To what degree teaching is (or could be) an art or a science or a combination of the two is a matter of deep dispute among teacher educators. Most practitioners in their classrooms would probably think of what they know and are able to do as principally an art, one they have acquired over many years, largely alone, through trial and error learning. Few would be able to cite any research evidence, except in the most general terms, to warrant what they do, although many educational researchers claim their influence on practising teachers is real, if rarely explicitly acknowledged.

What today is not in dispute is that if students are to become better learners, it is essential for teachers to become better at what they do. The dispute is about precisely how improving teaching quality is best achieved. Part of the trouble is that we know far more about learning than we do about teaching. This is in part because learning is of interest to a wide range of people apart from those who train teachers – psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and so on. In part it is because in a knowledge economy learning matters to many outside educational institutions, and especially those in business and industry, although here the talk is more likely to be of mentoring rather than teaching. Teachers and teaching are terms most people associate with schools and other explicitly educational institutions, and the people who study and research into teaching are therefore mainly those who prepare novice teachers and support the further professional development of career teachers.

Methods of teaching in schools as part of paid, professional activity – what we here call pedagogy – tends to be cut off from more ‘natural’ forms of teaching or what is thought of as helping to learn, whether in the workplace (for example, on-the-job learning with the support of a mentor) or in the home (for example, mothers’ actions that assist the development of the infant) or in the community (for example, what the young learn from their peers).