Why Best Practice Is Not Good Enough

* The editors of this volume assert that accounts of properly justified and fully contextualised responses to actual teaching (and teacher education) situations provide a valuable resource for professional development. We identify fully with this assertion and with the editors' stated intention to give such reports more attention than has previously been the case in TESOL Quarterly. Our concern in this piece is to take this position further by arguing that the concept of best practice is an illegitimate importation from an inappropriate paradigm and that its use threatens to undermine the very values that its proponents espouse.