Good intentions are not enough: Promoting quality teaching and productive pedagogies in teacher education programs

At the heart of Initial Teacher Education programs is the concept of "quality teaching". Certainly, as teacher educators we are concerned to be the best teachers we can possibly be in order to prepare our students - future teachers - to be "quality teachers" who have the capacities to achieve optimal learning outcomes for all their students. However, if our students' examination results are any indication, we fall somewhat short of the mark. In this paper we analyse student teachers' learning as evident from their final examinations and while we realise that examinations cannot adequately demonstrate the range of student learning we would suggest that they can point the way to re-conceptualising our teaching to create more effective and meaningful learning experiences. While we might all agree that quality teaching is desirable, this concept is unstable and frequently contested. A further aim of our paper, therefore, is to begin to deconstruct what we mean when we talk about 'quality teaching' within the context of the notion of 'productive pedagogies'