From Faculty Training To Faculty Development

Since the mid-1980s, China has established a 3-tier faculty training system. But with the massification of China's Higher Education, the training system could not meet the needs of sharply increased number of university teachers. To enhance the faculty quality in the new era, China has to shift from "faculty training" to "faculty development".This paper investigates the China's faculty training and communication system from both policy and academic perspectives. The author tries to find out the gap between China's faculty training system and the faculty development system, which is a common practice and leading in the international higher education community. Then the author attempts to give adequate suggestions for the development of China's faculty development system.The paper is divided into five sections. The first section is introduction in which the author gives the overview of the thesis. In the second section, the author reviews China's faculty training polices in the past 20 years and summarizes its characteristics. The third sections are the statistics and analysis of the research papers from CNKI on the two themes focused in this paper - faculty training and faculty development. The fourth section is a comparative research of Japan's faculty development system. In the last section, the author analyzes the dilemmas in China's faculty training system and the opportunities for new phase of faculty development and suggests the further direction of development of China's faculty development system based on the research direction mentioned in the previous sections.To ensure the successful shift from "faculty training" to "faculty development", developing related policy is the key factor. The researchers have the responsibility to conduct further research on faculty development and supply effective suggestions for the policy makers, while policy makers should pay special attention to the changing genre of faculty development to base their policy making and policy development.