Developing 'good' post-primary teachers and teaching in a reform era: cultural dynamics in a programme level study of the PDE

Most discussions about the quality of schooling quickly turn to the quality of teachers, reflections and memories of individual teachers who ‘made a difference’, whether good or not so, in a person’s school biography. The quest for the ‘good teacher’ is important to parents, interleaves itself into a community’s conversations about its schools, animates children’s and adolescents’ reflections on a central feature of their lives and increasingly is the protagonist in policy debates on teacher education.