Research And Analysis Of Standards For Professional Development Schools In America

Professional Development Schools(PDS) are innovative institutions formed through partnerships between education college in a university and P-12 schools. Their mission is professional preparation of candidates, faculty development ,inquiry directed at the improvement of practice ,and enhanced student learning. PDS are innovative institutions of teacher education, although they are facing challenges and difficulties now. Owning great potential, PDS have become one of the important forms of teacher education in America, and more and more correlatively theoretical studies are shown to readers, these abundant achievements provide enlightenment for our reformation of our traditional teacher education and solution of the problem about the teacher education. The analysis of the standards for professional development schools is proved to be one of the proper approaches to understand these new concepts, though there are still many other methods.Due to sparkpluging from Holmes Group, PDS emerged and flourished rapidly in 1980s in America, and PDS movement came into being finally. In order to maintain the continuous development of PDS, American professional education community designed many standards. According to different departments, the standards can be divided into four kinds, that is, standards developed by national community, by state community, by school district community and by university community. Among them, the standards developed by National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) are the most influential, and so this dissertation aims at further research and analysis about the standards developed by NCATE. NCATE began the study of the PDS Standards Project in 1995, formed their draft in 1997,carried out field-testing from 1998 to 2001, and then issued the formal standards in 2001. These PDS Standards are made up of five standards which involves more elements and these five standards are Learning community, Accountability and quality assurance, Collaboration, Equality and diversity, in addition to Structures, resources and roles . Besides, each standard possesses Beginning Level, Developing Level, At Standard and Leading Level and even every element is described and defined in detail at the different levels. After a series of introduction and analysis, this dissertation distinguishes these standards and others, and shows their features of complete structure, strict system, clear viewpoint and main idea, advanced ideas, open thinking, scientific development, and exact experiments. On the other hand, some problems also exist in these PDS standards. For example, the PDS with higher levels can not be evaluated by developmental guidelines of PDS standards, and the individual characteristics may be overlooked and so on.These PDS standards are mainly applied for the PDS assessment, and thus NCATE designed a process that the PDS standards assess the PDS and verify them. The assessment process contains two parts, that is, relatively independent self-study and the visit. The PDS may finish self- study and then the visit according the result of self-study. After the introduction in detail and the analysis of self-study and the visit, this dissertation concludes that the features of this assessment process should be execution of the standards and inheritance of the idea, reliable investigation and strict demonstration, sufficient preparation and abundant details, and each aspect going its own way. However, the limitation that the investigating time of the assessment process is somewhat short still exists.Combining the PDS standards and the characteristics of the assessment process with the existing problems of teacher education in China, the enlightenment to China's teacher education from PDS standards is drawn in the last part of this dissertation. It is the enlightenment about the methodology that with leading and guiding features, theoretical and realistic meanings, as well as scientific and developing advantages, centering on its nature and core the process of its development, the method of its organization and its application of the PDS standard provide reference for the development of all kinds of norms of teacher education in China. It is the enlightenment of people's thinking that some essential thinking that the boundaries between different roles are broken, the learning communities are expanded ,inquiry and learning in the context of practice provide reference for the teaching problems in China. However, if self-contained PDS will be set up in China at present, many difficulties and problems still exist such as the conflicts of the teacher education systems, the difference about the cultures in education and the shortage of fundamental conditions. Therefore, based on the present conditions and combined the reality, the advanced experience of PDS should be absorbed more reasonably.