This paper presents an analysis of contemporary education policy levers that seek to standardise and measure teaching quality through the deployment of professional standards and increased surveillance of teachers' work. These policy frameworks-with a focus in this paper on the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers-are contrasted against the experiences of five Australian primary school teachers, using interpretative case study analysis to demonstrate the contradictions, tensions and fragile discursive construction of the idealised 'good' teacher. Implications for teacher agency and autonomy are considered, and propositions are generated for policy frameworks that support and enhance quality teaching, rather than reducing the complexities of teaching to a set of standardised metrics.

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The cognitive and affective domains 2.2 The Code of Learning: Reflection in and on action 7.1 The professional learning process model 8.1 The 11 landmark teaching styles on The Spectrum 8.2 The anatomy of any style 8.3 The developmental channels 8.4 The reproduction and production clusters on The Spectrum 8.5 The discovery threshold on The Spectrum 8.6 The infinite number of canopy designs between all landmark teaching styles 8.7 The general structure of The Spectrum 8.8 An example of one scenario description used to measure how frequently a landmark teaching style was used 9.1 An activity theory model exemplary diplomatic skills, for typesetting the manuscript and composing the index, and for masterminding the book project; Mr Andrew James and Ms Eleanor Christie from Palgrave Macmillan for being unfailingly encouraging and helpful and for their commitment to high-impact and high-quality scholarly publishing; Dr Marc Clarà for writing the Foreword to the book; Ms Sylvia Anand and her colleagues at SPi Global for typesetting the book;The anonymous reviewer of the original book proposal;The following colleagues for writing reviews of one or more chapters and for thereby enhancing the quality of the final versions of those chapters: