ABSTRACT
The chapter title captures my beliefs about how to improve the quality of teaching. The meaning of each of the three terms requires clarification, as does the nature of the relations among them. My purpose in this chapter is to achieve such clarification. By better teaching, I mean that the teacher knows more about what teaching is and how it best works for him or her, is more aware of what is happening in the classroom as he or she teaches, and is more purposeful in the pedagogical decisions that he or she makes. These three aspects-knowledge, awareness and control-may be subsumed within the general term metacognition. On this view, better teaching requires enhanced metacognition regarding teaching. But better teaching is more than this, for it is affective as well as metacognitive. It is having more positive attitudes to yourself and what you do. It is caring more, being more committed, and having greater selfconfidence and self-assurance. Because of this, improving one’s teaching is not just learning better teaching techniques. It is undergoing fundamental change in one’s attitudes, perceptions, conceptions, beliefs, abilities and behaviors.
