Teaching is simultaneously a science, an art and a craft — and reducing it to any one of these diminishes what it actually takes to do it well. This OECD report pushes back against the search for a single correct way to teach, drawing on research across 20 practices and qualitative insights from more than 150 schools in 40 countries to build a richer and more honest picture of what high-quality teaching looks like in practice.
The report identifies five key goals that effective teaching serves and examines what the evidence shows — and where it remains genuinely uncertain — about the practices that support them. Crucially, it frames teaching not as a technical process to be standardised but as a complex, adaptive discipline that requires professional judgement, creativity and continuous collaborative reflection.
For school leaders and policymakers grappling with how to support teachers without constraining them, this report offers both an evidence base and a useful counterweight to the oversimplified pedagogical debates currently dominating the Australian education landscape.