Shifting the discourse of teacher quality

In recent decades, a neoliberal agenda of economic and social transformation has re-shaped education through a political focus on the quality of teachers, with education system itself publicly scrutinised for its shortcomings or ‘failings’. Professional teaching standards and other means of defining and regulating professional knowledge and behaviour are now part of education systems around the world. While professional standards are often broad in their scope, they are limited in their depth, in that they articulate the pedagogical knowledge and skills that are required for the profession, but do not acknowledge teachers and the non-cognitive capabilities they require in their daily practices. This chapter considers implications arising from the What’s the Evidence (WtE) project by examining how research into teacher quality can lead to important discussions about what being a teacher means: how teachers make sense of their work and how their inherent qualities affect their pedagogic decisions. It will explore how the research findings from the WtE study can enable educators, from early career through to school leadership, to navigate the tensions between teacher role, teacher identity, and teacher quality within the broad contexts of external mandates, school cultures, and their own understandings of teachers’ professional role and identity.