Nothing is more important to the work of schools than capable and dedicated teachers. Good teaching is hard work. It involves not only an engagement with the subject matter to be learned, but even more an intense engagement with all the students in the class--not just as learners, but as whole persons, since their personhood has so much effect on their learning. Because good teaching is so important, finding and keeping quality educators should be a preoccupation of every school, district, and government that is involved in education. In the last few years, many proposals have been advanced to this end, from changes in training to certification to professional development. Yet, so often basic, everyday policies and practices seem entirely inconsistent with what we know about working well with people, so that we fail to keep our current people feeling supported, or fail to keep them at all! Because of such poor practices, many countries have found it hard to recruit good people into teaching or keep teachers in the profession. High turnover of teachers imposes significant costs on an education system, not only in training and developing new teachers, but also in the lost productivity of experienced and capable people. Canada has avoided some of these problems compared to a number of other countries, notably the U.S. Canadian teachers are well educated. There are very few uncertified teachers in the system. Entry to university teacher education programs remains competitive all across the country, with applicants greatly outnumbering the spaces available. After their initial training, large numbers of Canadian teachers are engaged in ongoing learning of various kinds, whether formally through various kinds of qualification programs or informally through professional development and self-study. In fact, Canadian teachers are inveterate learners, as shown in an Ontario study of secondary teachers in which virtually all were involved in formal or informal learning related to their work (www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/sese/csew/nall/res/39learning&workoad.htm). Good preparation and ongoing professional development are presumably among the reasons Canadian students do so well in international comparisons of achievement. Focus on Retention Much of the focus in the research on teaching, especially in the U.S., is on attracting good people into teaching. Of course, recruitment matters, and we should be thinking about what might encourage talented people to want to be teachers. But better recruitment alone can never be a solution to the challenge of teacher quality, because teaching is a mass occupation. Canada has some 500,000 teachers in its schools, one of the largest occupational groups in the entire labor force. The same is true in every other country. With so many teachers needed, we will never be able to recruit only from the very top of the ability group of postsecondary students, since talented students have so many attractive career options. The most important challenges, then, are to develop teacher skills over their careers and to retain good people in the profession. We know how to do these things, too. To help people improve and grow in their work, we need to provide helpful feedback on current performance, good opportunities for learning on and about the job, and ongoing support for, as well as the expectation of, improvement. To retain good teachers, we need to treat them properly. This means decent pay and benefits, though pay is not the critical factor, as nobody goes into teaching to get rich! More important, teachers want interesting and challenging work, good working conditions, and respect. In some areas, Canadian provinces and school systems have done these things quite well. Our teachers are reasonably paid by international standards. Our school facilities are generally in good condition, and our workloads--the combination of teaching hours and class sizes--are also reasonable in comparison with other countries. …