ABSTRACT
If you want to improve learning, improve teaching! The injunction contained within this deceptively simple equation has driven numerous research and reform efforts over the years to define and improve the quality of teaching. Training teachers in the skills and strategies of ‘effective’ pedagogy, setting and applying professional standards of what teachers should know and be able to do, even testing teachers periodically on their basic, subject-matter knowledge – these are the sorts of methods that reformers have employed to try and raise standards in teaching. These prevalent reform strategies and the research agendas that feed them – on teacher thinking, teacher planning, teacher behaviour and professional knowledge – address some of what is important in teaching. Setting standards of what teachers should know and be able to do can certainly help insure the profession against truly awful teaching, against ignorance and incompetence in our classrooms. Moreover, professional standards can spur teachers and their systems on towards learning and acquiring more sophisticated and effective skills and strategies over time. But somehow, measures such as this miss a lot of what matters most in developing really good teaching. They do not quite get to the heart of it.
