Study Of Theory And Practice Of Teachers' Professional Development In Colleges And Universities

Since the large-scale enrollment of institutions of higher learning in 1999, the school-running scale of institutions of higher learning has been rapidly expanding, thus the construction of the teaching faculty has become the bottleneck of the development of colleges and universities, especially for the local ones where the structure of teaching faculty is not reasonable. High attention has been paid in the educational world to the teacher's individual professional development, the improvement of the whole teaching faculty's quality and the enhancement of teaching quality so as to improve the school-running level of colleges and universities, so that the professional development of college teachers has also caused attention in the academic world. This paper, through the discussion about the teachers' professional development of local colleges, aims to explore the strategies of promoting teachers' professional development in order to provide references for the personnel department and other functional departments of local colleges to make out such management systems as teachers' training plans, teachers' evaluation policies, and so on, so as to seek the common development of both the school and the individual teacher.Firstly, starting from the study of relative documents, this paper expounds the basic theory of teachers' professional development, including the connotation, the ways and the necessity of teachers' professional development. Secondly, taking the theoretical study as its basis and combining the author's years of the working practice of teachers' management, this paper discusses the peculiar connotation, developing stages and characteristics of teachers' professional development in local colleges. In the paper, the author takes the institutions of higher learning in Zhejiang Province for example, and, on the basis of analyzing the structural change of the province's teaching faculty during the fifteenth "five-year" period, discusses the major problems and their causes of teachers' professional development of local colleges and universities. Thirdly, through the case study of one local college's teachers' professional development in Zhejiang Province to further prove the connotation, stages and characteristics of teachers' professional development in local colleges and universities and exposes the interactive relationship between the teachers' individual professional development and the school's development. Finally, on the basis of the above-mentioned study of both theory and practice, this paper advances some practical strategies to promote the teacher's professional development of local colleges and universities in the respects of the government, school and individualists, and so on.The study shows that teachers' professional development in local colleges and universities is not only a life-long process but also a kind of life-long study running through the teachers' whole working careers. It is the teacher's professional quality and teaching ability that determine the teaching quality. This paper makes a descriptive study of both the characteristics and process of teachers' professional development in local colleges and universities. With the limitations of both my research time and ability, I have not made a further study of the teachers' professional development of the local institutions of higher learning in various aspects by following the diachronic dimension, which is to find a more effective strategy of the teachers' professional development. so as to construct a creative mechanism for the teachers' professional growth in colleges and universities.