Research On Competency-based Teacher Education Movement In America

American Competency-based Teacher Education (CBTE) movement is a teacher education reform having the most profound influence in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, U.S. Office of Education (U.S.O.E.) issued a Request for Proposals for The Elementary Teacher Education Models Program, which initiated the Movement. In 1971, with funding from the U.S.O.E., a conference on competency-based education was conducted at the University of Houston in its newly-opened College of Education building, marking that the movement entered a stage of all-round development. CBTE movement began to decline in 1977 when the government was getting out of the movement as the funding for the Education Professions Development Act came to an end. After the 1980s, the movement slipped out of our view.Although CBTE movement lasted only nearly twenty years and was finally replaced by Performances Standard-based Teacher Education (PSBTE), it has exerted an active impact on the American teacher education, promoting its reform and development on educational goal, curriculum design, assessment and certification. The List of Competency and Performance Objectives, though came under bitter criticism during the later period, for the first time in the history clearly defined and classified the competences and tried to transfer the competence into observable performance. Moreover, CBTE movement eased the long-term dispute between "academic orientation" and "professional orientation" in the field of teacher education and led to the fundamental change on the function of the teacher education institutions from raising the educational levels of teachers to developing teachers' competences and highlighting the observable effect of teacher education. Its assessment system emphasizing "output" and "product" totally changed the traditional certification which stressed "input" and "curriculum" although the assessment system wasn't fully applied in the practice. Finally, its " module" and "individual instruction" underwent continuous correction with the development of psychological theory, but they first aroused the public attention to the individual learning of the students and student-oriented learning, providing a new vision for examining the relationships of teachers and students in the teaching process, from which teacher educators will learn a lot.It has always been a key topic for the teacher education in the normal universities to optimize teacher education model and improve the quality of the teacher candidates. Currently, China actively pursues reflective teacher education and rejects behaviorism and CBTE, but actually, the essential ideas of CBTE were inherited in PSBTE and reflective teacher education after the ending of CBTE movement.Consequently, deep exploration on CBTE, based on the research on the rise, development, summit and declination of CBTE movement, still makes big difference, helping Chinese teacher education to summarize the experience and lessons of CBTE movement for the further reference to its development.