A Study On Faculty Development Center In The United States

The quality of education has become one of the main topics in higher education among countries around the world, which can be seen from the great concern over various university ranking lists. Faculties are the prerequisite of the existence and development of a university. Enhancing faculties’teaching and researching abilities is the key to improve university’s core competence. The United State owns the most developed higher education in the world, which makes it attractive to people throughout the world. Therefore, higher education in the United States becomes the studying and learning subject of other countries and regions. From the angle of organization, this study does a research on the faculty development center, which is a dedicated unit for improving faculties’teaching and learning abilities (mainly teaching ability), and then based on the analysis of the characteristics of this organization, suggestions and inspiration to faculty development in our country are provided.The first part of this thesis, also the first chapter, defines faculty development center in the United States and then briefly introduces the course of how it becomes an organization, in order to "see the limitations at present" and "find the criteria for measuring things".The second part consists of Chapter Two and Chapter Three. In Chapter Two, the current situation of faculty development center in the United States is described and organizational analysis is provided combined with the faculty composition and funding sources of CRLT in University of Michigan. Then, conclusions on the organizational model of faculty development center in the United States are made. Chapter Three firstly studies the program services and approaches provided by faculty developing center in the United States, and preliminarily analyzes the program evaluation.At last, the study focuses on the faculty development in our country in recent years. Combined with the implementing situation of faculty development these years, suggestions to our country are given from the aspects of faculty composition, funding sources, service programs and approaches and hopefully can be useful to faculty development in our country.