Define

Defining quality teaching and learning is unique to every community. You and your colleagues have common history, assets, challenges, and opportunities. These will help you determine where to begin.

Next we suggest that you look beyond your community to learn from others. Valuable national research, case studies and tools exist. The exercise of reviewing others' work will illuminate what you and your community value. This will help you establish outcomes specific to your needs.

These video stories reflect how and why different people create commonly valued outcomes, use existing research, and focus their pursuit of quality.

Featured Resources

Six Dimensions of Quality Teaching and Learning
This resource outlines the Six Dimensions of Teaching and Quality and what to look for during observations in regard to less than basic, basic, proficient, or advanced.

The Values Study: Rediscovering the Meaning and Value of Arts Participation
The Values Study develops a new framework for understanding arts participation and provides extensive guidelines for arts groups that may wish to conduct qualitative research on their audiences and visitors.

The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education
This report investigated how arts educators define high quality learning and teaching, what indicators of excellence educators look for in arts activities, and how a program’s foundational and day-to-day decisions affect the pursuit and achievement of quality.

“We’ve been bringing together a group of experts who are close to the ground and and sees what goes on in the classroom every day together with researchers and academics. They spent the first few months of the project looking at other definitions of quality that have been created and identifying what resonates in Boston to create our own definition.”