Quality driven teacher work: reflection on a concept

This paper examines the concept of Quality driven teacher work and its usefulness. The concept is discussed from four different perspectives: 1) the teachers’ and school leaders' views; 2) the dominating quality discourse; 3) teachers' discretionary work; 4) by using results from sub‐studies in an ongoing research project. The concept helps focusing on teachers’ discretionary work and highlights new time‐consuming tasks that threaten the quality of teaching. This is consistent with new research that shows that professional work is changing. Professionalism is more conceptually framed as a matter of technical proficiency. Teachers must be able to follow guidelines from predefined cases in detail. Being skilled becomes a question of being update on laws, rules, guidelines, and obligation to do documentary work in different quality systems. Skill then is less a question on being competent within a knowledge field from where they analyzed and make discretionary judgments. The concept of Quality driven teacher work highlights teachers day to day work to improve quality in their lessons. In conclusion the concept helps visualizing daily work of teachers’ attempts in transforming plans, policies and strategies into good teaching practices. Furthermore it helps to highlight the competition from other work task some of them connected with the new technical proficiency professionalism.