Current state and federal government initiatives in Australia to 'raise the quality of teaching and encourage the development of professional standards'1 send mixed messages about both the nature of teacher professionalism and the development of 'standards' for professional practice. More often than not, when politicians use the word 'standards', they fall back on fairly reductive notions of performance measurement and accountability. It is in this context that the federally-funded research project in which we are engaged, STELLA,2 defines itself. Its brief is to develop professional teaching standards, exemplars and performance assessment portfolios for primary and secondary English teachers, and it has attempted to reclaim the word, 'standards', investing it with teachers' values, knowledge, professional experience and meanings. It is probably important to add that this noble intention does not come out of the blue, but is supported by the current wave of national and international initiatives to raise the quality and status of teaching. An important outcome here has been the establishment of professional standards-setting and certification bodies3 developed and managed by the teaching profession and affirming the teaching profession's key responsibility in setting and managing its codes of good practice.

The following article is intended to give you an idea of the nature of the STELLA research project and the way we have gone about the preliminary work of developing standards for English teachers in Australia. We shall be focusing on work done by teachers in Melbourne, as that is where we are based, but there are similar groups of teachers working in other states in Australia: the funding which the project received through the Australian Research Council has partly been devoted to sustaining links between these teachers, enabling them to compare their perspectives on the teaching of English. A condition for receiving the research funding was a financial commitment on the part of the two professional associations, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) and the Australian Literacy Educators' Association (ALEA) - the former an organisation consisting largely of secondary English teachers, the latter representing primary teachers. The two associations have been instrumental in identifying and supporting the teachers who comprise the teaching panels working on the research project. They have also publicised the project's work at national conferences and in the national journals, as well as supporting workshops and briefing meetings for interested teachers and employing bodies across Australia.

What have the teachers been doing? The teachers meet together outside school hours. In their first meetings they examined the current research on teaching standards, familiarising themselves with examples of policy initiatives at state and national level, as well as developments in other countries. They discussed a number of different standards documents. Many of the current models identify generic teaching competencies and are formatted in the form of clusters of observable skills and sub-skills.4 Others are discipline-specific, written in the form of declarative statements elaborated in descriptive mini-essays.5 Some provide small illustrative classroom cameos, or 'vignettes', illustrating particular skills as enacted in the classroom.6 Not surprisingly, there was a degree of consensus, mainly negative, in the teachers' responses to these documents: checklists of skills and sub-skills lack integrity, denying the complexity, interactivity and contextual nature of any teaching act; mini-essays become unmanageable as they struggle with the utopian task of being all-inclusive; illustrative classroom cameos appear lifeless ('sanitised' is Brenton's preferred word), failing to capture the synergy of good teaching. So what might be better? The teachers agreed they would begin by writing their own accounts of good teaching; they would describe in their own narratives what good English teachers believe, know and are able to do.

The prompt the teachers were originally given was an open one: write a narrative that captures a moment of 'good' English teaching.7 So far we have collected over fifty narratives in which teachers describe examples, or moments, of 'good' teaching in classrooms ranging from Grades 3 to Year 12. The accounts provide comprehensive coverage of the English curriculum as defined in state and national curriculum standards frameworks. They include accounts of work in ESL classrooms, 'Special English' classrooms, and work with Indigenous students. Many of the stories involve sophisticated framing devices opening up several levels of interpretation for the reader or listener. In the following illustration, 'A cloze encounter of the poetic kind', a teacher begins her account of teaching Year 12 poetry by foregrounding her own academic values. The pun in the title signals the textual status of the story which follows:

Other stories expose the fine grained complexities with which the skilled teacher manages and makes judgements about student learning in difficult interactive/overactive environments. A Year 7 ESL teacher repositions her own pedagogical content knowledge:

Yet other teachers create the immediacy of a teaching episode, employing the deceptively simple stylistic device of a 'ripping yarn':

The teachers brought their accounts to meetings. They read them to each other and revised them on the basis of searching questions, suggestions, responses offered by their listeners. It is worth noting that by writing their stories, these teachers are engaging in complex textual practices, producing a variety of texts across a range of genres that mediate their knowledge and experience. When that complexity is matched by their public reading of the texts - and as any good English teacher will tell you, meaning cannot be said to reside 'within' texts, but is generated only through the reading of them - you have something which approximates to the complexities of teaching and the vast array of professional judgements that teaching entails.

But the stories have taken the project further, providing material for critical discussion, where the teachers have teased out the professional values, knowledge and skills embedded in their accounts of teaching and used these as a basis from which to formulate general statements of principle or belief that English teachers share. (We discuss this in more detail below). The distinctive feature of the STELLA project might well be the way in which it has foregrounded the role narrative can play in professional development and in the construction of professional knowledge. By writing their stories, the teachers have individually and collectively developed their own views of their professional responsibilities, as distinct from (though not necessarily in opposition to) the way politicians and bureaucrats might define their role. And by putting their practice on public display, they have shown a willingness to be professionally accountable in a way which is far more compelling than technocratic models of performance appraisal in terms of quantifiable outcomes. Indeed, the teachers' whole-hearted engagement both in their talk and their writing conveys their sense that STELLA provides an historic opportunity to affirm their professional identity - though they might not quite put it that way.

The post-war period in Australia has witnessed a long struggle by English teachers to assert their professional status, a struggle that is reflected in the history of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) and its journal, English in Australia8 and the STELLA project has explicitly situated itself as a moment within this history, as part of a continuing attempt by the profession to define itself.

This portentous claim does not quite capture the quality of the discussions in which STELLA teachers have engaged, for it is not as though they have self-consciously and unsmilingly gathered together to do something momentous or historic. Their discussions have been shot through with the paradoxes and ironies of attempting to make general statements on behalf of English teachers in Australia. They have not, however, fallen back on unchallengeable 'motherhood' statements of belief, but have tried to generalise carefully from the stories they have written, accepting the imperative to define and categorise while resisting the temptation to over-simplify or dogmatise.

What have they learnt from their experiment? Firstly, it became apparent early on that there is not a great deal to argue about at the level of the general statements or principles that tend to be adduced when people try to describe good teaching. Usually standards documents contain sets of categories that account for the teacher's skills and commitment in managing and monitoring student learning; that define the teacher's disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical expertise and capacities to think systematically about practice, learn from experience and engage with the wider professional community. In their attempt to identify various dimensions that might constitute 'good' English teaching, the teachers, not surprisingly, covered this range of concerns, finding it easy to match the categories developed by the NBPTS and INTASC, as well as other standards material produced in Australia. But the second lesson they drew from this experiment was more interesting, in that they could not escape a sense of the presumption invested in their 'We', and the inclusions and exclusions that the first person plural inevitably entails.

Rather than an admission of defeat, this experiment has brought the complexities of formulating professional standards to the fore. It is not enough to postulate large statements of principle, as though the general terms in which such statements are couched can transform them into a salient frame of reference for all English teachers across Australia. The challenge as the teachers saw it has been to find a connection between generalisations about 'good' English literacy teaching and actual instances of practice that do justice to both dimensions, accepting the inescapability of formulating generalisations, while not presuming that such generalisations can fully comprehend the rich particularities of specific classrooms, school sites, systems or cohorts of students.

When teachers have read narratives written by teachers from other regions of Australia, they invariably qualify their judgements about the quality of the teaching described (whether it be an instance of negotiating the curriculum or handling the needs of a mixed ability class or some other aspect of teaching) by requiring more information about the context in which the teacher is working. They have unfailingly demonstrated the situated nature of their own knowledge and experience, foregrounding the need to understand the specific situation which each story describes, acknowledging that their own frame of reference might not be appropriate for judging how adequately the narrative describes 'good' teaching. This has especially been the case when teachers working in metropolitan Melbourne have read stories by teachers from remote communities about their experiences with Indigenous students.

The teachers involved in STELLA have been sensitive to the way their stories mediate their knowledge and experience, rather than providing a direct window on their teaching in some kind of narrow, 'realist' manner.9 They have consciously been engaging in complex textual practices in their bid to construct versions of their knowledge and teaching practice, signalling the textual status of their narratives and framing their stories in a variety of ways.10 Each narrative has thus provided an occasion for exploring a range of interpretations, rather than simply generating one reading - as evidenced when the teachers have not been able to assume a common frame of reference or a set of shared experiences, and they have been obliged to reflect on the assumptions they have brought to their reading of the text.

This may hardly be surprising, given that they are English teachers who are presumably conscious of the complex play between language and meaning, but such textual practices nonetheless constitute a significant point of departure from other attempts to formulate professional standards. Material produced by the NBPTS, for example, refrains from acknowledging its textual status, aspiring to a kind of unproblematic transparency when it comes to defining what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do.

So one outcome of the project will be the publication of a corpus of stories written by English teachers about their practice, exploring a range of dimensions of English teaching and connected to statements of standards organised around the categories of 'believing', 'knowing', 'teaching/learning', and 'professional engagement'. These categories (and their elaboration) remain provisional, and will be finalised only after extensive consultation with the wider profession. The final text will inevitably share many features with other standards documents. However, the STELLA teachers expect that it will constitute a different kind of intervention in the life of the profession than has been the case with other attempts to introduce standards, and that it will lend itself to larger purposes than simply an instrument for career entry or advancement enabling individual teachers to seek certification as beginning and accomplished teachers (as is the case with the U.S. models cited above).

Teachers involved in STELLA have become conscious of the values and beliefs they share, of their collective identity and history as English teachers, and several of their stories affirm the values of collegiality and collaboration, rather than focusing simply on the individual excellences or abilities that teachers reveal when they perform in classrooms. The STELLA materials will not only affirm these values, but invite other teachers to initiate professional dialogue with each other about their teaching, giving them a collection of narratives against which to test their own beliefs and values, and encouraging them to open their teaching up to scrutiny by writing their own stories or going public in other ways. ( Western Australian English teachers have experimented with producing videos that capture moments of 'good' practice.11)

The very processes in which the STELLA teachers have been engaged have evidenced their professional commitment, and it is now a major goal of the project to involve a wider network of teachers in the conversation they have begun. Too often, when you read the standards literature, you encounter a division between the process of developing standards and the standards themselves, a division which is especially marked in accounts of the NBPTS.12 The result is that the 'insiders' who have developed the standards inevitably view them differently from 'outsiders' who must henceforth allow their teaching to be judged on terms which have been formulated by others.

The STELLA teachers (as 'insiders') have registered the deep professional satisfaction they have gained from writing stories and participating in discussions about their teaching practice, and they have lamented the fact that the school day cannot be restructured to allow such talk to take place at their schools. Several have described STELLA as the best professional development they have ever experienced. The challenge is to refrain from treating their professional development as a good by-product or spin off from the real business of formulating standards, and to provide others with similar opportunities for professional development, conceptualising standards as part of a continuing process of development on the part of the profession as a whole.

By writing their stories, STELLA teachers have opened up their teaching to public scrutiny, allowing their views and values to be interrogated and debated. Sometimes their narratives have provoked radically divergent opinions about the quality of the teaching described. Consensus has usually been achieved, not at the expense of the diverse range of views which the narrative may have prompted, but by a thorough airing of those views, as readers, reading and re-reading the stories, have teased out the multi-levelled nature of each story. At the very least, STELLA teachers have acknowledged the professional commitment of any teacher who has been prepared to go public, and who is prepared to accept the challenge of constructing an account of 'good' teaching: they have all written their own stories and taken the same risk.

The researchers' decision to invite the teachers to write stories was prompted by literary theoretical accounts of narrative, including the burgeoning literature on the role of narrative in educational research. 13 For STELLA teachers, writing stories has been less a way of retailing their pre-existing knowledge and values, than of actively constructing knowledge about their teaching. In the final section of this article we try to illustrate this process by presenting a narrative which Douglas wrote, including his reflections about the way the narrative developed over several drafts in response to critical feedback from others involved in the STELLA Project.

In the following story, Douglas describes different groups of students engaged in oral activities. The work he focuses on is part of the Victorian English Curriculum and Standards Framework (CSF) which specifies appropriate learning outcomes for students at each year level. This framework consists of a number of strands, including 'speaking and listening', and promotes the value of critically engaging in film, television, and other media. As a teacher in a government school, Douglas is obliged to work within the CSF, and the lessons he describes in the following narrative were all planned to achieve CSF outcomes.

The aim of this article has been to convey a sense of the process of developing professional teaching standards as the STELLA teachers have experienced it and to recognise the way this process affirms the status of teachers as members of a 'community of practice', as critical professionals rather than functionaries following someone else's agenda. We have tried to demonstrate the complexities inherent in making connections between general statements of principle and specific instances of practice.

As we reach the half way mark of the project we remain confident that we can achieve an outcome that will merit professional and public acceptance.We will remain profoundly sceptical about developing a reified set of standards that might be used merely to judge an individual teacher's performance. The stories which the teachers have written cannot be used to objectify professional standards in some kind of uncomplicated way for all to see. Rather than reaching this kind of completeness, we see our work as remaining open-ended, part of a continuing process of definition and redefinition, reflection and critique grounded in teachers' knowledge and practice. As well as the print-based project outcomes, we have begun to experiment with the production of a hypertextual version in which the statement of standards, teacher narratives, commentaries, evaluations, teacher discussions and student work and comment are hot-linked and use a range of print, sound and video modes. In this format the profession might add to these web documents, thus constituting a product that remains permanently open, resisting the temptation to sign off on behalf of future members of the profession.

There is no easy way out. The capacity to articulate what counts as accomplished practice, to evaluate and enforce standards of practice, is the defining credential of a professional body, the foundation for public credibility and trust. Standards enable the profession to take responsibility for setting its own agenda for the continuing professional development of its members. They are the central mechanism for quality control. The catalyst for the improvement of teaching, is the will and courage of the profession and the wisdom of governments in supporting the profession's work.