A Study On The Curriculum Of American Pre-service Teacher Education

Well-organized pre-service teacher education curriculum is the direct factor which affectingthe quality of teacher cultivation, the foundation for preparing qualified teachers and thesafeguard for teacher professionalization. Teacher education in the United States plays a leadingrole in the world. Since the first teacher-training school was founded by Samuel Read Hall inVermont,1823, the teacher cultivation mode in America has experienced four phases ofdevelopment which can be divided into the period of normal schools, normal colleges, educationdepartment in universities, and the period of diversification, the courses offered at each phasehave their own characteristics while it is of great value to explore and study them for the sake ofgrasping the trend of international teacher education curriculum and drawing on their strengths.The main method adopted in this thesis is documentary analysis, the author gathers relevantinformation via various approaches, and the following achievements have been obtained bysorting and analyzing the pioneer’s research: first, summarizes the different curriculum featuresat different phases. Second, presents three kinds of pre-service teacher education modes anddescribes the courses they offered respectively, and then analyzes the curriculum from threedimensions which are course objective, course structure and contents, course evaluation. Third,exposes problems on the basis of2014Teacher Prep Review released by NCTQ, the three mainfindings are: American teacher education course objective is inconsistent with the demands oflabor market, irrational variations in coursework and the inadequate content preparation ofteachers, and then predicts the trend on teacher education course. Fourth, summarizes the coursescharacteristics about teacher education in America and proposes three specific measures: mergethe theoretical courses，pay more attention to practice courses, strengthen cooperation betweenuniversity and middle school or primary school and set a series flexible and comprehensivecourse evaluation system.