Section archive - Teacher Education Programs

This paper provides a general picture of what changes have taken place in Chinese teacher education at a time of rapid transition from central control to distributed management and decision making, along with the country's shift from a planned economy to a socialist market one. Two major topics of this work focus on how institutions of higher and teacher education respond to the challenges of the changing environment, and on the major trends, priorities and direction of recent education reform.

This article explores the current state and a challenge faced by teachers and teacher education in Vietnam. It also analyzes international aid projects providing support to teacher education there. The main task for improving the quality of education in Vietnam is the effective implementation of the new curriculum adopted in 2002. Teacher education is the key to completing this task. It is important for teachers to learn new methods of instruction, and teacher education needs to be strengthened to allow them to acquire these new methods.

There have been 101 government inquiries of one sort or another into Australian teacher education since 1979. Most have presumed or documented concerns about the performance of teacher education. However, there has been little impact from the reports of these many inquiries. This article argues that in the absence of compelling evidence of differential effects of well- or poorly-organized programs, or well- or poorly-funded programs, there is no likely end to the stream of reports and no reasonable hope of restoration of adequate funding.

In 1997, Singapore's Ministry of Education (MOE) committed itself to an ambitious program of pedagogical reform in Singaporean schools in anticipation of the kind of institutional challenges that young Singaporeans were likely to face in the coming decades. Since then, the Ministry has designed and implemented a series of initiatives that will go a considerable distance to achieve its objectives. These initiatives focus on substantial changes in the system of 'instructional governance' in Singapore over the past decade, and efforts to change the pattern of classroom pedagogy. But the authors argue that these initiatives do not go quite far enough to close the gap between policy and practice.