Principal Alina Page with students at The Heights School.

Principal Ms Alina Page reflects on introducing Quality Teaching Rounds and QT Assessment Rounds at Para Hills High School and the impact on teacher collaboration.

When Ms Alina Page first encountered Quality Teaching Rounds, she was leading Para Hills High School in Adelaide. Today she is Principal of The Heights School, but the experience of introducing the program at Para Hills continues to shape how she thinks about professional learning and collaboration in schools.

Ms Alina Page.

Her introduction to the approach was unexpected. “I came across it by complete coincidence,” she says. “[Laureate Professor] Jenny Gore and I were both receiving an award and we just happened to strike up a conversation and exchange notes about what each of us do.”

Professor Gore is one of the architects of Quality Teaching Rounds, a professional development program that has been evaluated through several randomised controlled trials.

Curious, Ms Page began looking into what the program might mean for her school.

“The one thing that was glaringly obvious is how much of a lens it put on teachers working together to improve their professional practice,” she says, “rather than relying on an external observer to come in and provide feedback.”

The concept appealed immediately, but she didn’t introduce it at Para Hills straight away.

“I sat on it for about a year and a half,” she says. “That was purely because the school was just not ready for that.”

For Ms Page, introducing any new professional learning initiative requires careful consideration.

“As a leader, you have to really judge what comes in when,” she says. “Whilst I knew from the moment I looked into it that I wanted to implement it in the school, the timing was really important.”

When the time came, Para Hills High School joined the federal government-funded Strengthening Induction through Quality Teaching Rounds initiative. The first step was small.

“We sent a team of four people – two experienced teachers and two early career teachers – to do the training,” Ms Page says. “They came back raving about how this could work.”

A structured approach to collaboration

Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) is a professional learning program developed by researchers at the University of Newcastle. It is designed to improve teaching practice through structured collaboration between teachers.

The program is built around the Quality Teaching Model, which focuses on three dimensions of teaching practice: intellectual quality, quality learning environment and significance. Each dimension includes a set of teaching elements that provide a shared language for analysing classroom practice.

In a typical Quality Teaching Round, a group of four teachers forms a professional learning community. Each teacher teaches a lesson that the others observe. Afterwards, the group meets to discuss the lesson using the Quality Teaching Model.

Rather than informal feedback, the discussion is structured and evidence-based. Teachers analyse what occurred in the lesson and code it against the elements of the Model. The purpose is not to evaluate the teacher but to examine teaching practice collectively.

For Ms Page, this collaborative design was one of the most appealing features of Quality Teaching Rounds.

“It creates that vehicle for people learning from each other,” she says.

Traditional classroom observations often position leaders as evaluators. Ms Page felt that approach had limitations.

“Very often, observation processes are conducted as the principal coming in with a checklist and you’re passing or failing,” she says. “This is completely different.”

“The focus is on teachers working together to improve their professional practice. It’s developmental in nature rather than judgemental.”

She says the structure also supports collaboration between teachers at different stages of their careers.

“Creating a vehicle for them learning from each other has always been the goal.”

At Para Hills High School, the first trained group quickly became advocates for Quality Teaching Rounds. As their experiences spread through the staffroom, interest grew.

“They were really enthusiastic about the impact,” Ms Page says. “That early adopter group became the people who drove it forward.”

“What we’ve seen is through those early adopters there was a gradual drive for the whole school to be part of the approach.”

Extending the framework into assessment and building trust

As Quality Teaching Rounds became embedded within the school’s professional learning culture, staff began exploring how the same framework could be applied beyond classroom observation. That led to the introduction of QT Assessment Rounds.

Assessment Rounds use the same model to analyse and improve assessment tasks. Instead of focusing on a lesson, teachers work together to review the design of an assessment task before it is delivered to students.

The process encourages teachers to consider how well an assessment promotes deep understanding, intellectual challenge and meaningful engagement with content. It also requires less professional learning time and teacher release compared to the full or half-day Quality Teaching Rounds.

For Ms Page, the shift was a natural extension of the work already happening through Quality Teaching Rounds. At Para Hills High School, the school already had strong quality assurance processes, which helped integrate the approach.

“We want to have this continuous improvement cycle in our staff and in everything we do,” Ms Page says.

QT Assessment Rounds strengthened that cycle by bringing teachers together to analyse assessment design collaboratively, placing greater emphasis on the quality of the task itself.

The approach helped ensure alignment between curriculum, teaching practice and assessment. By analysing assessment tasks together, teachers could refine their approach and share ideas about how to improve learning outcomes. The process also extended the professional dialogue that had begun through classroom observation.

For Ms Page, one of the most significant outcomes of introducing Quality Teaching Rounds was the shift in professional culture within the school.

Rather than being directed entirely from leadership, the initiative gained momentum through teacher ownership.

“One of the fantastic things was it wasn’t something that was leadership-led necessarily,” she says. “It was leadership supported and promoted, but it was staff-led.”

Teachers volunteered to participate in rounds, observed each other’s classrooms and contributed to professional discussions about practice. Over time, the process helped build trust among staff.

“When teachers feel safe to open their classroom and talk about practice honestly, that’s where the real improvement happens,” she says.

The Quality Teaching Model also provided a shared language that helped keep conversations focused and constructive, supporting both early career and experienced teachers.

“From my perspective, teaching and learning is at the core of what schools are about,” she says. “If that’s not on point, anything else falls apart.”

In late 2025, Ms Page moved to her current role as Principal of The Heights School in Adelaide. While she is still early in her tenure there, the experience at Para Hills High School continues to inform her thinking about professional learning.

There have already been early conversations about introducing Quality Teaching Rounds at The Heights in the future.

“It’s certainly something we’re looking at,” Ms Page says. “But, as with Para Hills, the timing has to be right and the staff have to feel ready to engage in that kind of collaborative professional practice.”

At Para Hills High School, once the conditions were in place, the model spread gradually through staff interest and peer influence. Ms Page says the experience reinforced the value of creating structured opportunities for teac...

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