I don’t know any school, anywhere, that’s better than the teachers in it. You can have the most brilliantly conceived curriculum on the planet, the most sophisticated, sensitive and responsive systems of assessment, but if the teaching is bad in the middle of it, you’re going to have a bad school. And equally, if you have brilliant teachers, you can get away with very little formal assessment yet still have brilliant results.

I talked about, in the All Our Futures report, two things, one of which was “teaching creatively”: teachers finding interesting ways into material. Presenting unusual points of entry or interesting angles or perspectives, and enjoying the process of finding them. So, that’s important. Teachers themselves should try to evolve their own creative capacities and enjoy what they do, creatively. Standardized testing has taken the joy of teaching away from them.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/12/ted_and_reddit_1/  Ken Robinson