A Research On "New York City Teaching Fellows"

Since the new century,teacher education has become a very important topic all over the world.To make sure that teachers gain necessary quality and skills,most of the counties have already conducted teacher certificate system and teachers' position has been raised and the integration of pre-service,induction and post-service has been emphasized.However,teachers prepared by traditional teacher education programs have been far from enough,and their quality has also been doubted.What is more,the unbalanced economic development has enlarged poor or developing areas' lack of teachers.In the 80 s of last century,the USA has been in great shortage of teachers.And teachers' quality and structure have been criticized now and then,the teacher education in the USA has been facing the challenge of “deregulation”.And also during this time,the alternative teacher education(ATE)reform took place,and thrive beyond the new century.ATE,as an alternative way(other than traditional teacher education)to prepare teachers,is featured with its short time,and emphasis on teacher diversity.Among all the American ATE programs,the “New York City Teaching Fellows(NYCTF)” program is one of the most famous.NYCTF started in 2000,and has already prepared a lot of qualified teachers and changed the single structure,and thus received huge support from the New York government.This research aims to analyze NYCTF,find their excellent strategies,and raise some suggestions for Chinese teacher education based on China' s situation.The main body of this research consists of five parts,namely the analysis on why the NYCTF program came into being,its value orientations and main goals,process details,achievement and problems,and its good strategies and the inspiration for China.The number of public teachers for the New York City was inadequate,and the structure of the teacher team was inappropriate during the late 20 th centuries.The public education in New York City at that time was in very low quality.New York City needed a lot of qualified teachers to develop its public education.Since last 80 s,big problems concerning primary,middle and high school teachers have arisen in the USA,but the traditional college-based teacher education could no longer meet the teacher needs set by America,and thus alternative teacher education reform came into being and made rapid progress,which shed great inspiration for New York City.Under both the impact of inner desire and outer pull,the NYCTF program came into being.The three value orientations of the NYCTF program are education equity,practice-based ideas,and teacher deregulation;and the three goals of the NYCTF program are preparing qualified teachers,releasing the teacher shortage,and raising the public education quality of New York City.As for the process,the NYCTF program is mainly carried out through four steps including recruiting and selection,pre-service training,post teaching practice and post-service training.NYCTF has already been carried out for more than sixteen years,and it has succeeded in raising a lot of educators,diversifying the teacher team,promoting a balanced development of New York City public education;however,the NYCTF program also encounters some problems.Generally speaking,the NYCTF program has formed a lot of excellent strategies including paying great attention to education equity and balanced development in education,showing respect for teacher diversity,attaching huge significance to candidates' academic achievement,and focusing on the high efficiency and practical feature of teacher preparation.Based on the current situation of China,the writer proposes that China should attach great significance to the practical use of ATE programs;and should also make good efforts to improve enrollment and election system,training system,and safeguard mechanism of the current Chinese ATE programs.