Chapter 17 describes the factors that determine the demand for and supply of teachers, including population growth, class size, the fact that teaching is a feminized profession, highly localized in terms of where individuals who become teachers choose to work, shortages and surpluses of teachers, costs of becoming a teacher, incentives to teach, and the effects of teacher education on both teacher quality and the supply of teachers. The chapter discusses working conditions in schools and the theory of compensating differentials – the reality that teaching conditions vary substantially among schools but that schools with poor working conditions may not be able to offset them with higher teacher salaries, with substantial implications for teacher quality in such schools. The chapter also reviews how teacher quality is defined in the empirical literature on teacher labor markets.

Chapter 19 discusses the politics of teacher labor markets, including an analysis of the role of teachers’ unions and of two strategies to improve teacher quality – raising teacher salaries to recruit and retain “better” teachers versus raising the quality of teacher education and professional development. The discussion includes an analysis of local monopsony of local school districts in the market for teacher services and local monopolies of teacher unions, a discussion of the possible impact of teachers’ unions on student performance, as well as a comparison of how effective higher teacher salaries in the United States and elsewhere may impact the quality of teacher supply. The chapter concludes with a review of how teacher education programs do or do not influence the quality of teacher supply, and what the elements of good teacher professional development programs appear to be, according to recent empirical studies.

This chapter provides a rationale for the book and the research that it presents. It documents the near complete absence of prior research into teacher or teaching quality in the global South and justifies specifically why teacher expertise research may be the most useful vehicle through which it can be studied. It argues that the contextually appropriate, feasible and sustainable pedagogic practices of expert teachers in any context can, if implemented more widely across the educational system, bring about significant increases in the quality of teaching and learning. The chapter offers a definition of ‘global South’ specific to the aims and contexts of the book and compares this with alternative ways of conceptualising the South. My background, as author of this book, is then presented, followed by an overview of the book that includes brief summary descriptions of the chapters that follow. The chapter finishes with a discussion of paradigmatic concerns that sets out the author’s own position as a multiple- methods, critical realist researcher who rejects the paradigm dichotomy between positivist and interpretivist approaches, instead preferring to view generalising and particularising tendencies in research through a continuum along which researchers are able to move flexibly, appropriate to the questions or problems of interest under investigation.

This chapter looks at the construct of expertise in detail, investigating how and why it is simultaneously useful yet problematic, arguing that it is, nevertheless, the most appropriate measure of quality among teachers. It begins by looking at prior definitions of expertise in education, identifying two key tendencies within these definitions – tendencies towards norm-referencing and criterion-referencing. Norm-referenced expertise is further subdivided into product-referenced (expertise as outcome) and community-referenced (expertise as role) expertise, and criterion-referenced expertise is subdivided into competence-referenced (expertise as attribute) and process-referenced (expertise as process/practice) expertise. The chapter then goes on to investigate two often-perceived proxies of teacher quality in educational research, teacher effectiveness and teacher experience. It provides extensive evidence to support the assertions that teacher effectiveness is too narrow a construct to encapsulate all that we value in teacher quality and that teacher experience is too wide, and does not correlate consistently enough with quality. It argues that there is a somewhat ‘fuzzy’ nature to the relationship between these three concepts, which necessarily overlap and exhibit porous borders. The chapter concludes by offering a working definition of teacher expertise that is capable of being sufficiently flexible to different communities and value systems around the world.

Teacher quality – what teachers do, how they teach and the way they present information – impacts on student learning (Hattie, 2003; 2009). Effective teaching and learning are multifaceted. There is no one recipe for teaching that will suit every student on all occasions. In your journey as a pre-service teacher, your goal should be to learn as much as you can from your university coursework, your professional experiences, lecturers and tutors, and the school teachers that supervise you, as well as drawing on your background knowledge and experience, so you are prepared with a suite of ideas, strategies, frameworks and theories that will support you to implement effective teaching and learning.