This document discusses the Quality Teaching model, which focuses on three dimensions of effective teaching: Intellectual Quality, Quality Learning Environment, and Significance. It explains that each dimension is important and must be balanced, as emphasizing one over the others can lead to problems like disengagement or "busy work." Specific strategies are provided for how to build intellectual challenge, increase student engagement through significance, and support student success through a quality learning environment. The document argues that the Quality Teaching model is multidimensional because all three elements are needed for truly effective pedagogy, and Intellectual Quality in particular plays a central role.

1. Demystifying
Quality Teaching
Dr Robert Parkes
Senior Lecturer in Curriculum Theory, History & Media Education
School of Education
University of Newcastle

2. How to ‘read’ the Quality Teaching model
• The Three Dimensions are ‘critical’
– Intellectual Quality
– Quality Learning Environment
– Significance
• Each ‘element’ is really an ‘indicator’ of the
presence of its dimension

3. Quality Teaching – The Two Balances
1
Intellectual
Challenge
Significance
2
Intellectual
Challenge
Quality
Learning
Environment
= Buy In
= Success for All

4. What happens if IQ is emphasised
at the expense of SIG and QLE?
1
Intellectual
Challenge
Significance
2
Quality
LearningEnvironment
= Failure for Some
= Disengagement
Intellectual
Challenge

5. What happens if SIG and QLE are each emphasised
over the other dimensions?
1
Intellectual
Challenge
Significance
2
QualityLearningEnvironment
= Students unchallenged,
and engaged in tasks that
repeat what they already
now; ‘busy work’.
= Success at trivial tasks;
‘busy work’.
Intellectual
Challenge

6. How do we build intellectual challenge?
You can intellectually challenge your students by engaging them in tasks that
require them to demonstrate:
• Deep knowledge (Tasks that focus on the important, central concepts of a topic,
subject or issue)
• Problematic Knowledge (Tasks that have multiple, contrasting and conflicting
answers, or that reveal how knowledge is socially, culturally or historically constructed
and open to question)
• Higher-Order Thinking (Tasks that require students to synthesize, analyse, evaluate,
hypothesize, generalise, etc. not simply ‘transfer’ information from one place to
another, but to ‘transform’ it)
• Deep Understanding (Tasks that require students to provide information, arguments
or reasoning that demonstrate their grasp of central ideas and concepts)
• Metalanguage (Tasks that require students to address how language is being used to
create meaning by specific individuals, for specific audiences and purposes)
• Substantive Communication (Tasks that require students to provide extended or
elaborate arguments, explanations, interpretations in written, oral, graphic or dramatic
forms)
Step 1:
Ensure the
conceptual
challenge of
the task
Step 2:
Ensure the
communicative
challenge of
the task

7. You can increase student engagement through the significance of a task by:
• Connectedness (Requiring students to respond to real-world problems, to apply
knowledge in real-life contexts, or exhibit work to public audiences)
• Narrative (Providing narrative framing for the task/problem you want students to
work on; Requiring them to write, tell, perform or illustrate their understanding in a
story form; Having students share their aspirations, and connecting tasks to these
aspirations)
• Background Knowledge (Providing students with opportunities to make links with
what they already know, from inside and outside school life)
• Cultural Knowledge (Explicitly acknowledging and valuing different cultural
perspectives; Encouraging students to look beyond stereotypes; Require students
to reconsider their response to a problem from a different cultural perspective)
• Knowledge Integration (Requiring students draw on knowledge from more than
one discipline when solving the problem set)
How do we increase the likelihood of student
engagement?
Step 3:
Make the task
look and feel
‘real’ and worth
doing
Step 4: Ensure
the task
acknowledges
and draws upon
what students
already bring to
the table

8. You can show your students that you expect them to do well, and
support them to do so by providing them with:
• Explicit Quality Criteria (Detailed criteria regarding the quality of
work you expect; and provide them with opportunities to evaluate
their own work in relation to those criteria)
• High Expectations (Present students with challenging work and
reward them for taking conceptual risks; Encourage all students to
aim high; Provide access to the highest level challenges to all)
• Student Direction (Present students with the opportunity to
exercise control over the choice of activities they will do, the
deadline for completion of the task, the pace at which the task is
completed, and the criteria by which the task will be assessed)
How do we increase the likelihood of student success?
Step 5:
Develop clear
expectations and
structure in
opportunities for
social and
academic support
Step 6:
Ensure opportunities
for student
ownership of the task

9. Intellectual
Quality
Significance
Quality
Learning
Environment
Quality Teaching: Why it is a 3D Model
And why Intellectual Quality has a
special place in this model of pedagogy

10. Intellectual
Quality
Significance
Quality
Learning
Environment
Quality Teaching: Why it is a 3D Model
And why Intellectual Quality has a
special place in this model of pedagogy