Reform Of Teacher Education In The Asia Pacific In The New Millennium

In facing the challenges of rapid globalization, IT intensification, international competition and local demands for developments, educators, scholars and leaders in the Asia-Pacific region and other parts of the world are concerned with reforms of teacher education for the future of education in the new millennium. This edited volume aims to provide a global sharing of the major trends and characteristics of the ongoing teacher education reforms in this region and the major challenges and issues raised in policy formulation and reform implementation. With a total of 14 chapters prepared by 18 scholars from nine educational systems – Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and United States – in the Asia-Pacific region, the book highlights the trends and challenges in the reform of teacher education in the region generally and in eight educational systems in particular. Most chapters directly or indirectly address the latest issues of teacher education and development at operational, site, and macro levels from a national or regional perspective. This volume is of interest to teachers, teacher educators, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders in all developed and developing countries.

This book provides a wide-ranging review of the current state of teacher education, with contributions by an international group of teacher educators. It focuses on issues confronting teacher educators today and in the coming decade, including the impact of globalization on the profession of teaching, and the need for teacher education to adapt to changing accountability requirements, and establish a set of minimum standards that qualify a person to teach.

This book reviews of the development, implementation and practice of the disciplines of school effectiveness and school improvement. Seven main topics are addressed: History of the school effectiveness movement over the last 25 years; Changes in accountability and standards; Leadership in school effectiveness; Changes in teacher education; Impact of Diverse Populations; Education Funding and its Impact; and Best Practice Case Studies. The contributors are active in school effectiveness research worldwide.

This book introduces and explores the nature of large scale reform, and offers a fresh insight into the importance of social capital and professional development leadership for teachers and school management. It synthesizes research on the role of the professional development leader and the importance of social capital in schools, and examines its potential to impact large scale, system-wide, reform projects. The text presents a range of international examples and theories from renowned researchers and educationists, which illustrate the challenge of raising the prominence of education social capital in schools. Considering crucial research that informs effective adult learning interventions, underlying themes supporting constructivist and transformative interventions are identified and woven into the narrative. Factors and variables needed to encourage and implement initiatives are examined, and each section is accompanied by case studies from around the world. The book is split into five sections and twelve parts which include: -The Lesson of Large Scale Reform for Leadership Development -Assessment of Wide Scale Educational Reform Initiatives -Developing Social Capital through National Education Reform -System Improvement through Professional Learning Communities Large Scale School Reform and Social Capital Building will be of interest to policy makers and system reform leaders, along with researchers and postgraduate students with a focus on continuous professional development, educational reform and school leadership.

Pre-service teacher education is a crucial component of the lifelong process of the professional development of teachers as it equips prospective teachers with the necessary and sufficient competencies to design meaningful and authentic learning environments that engage students in the learning process. If done well, it enhances the quality and improves upon the retention of teachers in the profession. This book is important because it attempts to deconstruct the nature and describe the practice of current pre-service courses and programs in the Asia-Pacific region, examine new paradigms of pre-service teacher education and their implications for practice, and explore emerging innovative practices. Moreover, this book’s particular focus on engaging new partners and on harnessing required resources and capacities in the process; together with the particular role that new technologies may play in the new partnerships is especially valuable. Drawing upon leading scholars of teacher education from the Asia-Pacific region, the 12 chapters in this book are divided into three main sections to revitalize and inform the scholarship and debate on teacher education: —Examining Pre-Service Teacher Education —Engaging Partners in Pre-Service Teacher Education —Emerging Practices in Pre-Service Teacher Education

This book investigates the relationships between education and national development in an area of the world where both have acquired considerable importance. It questions assumptions which view education primarily as a direct investment in human capital and approaches which measure the efficacy of educational provision solely in terms of quantifiable differences between inputs and outputs. Unlike most of the more general works in this field, it does not set out either to confirm or to refute a particular theory. Instead, the main perspectives which have been adopted to explain the role of education in development are explored. The role of education in the development of eight societies in East Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Macau, and the People's Republic of China, is examined. These societies are compared in order to highlight the diverse and complex role played by education in their development.

Research into teacher education is dominated by Anglophone literature, with the inevitable result that teacher education in non-English speaking regions of the world largely remains unexamined. This book fills the gap in the existing literature and comprises twelve invited contributions from an international panel of educationists. To provide the reader with a clear structure, the book offers a detailed introduction and afterword which brings together the various themes examined in each chapter. The contributions offer perspectives on teacher education in the Asian region, perspectives which, until now, have been missing from contemporary debate on teacher education. Presenting research from Australia, Japan, the USA, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea and Vietnam, this book examines the varied situations teacher educators experience in their own countries; in so doing the researchers identify resonances and dissonances in comparison with the dominant Anglophone research literature on the same subjects. This book is an important contribution to the comparative study of teacher education in the first decade of the twenty-first century, giving a voice to an important sector of the international community of teacher educators. This book was published as a special issue of Journal of Education for Teaching: International research and pedagogy.

This book addresses the complex issues that arise in school-university collaborative action research projects. Employing sociocultural perspectives on examining professional practices of in-service teachers, it examines the complexities of negotiating beliefs, identities and interpersonal relations when educators from two different institutional cultures collaborate. Specifically, the book explores issues such as the discourses that are operative in school-university collaboration for English language teacher education; the way in which beliefs, interpersonal relations and identities are negotiated in school-university partnership; what tensions and complexities operate in collaborative action research discourse in an educational context; and how school-university collaboration can be achieved. The book adopts a critical perspective and provides arguments from a non-Western sociocultural perspective.