The Problems In The Secondary School Teacher Training In The Context Of State-level Training Programme

In December2010, we undertook the Teacher Training Project for the BackboneTeachers from Rural Areas of Midwest China, which is one of the State-level TrainingProgramme for Primary and Secondary School Teachers promulgated by the Ministry ofEducation and the Ministry of Finance. The trainees are100backbone teachers frombelow county-level junior schools in Hebei Province. They were asked to write a reflectivejournal by the end of the training. Although most of them held approval attitudes to thetraining in the journal, they revealed unsatisfactory in some respects. Based on theinformation in the journals, we compiled a questionnaire and conducted a survey to thetrainee teachers aiming at discovering the representative and burning problem in thetraining programme so as to find appropriate solutions. It is found the most representativeand burning problem in the training courses are of more theoretical rather than practical,where there is a gap between training courses and the authentic teaching practice.Meanwhile, there is a great discrepancy in educational background and subject knowledgeamong the trainees resulting that training did not meet the individualized needs. Moreover,the in-depth interview indicates that another major task we are confronted with is thedevelopment of the middle school English teachers’ communities of rural areas, whichshould get attention and be promoted through the State-level Training Program.Based on the current situation of the performance of the training practice in HebeiProvince, this research intends to discover the representative and burning problems, andhopes to find appropriate solutions to them and improve the quality of the teacher trainingpractice and the teachers’ development.