Research On Expert And Novice Teacher Decision Making

Teacher is the one who implement teaching. Teacher is also the decision makers. This research was designed to study the decision making's differences between expert and novice teachers during three stages of teaching: planning stage, interactive stage and reflection stage, and to explore the influences on the differences. And the findings are likely to shed light on the improvement of novice teacher's decision making ability and to provide advice to novice teacher's professional development and teacher education. According to the research problem, a case study approach was become the research method. Two English teachers in middle school became the research subjects. Data was collected from multiple sources, including interviews before and after class, stimulated recall interviews, observations and inspection of documents. The research claims:During the planning stage, the expert and novice teacher had the same teaching planning types; however, they had different forms of expression about teaching planning. Expert teacher' teaching targets were more comprehensive than novice teacher'. Expert teacher's teaching contents were more conformed to students. During the interactive stage,the expert teacher's decision making were more reasonable than novice teacher's on three aspects : Adjust the teaching plan to students need. Apply the teaching methods. Manage the classroom.During the reflection stage,both the expert teacher and novice teacher made some reflection about their teaching. The major difference between expert teacher and novice teacher related to the focus and the depth of their reflection. Expert teacher paid more attention to students and used to analyze reasons about the teaching event. Novice teacher laid emphasis on self-teaching and did not analyze the problems.The main impacts on expert and novice teacher' decision making were teacher's beliefs and teacher's knowledge, which included curriculum knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.In order to improve novice teacher's ability of decision making and improve teacher professional development, this research suggests that we should concern both teachers'pre-service education and post-service training. Pre-service education consists of adjusting the curriculum contents in normal universities, putting the pedagogical knowledge into practice and increasing student teaching hours. Post- service training includes novice teacher reinforce teaching reflection, school sets up training mode of"partners' mutual help"and builds communication platform.