Teaching Quality Framework

For most people whose lives have been transformed through education, they never forget the teachers who made the difference. At Western, we are designing a Teaching Quality Framework that recognises our unique Western Sydney context while defining what good teaching looks like and how it’s rewarded and recognised.

The framework will categorise the dimensions of learning and teaching that we value, measure, reward, resource, and support. It will also align with recruitments, probation, performance, and promotion criteria.

This is an important piece of work that needs the eyes and ears, and hearts and minds of all our Western teachers and educators. Across 2025, we are shaping the TQF with the university community.

We are consulting with the university community

In April, the PVC Learning and Teaching, Professor Brian Stout launched the Discussion Paper for comments and feedback, and in July we ran a series of Focus Groups with academic and professional staff to support our deliberations.

In early August, we will release a summary of that data and your insights to the university community so we can draw on it to take the next step in the consultation process.

Here's what we have learned so far:

• What helps teachers’ and educators’ success in teaching is time: to read, prepare, get to know their students, innovate with content and assessment, share with colleagues, and to devote to their professional learning.

• A TQF can help provide language, set expectations, and drive resource development, especially for new teachers. For established teachers, it might also help to provide direction for improving teaching by making transparent the standards by which teaching is being evaluated.

• What worries teachers about a TQF is that it may be implemented in a way that becomes bureaucratic, tick-box like, that it doesn’t respect disciplinary specificity, and that it constrains and standardises teaching, rather than expands it.

• There was a feeling among many staff that we need better, reliable, and more efficient ways of getting feedback from students, and many teachers are keen to experiment with different sources of evidence but worry that these are not seen as valid by others who make judgements about teaching quality.

• Teachers are seeking more regular opportunities to share their practice and to learn from others– locally, with colleagues; in and across workgroups in Schools, across the university, and the sector.

• Our teachers are keen to learn and improve, and they want to do so in a culture where teaching is discussed, robustly debated, and celebrated. Our teachers recognise who our students are, the life experiences they bring and the circumstances they learn in, as well as the aspirations students have for themselves, their families, and communities.

Next steps

In August, we start the next phase of the consultation process which we are calling MakerSpaces. We have asked Schools to identify teachers, educators, and professional staff to join us so that together, we can look at the data, the research, trends in the sector, and to take the next step in co-creating a genuinely Western TQF.

Reach out to your Associate Dean, Learning & Teaching if you are keen to participate. We have made the provision to include sessional staff in our MakerSpaces too.

In September, we are consulting with the student community about what teaching quality looks like to them.