Introduction: Upper Secondary Science Teacher Quality - "Those Who Can"

"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." --George Bernard Shaw. The great Irish iconoclast did not have a high opinion of the teaching profession. The schoolmaster of the nineteenth century was all too often the subject of mock respect rather than genuine esteem, and the Shavian view of the teacher as someone who could not succeed in his or her specialist field - the science teacher as someone not quite good enough to go into professional science, for instance - lingers on in the public psyche. But teaching is a profession (the International Labour Organisation classified secondary teaching as such, alongside doctors and lawyers, many years ago in its categorization of occupations), and akin to all professions, there are good practitioners and those who leave much to be desired. The focus thus shifts to those attributes that make for a good education professional, that is, teacher quality.