A Study On Teacher Professional Standards

Teacher professional standards are the premise for establishing and improving the professional status of teachers, and the essential evidence of evaluating their teaching quality; setting up the objective and scientific professional standards is the basal sign for teaching as a profession; it is also the core content to establish the standard system of teacher education. Therefore, Studying and developing teacher professional standards has been a highlight in international society since 1980s. While in China, the interest and concern on teacher professional standards arose from the Asia-Pacific Expert Meeting on Teacher Professional Standards held at East China Normal University in 2003 and through International Forum on Teacher Education, the largest annual international platform for teacher education innovation. It is imperative currently in China to initiate the international comparative study and joint development on teacher professional standards.This dissertation aims to discuss the teacher professional standards based on international cases through the method of comparative study and try to conclude its possible implications for the development of teacher professional standards in China, which holds the largest population on teaching force.The whole dissertation is divided into seven chapters as follows: The introduction chapter shows the context, importance and methodology of this research. The second one focuses on the policy framework of teacher professional standards, aiming to determine the intension of teacher professional standards, its dimensions and possible types as well as the basic requirements of developing high quality teacher professional standards. Teacher professional standards can be divided into generic and specified, through this dimension, Chapter Three, Four and Five discuss the generic teacher professional standards with six countries' cases and the specified teacher professional standards with three countries' cases, and analysis the cases' backgrounds, contents and main features according to the method of comparative study. It is only the first step for us to develop the teacher professional standards; it is also important to implement the developed standards into practice, therefore Chapter Six discusses two possible implementation strategies, i.e. establishing standard-based teacher professional development system and teacher performance management systems. Based on the above international cases, Chapter Seven is the implications to construct the system of teacher professional standards in China from international cases' study. It tries to draw up five suggestions on teacher professional standards constructing in China: developing the teacher professional standards with considering of the feature of international perspectives and local context; different career stages and life-long progress; the basic benchmark and future orientation; system designing of education professional standards based on research; implementing the teacher professional development system as well as performance management system based on teacher professional standards.