On The Middle School Politics Teacher Professional Development

With the intensification of economic and technological competitions worldwide from 1980s on, education has been becoming a strategic priority for the social development almost in every country. People come to pay great more attention to the teachers' professional competence, and the quality and effectiveness of their performance. Under the circumstances, the movement on teacher professionalization turned to be the development trend and fashion in the field of teacher education globally. The process experienced consecutive periods from collective professionalization and passive individual professionalization to active individual professionalization. At present, the professional development is the core theme and mainstream in the research on teacher professionalization. However, the theoretical research and practical application on teacher professionalization are still at the primary stage in China. Fortunately, it has taken as the mainstream discourse in the teacher education. The researches on teacher professionalization present great meaningfulness both in theory and practice. The following dissertation will carry out a detailed research on the issue of professional development for the moral and political science teachers in middle schools of China, and it will present a preliminary analysis on the essence, characteristics, content, current problems and development strategies of their professional development based on the relevant theories of education, sociology and pedagogical psychology with the pedagogy of moral and political science teaching as the starting point. The core points include following findings. Teaching career is "a forthcoming profession" if measured by the criteria on a mature profession. The professional development of moral and political science teachers is a dynamic process of the gradual upgrade and perfecting on individual teacher's professional belief, knowledge, capability, and ethics. The professional development of moral and political science teachers owns distinctive characteristics as it is a multi-period and consecutive development process with practical orientation, and the outstanding character and core lies on the establishment of professional belief for individual teacher. There is by no means one single factor influencing the teacher professional development, and actually it is affected by the interactions between multi-player like official educational administrative organ, society, school and individual teacher. By that fact, the promotion for the professional development of moral and political science teachers is a social engineering in which the state should be responsible for creating benign social environments and reforming the current teacher in-service training system, and on the other hand, the moral and political science teacher should stick to the principle of self-development. Base on practical class teaching experiences, with joint efforts by various stake takers, the moral and political science teachers will be able to get comprehensive upgrade on their professional competence in the end.