Teacher Learning For The Knowledge-Based Society: Facilitate The Development Of Adaptive Expertise

In the fast-changing knowledge-based society, every professional including teacher should prepare himself/herself for the complex and uncertain environments with a new challenging learning and professional development goal, that is, adaptive expertise. Teachers'adaptive expertise is often characterized by deep conceptual understanding of education and teaching, adaption to new teaching situations and tasks, tendency to continuing professional learning, and mind habits of metacognition while teachers are situated in the ever-changing and complex professional settings of teaching. Comparing with routine teachers, adaptive teachers can not only efficiently solve the problems of teaching by directly applying their own existing knowledge and skills, and also take the challenge of problem solving as a start of new learning way which towards the expansion of their own existing expertise and the construction of new knowledge.Adaptive expertise research has been a new focus emerging from the field of learning sciences in recent years. However, the research on teachers'adaptive expertise is still in the beginning stages of development. Rooted in the local context of teachers' professional practice and based on the theoretical exploration of adaptive expertise, this research investigates the characteristics and development of teachers'adaptive expertise by a well-designed empirical research and an elementary design-based research. The main purpose of this research is to suggest a valuable professional developmental goal for the teachers in the knowledge-based society as well as to provide new insights for teacher education change.The dissertation is consisted of six chapters.In the first chapter, this research traces the origin of the construct of adaptive expertise and the research history of adaptive expertise over the past two decades, and then analysis the profound implications and effects resulting from adaptive expertise research.The second chapter illustrates the intrinsic essence of adaptive expertise in terms of three dimensions:characteristics, inner functions and hidden epistemology, then put forward a definition of adaptive expertise based on the findings resulted from earlier illustration.Given the great emphasis on learning and development from the perspective of the learning sciences, the third chapter discusses issues on development of adaptive expertise from three aspects:influential factors, general developmental mechanism, and paths of the development, then issues on evaluation of adaptive expertise are also analyzed.In the forth chapter, this research turns to teachers'adaptive expertise, depicting the macro-level and mid-level context of teachers'adaptive expertise research as well as some existing and relevant research on teachers'adaptive expertise, raising a definition of teachers'adaptive expertise, and suggesting the future research directions in the field.Chapter Five conducts an empirical study which intends to capture the characteristics of primary mathematic teachers when they are confronting with an authentic teaching problem solving task. By means of Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) and relevant quantity and quality analysis of data, the relationship between adaptive expertise and results of problem solving, the relationship between adaptive expertise and professional experiences, and the issues on new teachers'adaptive expertise are revealed and discussed.Chapter Six adopts the method of Design-Based Research (DBR) to facilitate the teachers'development of adaptive expertise in a project conducted in a secondary school in Shanghai and to elaborate a teacher learning environments design model which named Multi-Spiral Teacher Learning Environments (Multi-Spiral TLEs) with the aim of the development of teachers'adaptive expertise. The initial design, development and implement of DBR reveal that the Multi-Spiral LEs can effectively facilitate the development of teachers'adaptive expertise.