Preliminary Research On The Teachers' Practical Knowledge

The teacher's subjective strength and the creation spirit is basic, closedfoundation of all educational reforms. The importance of teacher demonstrates theteacher education's important status. The teacher education is the motivity ofeducation career, also is the most important initial link of the chain links.The teacher's practical knowledge research is one of the most important teachereducation topics and its theory is urgent to study and to solve. The teacher's practicalknowledge ,in the background of the practitioner's life history(including the teacher'slearning experience, teacher's practical teaching experience, important others,essential events and time) ,is the rich personal,creative , practical educationalexperience which is a compound made up of the idea, the intuition, the capacity andthe courage, with the aid of the educational theory,the case research and the problemsolving in the long time teaching practice not only includes the value ,the belief andthe supposition guide function of the teacher;but also includes the contextualknowledge based on the context and emergency, which is appropriate,accurate ,intuitive, continuous and automatical. This kind of knowledge is of theteacher ,but not for the teacher,is the teacher experiences and the reflectiveknowledge to the experiences ,much of which is silent or tacit knowledge. In thealterant changing teaching situation, the practical knowledge emphasizes the teacher'screativity and practicality as "the expert ". The teacher's practical knowledge is thecore factor of the teacher professional development and the self-growth, is therepresentation of the teacher's self-improved development tendency. In order toenhance the teacher occupation professional standard, it has become the focus point ofthe world educational reforms, how should the teacher obtain the practical knowledge.But as the influence of different factors, there is actually (a) great disparitybetween the importance of the practical knowledge and its status, the kind ofknowledge is continuously in the state of being neglected and forgotten. The teacher'spractical knowledge is the teacher education researchers' studying scotoma which isbeyond the researchers' vision for a long time;simultaneously the teacher alsoneglects the function of his own practical knowledge because they fall in the tedious,tiny and trivial daily educational events. Obviously, the great disparity, between therealistic status of the teacher's practical knowledge and its function in teacherprofessional development, not only hinders the theory construction of teacher'sknowledge foundation, moreover makes the negative effect on the patterntransformation of teacher education as well as the school teaching practice.This research is a further study on the base of the summary about the teacher'spractical knowledge, which adopted the way combined "from the top downward" with"from bottom to top ". First, the paper employs the historical method and documentmethod. I introduce the background of the emergence of the teacher's practicalknowledge by the methods of research, the important background are the post-modernism trend, the personal knowledge and the teacher's knowledge researchtendency. Then I tried to propose my own view on teacher's practical knowledge afterthe historical review and induction to the teacher practical knowledge.Secondly, the paper also employs the case approach, put my eyes on the situationof the teacher's daily life. I interviewed a teacher and described a true story about herin gentle, subtle and sensitive way, with the purpose of getting the answer to obtainand update the teacher's practical knowledge .I try to enter the world of the teacher'slife ,to listen to the voice of the teacher ,to feel what she is feeling and to dig out thebelief that the teacher believes in .I also hope to pour rare life-green into this graytheory with the true story , because of my teaching experience as a teacher before.An expert teacher is superior to a raw recruit teacher. It is the goal for a rawrecruit teacher to be an expert and it is the direction and trend of teacher's individualprofessional development. Expert teacher's abundant practical knowledge plays anirreplaceable role in teaching, it is the essential characteristic of an expert teacher.Then, what kind of structure characteristics does an expert teachers' practicalknowledge have? How can new teacher get this kind of practical knowledge? What isthe way to improve teachers' practical knowledge? This research is a preliminarydiscussion of the expert teachers' practical knowledge.