Values Education: the Missing Link in Quality Teaching

Educational research of the 1990s and beyond has challenged earlier conceptions concerned with the capacity of teachers, and formal education generally, to make a difference in the lives of students. Highly interventionist studies (cf. Newmann, 1996; Darling-Hammond, 1997) were conducted in the USA that tested, against virtually every category of disadvantage, whether a particular approach to teaching and schooling could break through the disadvantage effect. The particular approach to teaching and schooling goes by various names but is most commonly captured in the notion of ‘Quality Teaching’, a notion that encompasses both the work of individual teachers in classrooms and, ideally, the work of whole-school teaching regimes.