As I’ve worked to refine my teaching practice, ‘what makes a good teacher?’ is a question I’ve asked myself more times than I can count.
What actually is “best practice”?
I’ve had some version of this conversation with colleagues for years. In staff rooms, after staff meetings, in corridors and over coffee after a professional learning day that can motivate and inspire while also leaving us with more questions. What is best practice teaching? What counts as evidence-based? How do we actually teach spelling well? Is our program working? What about fractions? What does good classroom teaching look like, in practice, in a composite Year 5/6 class on a Tuesday morning with thirty kids in front of you?
I don’t think there’s one clean answer, and I think that’s worth saying out loud. I wonder if so much of the conversation around “raising teacher capability” can sound as though somewhere there is a settled, agreed understanding of best practice and we’re all simply working towards it. I’m not convinced it’s that simple.
After almost 20 years in classrooms, I feel much more confident about some aspects of teaching than I once did. Strangely, I also feel more confused about others. When I speak to colleagues, many of them feel the same. It’s not because we don’t care about evidence. It’s certainly not because we don’t want to keep learning.
How we teach depends on context. It depends on the school, the cohort of students, the curriculum, the resources available and the time we have. It depends on which programs a school has invested in, which professional learning has been offered, when it was offered, whether it was relevant, whether it was sustained, whether anyone had time to actually implement it and whether it made sense to the teachers expected to use it. It also depends on what we have noticed over years of working with children in our classrooms — trying something, seeing what happens, adjusting and trying again.
We are humans working inside a system that hasn’t always made “best practice” particularly easy to understand, while the expectations can feel like they’re continually shifting.
The gap nobody quite names
I’ve always found professional learning inspiring. Having the opportunity to step outside the day-to-day classroom and think about why we teach the way we do, what the research says and what might be worth trying can be incredibly valuable. When professional learning is relevant, practical and connected to what is happening in classrooms, it gives teachers more knowledge and ideas to draw on when they are planning and teaching.
But I’d like to acknowledge another reality to teaching.
Sometimes you are planning for thirty children with very different needs, trying to make sure you haven’t missed anything in the curriculum while also working out how you’re going to differentiate the lesson. You want to deliver a curriculum that is thoughtful and responsive to the children in front of you.
I’ve used downloaded resources and slide shows because I didn’t want to accidentally leave gaps in what my students were learning. Now we also have AI tools that can produce a lesson sequence, worksheet or set of activities in seconds.
I don’t think the question should always be, “Why are teachers using these resources?”
I think the more interesting question is, “What need are these resources meeting?”
Sometimes they save time. Sometimes they provide reassurance. Sometimes they help a teacher manage the sheer volume of work involved in planning to meet the needs of their class.
I think it’s important to be curious about this because, if we want teachers to make thoughtful, informed professional decisions, we need to think about the conditions in which those decisions are being made.
Perhaps that is part of the conversation we miss when we talk about “raising teacher capability”.
Teachers don’t just need to be told what good teaching looks like. They need mentoring, professional learning, knowledge, time, resources and support to work towards it.
So what actually is best practice?
It’s a question I keep coming back to, and I don’t think anyone has a perfect answer. I don’t think there is one approach that can simply be lifted out of a research paper, turned into a program and applied identically across every classroom. There is no doubt that research matters, and I love reading about it. Evidence matters too. Context is important. We should absolutely be asking whether what we are doing is supported by what we know about learning.
The hard — and best — part is that teaching is carried out with actual children: children who arrive at school with different experiences, different strengths, different needs and different relationships with learning. What works for one school, class, or even one child, may not work in exactly the same way for another.
Maybe the more useful question isn’t, “What is best practice?” Maybe it’s the question Amy Green from The Wellness Strategy asks: “What does good look like in each school?”
I like that question because it leaves room for context. It also creates space for discussion, professional judgement and, as Adrienne Hornby describes it, having “time to rumble in it”.
What do teachers need to do good work?
Most teachers I know don’t need convincing that best practice in classrooms matters. They want to do a good job. They want to understand their students. They want to know whether what they’re doing is working. They want to feel confident in their professional decisions.
When I think about Self-Determination Theory, the idea that humans have fundamental psychological needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness, I can’t help but keep coming back to competence. If we want teachers to feel capable, confident and able to make good decisions, we need to help them understand what “good” looks like.
They need access to good knowledge. They need time to develop their practice. They need opportunities to learn with and from other teachers. They need clarity about what good looks like, and they need enough autonomy to use their professional judgement with the children actually sitting in front of them.
Perhaps “best practice” isn’t something we can simply hand teachers. Perhaps our job is to create the conditions where teachers can develop the knowledge, confidence and judgement to recognise what good teaching looks like and adapt it to the classroom they’re standing in.
Maybe the question isn’t, “Are teachers following best practice?” Maybe it’s, “Have we created the conditions for teachers to know what good looks like and keep getting better at it?”
I’m still sitting with that question.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
#Education #Teaching #TeacherWellbeing
Sources and further reading
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). High-Quality Professional Learning for Australian Teachers and School Leaders.
Victorian Department of Education. High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS).
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development and Well-Being.
Green, Amy. Right Now, Episode 4: Challenging the Status Quo, 16 March 2026.
Hornby, Adrienne. Well Led Podcast (2026). Conversation with Sue Chandler “Rebuilding Trust and Culture in Complex Schools”.