Neglecting the Evidence: Are We Expecting Too Much from Quality Teaching?

Abstract

Internationally, “quality teaching” and its close relatives “authentic pedagogy” and “productive pedagogy” have been enthusiastically embraced by policy-makers in education. In Australia “quality teaching” has emerged as a central strategy for boosting the nation’s scholastic performance. This chapter argues that over the past six years State and Commonwealth education ministers have tended to focus quite selectively on research findings that speak to the positive outcomes associated with quality teaching, while neglecting the complexity of this field of research and the role that other factors (such as peer influences, parental involvement, or socio-geographical factors) may play. Drawing on findings from the author’s current research into student engagement in low socio-economic areas the chapter argues that the phenomenon of ‘residualisation’ in particular, whereby disadvantage is concentrated in certain public schools as a result of ‘school choice’, has quite powerful effects on the engagement and achievement of low SES students. Such evidence has, it is argued, been tacitly excluded from governments’ policy arguments.