherent approach across a whole school are multifaceted. The careful leadership of a principal may guide an education community into effective pathways. But the mess left by Australia’s federalism and the impacts on education from multiple reforms and schema from different levels emphasise the issues facing a country with more government officials per capita than any other in the world.