A Sino-American Comparison On Field Experience In Initial Teacher Education

As one of the oldest teacher education courses, field experience exists in teacher education curriculum with the forms of early field experience, laboratory experience and practicum. It is an essential path for the student teachers to obtain practical knowledge and develop core competency through the activities of observation, research, teaching and classroom management. However, field experience has been ignored and weakened in the practice for a long time, which is regarded as a major defect in teacher education. With the international tendency of returning to practice in the field of teacher education, the transformational reform in basic education and preservice mechanism, the focus and need of research on field experience turns out to be gradually stronger.The dissertation starts with the concern about the dilemma and development of field experience in the context of teachers' professional development. The author then claims its supportive theories of practical knowledge, reflection and professional socialization of teachers and explores the essence and value of field experience. On the base of theoretical research, the paper enters the comprehensive and in-depth comparison between Sino-American field experience.The historical development of Sino-American field experience has shared the same germination, development and stabilization stages ever since 1820s and has separately stepped into the period of reconstruction and reform since 1950s. During the evolution of the curriculum, four models such as Apprenticeship Model, Laboratory Model, Clinical Model and Reflective Model played or have been playing significant roles in the practice of field experience.The author advanced the comprehensive comparison between Sino-American field experience from the aspects of curriculum objectives, content, implementation and evaluation. The curriculum objectives coincide with the goals of teacher education. Under the adaptive goal of Chinese teacher education, the course of field experience lists four requirements, which consists of professional ideology, knowledge and skills and schooling inspection. And with standard-based conception, the objectives of American field experience is supported by different levels of professional standards issued by professional organizations and committees, which focuses on the accordance of student teachers' performance with the standards in the fields of professional dispositions and professional pedagogical skills.The research on curriculum content initiates from the approaches of content selection and content organization. The curriculum comprises the early field experience, laboratory experience and practicum in formal and informal educational institutions, including the relative experience obtained by the student teachers in these institutions. And there has been a great gap of the time-total and proportion of class hour distribution between the courses of China and the United States. China adopts the centralized and gradual progressive styles, which in the US, appears as an infiltrate style. On the other hand, the content organization exhibits a diverse logical consequence, with the pattern of coordinative distribution in China and module integration in USA.The implementation modes, central session, approaches and participants reflect the current implementation of Sino-American field experience. It can be divided into different categories according to the training level, organization and cooperation styles between universities and schools. Mentoring, as the core of the course implementation, differs from the models and methods between the two countries. Chinese approach of "Shuoke(talking about teaching plan)—Tingke(class observation)—Pingke(site-based class evaluation)" and American "Class observation-centered" approach reveal totally different implementation styles. Furthermore, the diverse roles and responsibilities of key participants—student teachers, cooperating teachers and supervisors display the respective features of Sino-American teacher education.In the curriculum evaluation field, China and the United States have developed different standards with relative indicator system on different levels, which includes national, organizational and institutional levels. Moreover, the standards and its indicator system include all-around and single competence evaluation system to provide sound judgment and assessment of student teachers' performance. In the evaluation models of the two countries, cooperating teachers, supervisors and student teachers play quite different roles. In addition, from the perspective of evaluation approaches, China mainly introduces the approach system of experience appraisal, class observation evaluation, unified test and fuzzy assessment. In the United States, the evaluation approaches appear as self-evaluation, performance assessment, reflective seminar and portfolios. On the other hand, the curriculum evaluation also includes the program evaluation, which refers to the judgment on the designing and procedure of curriculum objectives, content, implementation and evaluation, etc. The aim of program evaluation is to provide the chance of course adjustments and improvement by the course conveners and administrators. After the overall comparison and reflection between Sino-American field experience, the author argues that the reform of the course be based on the transformation of curriculum conception, which claims the resetting of the objectives to cultivate future teachers with the willingness, competency to teach and research aspiration on teaching. At the same time, it is of necessity to broaden, integrate, infiltrate and progress the curriculum content and to realize commensalisms, reflection and dialogue in the process of course implementation. At the same time, the need to form the system of evaluation and accreditation with high validity to ensure the quality of field experience turns out to be critical, which elaborates its value to improve the professional growth of student teachers.