ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 focuses on teachers’ teaching practice, and makes a case for how and why more ‘explicit’ approaches to teaching have governed teachers’ teaching practice in recent times. The chapter begins with an overview of the nature of teaching practices during the previous decade in particular, with an emphasis upon the Anglo-world. It then focuses upon the nature of the broader policy context within Australia, followed by the Queensland context. This leads into the substantive part of the chapter, which describes and analyses the nature of teaching practices in Queensland, including in the context of standardized curriculum reform described in the previous chapter and standardized testing outlined in more detail in the next chapter. This includes considerable attention to the notion of ‘explicit teaching’, and various kinds of teacher observations. The chapter concludes with an account of alternative practices to more reductive standardized teaching approaches.
