A Narrative Inquiry Into Teachers' Challenges On Professional Development In The Context Of New Curriculum Reform

The new curriculum reform is prosperous, and it also provides opportunities for the teachers to promote their professional development. It is well known that teachers play important roles in implementing the new curriculum reform. They are even the crucial factor.This study takes three senior middle school English teachers as participants and it takes me about a year to keep in connection with the participants to interview (including online chat, telephone interview), observe, and listen to their life history. Narrative inquiry and life history could present the life scene, going "back to things themselves". This study finds out that the new curriculum reform brings opportunities as well as challenges to the teachers. The new difficulties will come up with the implementing of the new curriculum reform, and narrative inquiry is used to explore and reveal the challenges and difficulties behind the stories.This paper is divided into 6 parts. Chapter One mainly introduces the origin, significance and background of the study. Chapter Two is the literature review, which tries to summarize the relationship among teacher training, teacher education, teacher development, and the connotation of teacher development, and then to find out the importance of research into teacher professional development. In Chapter Three, research methods are introduced in detail, and it also presents the reason why qualitative research method is applied, especially the narrative inquiry and life history as well as the procedure of data collection. In Chapter Four the data are presented, and it is also a discussion of senior middle school English teachers'challenges. Chapter Five is data analysis and it finds that the challenges can be divided into two kinds of factors:the internal and the external. The internal factors mainly include the understanding of teachers themselves, the understanding of students, and the understanding of teaching and textbooks; the external factors mainly include the stress from examinations, schools, and the society. And at the end of this part, Maslow:s hierarchy of needs is adopted to analyze teachers" challenges. Chapter Six is the conclusion of this study:what challenges the new curriculum reform has brought to the teachers and how to deal with them. But this study only touches the tip of the iceberg; further study is well worth carrying out.