Teaching is dizzyingly complex and uncompromisingly pressure-ridden. Teaching is also susceptible to rhetoric and action which promulgates a sense of guilt about not measuring up against expectations and performance of peers and raises personal and public queries over competence. For some, this paralysing guilt can originate from a myriad of sources; excessive work scrutiny, school inspection, lesson observation, appraisal against teaching standards, vigorously peddled ideology and interaction with persons who with sarcasm and pomposity, point out ‘what the research says’, ‘what the evidence is’, and ‘you should be …’. These same people seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in corrective mode, wading in and pointing out the shortcomings or inadequacies of people’s or schools ideas or practices. It all feels so unhealthily competitive and undermining at times.

Who then, in all honesty, could be considered an interlocutor when it comes to identifying who the ‘best’ teachers are and describing and defining what the ‘best’ teachers do, think, read, act like, strive for etc.? Best at what? Best for who? Best to what end? What research or evidence is ‘best’? Have we actually agreed on what ‘best’ is or looks like? I would argue that when ‘best’ is employed to describe or define anything, it can lead to a form of cognitive imprisonment, making us narrowly believe that there is little else needed, sought or researched or we need to change our mind about what we have always believed. The mere utterance of ‘best’ is constraining. As Brookfield (1995) notes, “primarily it serves individuals with a reductionist cast of mind who believe that the dynamics and contradictions of teaching can be reduced to a linear, quantifiable rating system”. He goes on to note that “such epistemologically challenged people sometimes work their way into positions of administrative and legislative power. Believing that learning and teaching are unidimensional, they carve curricula into discrete units and create standardised objectives (and methods) that are meant to be context and culture-proof”.

The idea of ‘best’ can also cause us to ossify into congeries of confusion and self-doubt. I don’t know many teachers who aren’t committed to developing their practice, and that is not to say they aren’t aware of what research and support is out there. They want to smite the crappy jargonistic vernacular, arrest the flow of fads and take a broom to the bureaucracy that coagulates our time and prevents collaboration, progress and developing agency. That said, the many masks and roles we expect our teachers to shift between to be ‘the best’ and showcase the ‘best’ is worrying. Teachers don’t have chromatophores that allow them to quickly blend into and fabricate their ways to meet policy change or shifting school expectations. It’s just not that easy logistically let alone emotionally.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, it seems that professional action is at the forefront of the agenda of education at the moment and professional action needs to be justified and defended. There is a case made by some that nothing should be left to chance. But many commentators are punch-drunk on myth-busting, fad-smashing and having an epiphany about the fact that were led up the garden path and were wrong. They critique the part without addressing the whole. As Ball states (2015), we need to question the ‘necessarian logic’ espoused by policy entrepreneurs, so-called ‘experts’ and those that create the murky swamp that is a business-like or medicalised view of education and ‘what counts’ and ‘what works’.

Teaching shouldn’t be a contest or a pursuit to sort and rank practitioners. Nor should it be a director’s cut with CGI, costumes and clever marketing and promotion trotted out on occasion to extol the views and practice of some and marginalize others. I would argue that when teachers have worked together, thought together and researched together we have ameliorated some pretty big issues and advanced the profession, whereas we have only served to divide and compete with ourselves by creating a sense of ‘the best’.