TALISA: Teaching Action Learning Improving Student Achievements

Quality teaching and learning is a priority at Sir Joseph Banks. We have therefore put in place an exciting initiative, the TALISA (Teaching Action Learning Improving Student Achievements) project, which gives teachers time to work together and learn to use the Quality Teaching Framework in their daily teaching. Teachers learn about Quality Teaching at a practical and experiential level with the support of project coordinators and an academic partner.

The TALISA project is about giving our teachers time to focus on their ‘core business,’ time to work together and learn to use the Quality Teaching Framework in their daily teaching. They choose a lesson, and work on a few elements of the QT framework, integrating the elements into that lesson. The teachers work in pairs, planning and then observing the lesson and collect evidence of those elements in the lesson. As part of this action learning process, they reflect on the lesson, on what worked and what didn’t. The focus is always on the elements of Quality Teaching and discovering what it looks like in our school, in our subject and our classroom. It is about working out how Quality Teaching can live and breathe in our daily work. At the end, our teachers will have refined a lesson that can be used again and again. Our teachers will have learned about QT at a practical and experiential level and have generated ideas about how to use Quality Teaching elements in all their other lessons with the minimum of fuss. Through all this, we will have the support of an academic partner, David Smith who will come to the school and meet with the teachers.