Quality teaching and values education: coalescing for effective learning

Awareness of the potential of quality teaching (or teacher excellence in content, knowledge and pedagogy) to impact upon student achievement is an outcome of recent school-effectiveness research. This research has extended the understanding of the conception of 'teacher' beyond surface factual learning to that of induction into learning of intellectual depth, which engages the more sophisticated skills of 'communicative capacity' and 'self-reflection'. Habermas provides a conceptual framework for this expanded notion through the awareness that knowing extends beyond factual knowledge to the challenge of 'communicative knowledge' and 'self-reflectivity'. Quality teaching alerts educators to the potential of the role of explicit teaching in values education and, in turn, the capacity of values education to complement and even enhance the learning goals implicit in quality teaching. By this is meant that values education has potential to remind individuals and systems that it is the affective and relational aspects of teaching that ultimately give it its power and positive effect. Data from the Australian Government's Values Education Good Practice Schools project are offered as evidential support for this hypothesis