A Research On Teachers' Professional Standards Of Primary And Secondary Schools In The UK

Along with the popularization of basic education, it is natural to turn the focus from educational equity to educational quality and effectiveness. Accountability for the quality and performance of basic education has become a worldwide tendency. Basic educational quality is closely associated with the success or failure of education which contributes positively or negatively to the quality, strength and destiny of a nation and a country. Although the quality of basic education depends on many factors, but the most important factor directly related to the quality of education and the outcomes of students is the teachers' quality. Limited with high quality education resources and teachers, parents and students are trying to do everything possible to study in good schools. This reflects the significance of enhancing teachers' quality. British teachers'professional standards are a national, unified and multi-level standards group, which consists of qualified professional standards, core professional standards, post-threshold professional standards, excellent professional standards and advanced skilled professional standards for teachers. Research on it will not only help us understand professional standards for teachers, but also provide us international experiences for the development of teachers' professional standards for evaluation.In the part of literature review, this paper defines the three core concepts "teacher professional standards "and "teacher evaluation" and "teacher evaluation indicators". Then it discusses the relationship between teacher professional standards and teacher evaluation standards. Afterward it integrates the teacher evaluation theory and teacher effectiveness theory which are closely related to this research, extracting the elements and dimensions of the evaluation index.In the empirical part, the research methodologies, such as interview, questionnaire, factor analysis, independent samples, T-test and variance analysis have been utilized to analyze teachers'viewpoints and recognitions in Liaoning Province against the British professional standards. Questionnaires were distributed to school principals, administrators and teachers in Liaoning Province (such as Shenyang, Dalian, Anshan, ect.) including the urban and the rural. The number of distributed questionnaire copies was 2104, and the number of the returned valid questionnaires was 1863. SPSS11.5 and Excel 2003 were used to analyze the valid questionnaires. Six new dimensions were deprived from the factor analysis, including a total of 42 loaded indicators (> 0.4). In the process of this research we also found differences between teachers' gender, the urban and the rural areas, the different types of schools and the different teacher background, which leads to the differences on the understanding of the standards. The differences exist between male and female teachers in the way of thinking, the teachers' quality in the urban and the rural areas, the differences between reserves of knowledge and the cognitive concepts, and the different levels of teacher education, all of these will result in different feedback results. For example, primary school teachers focus more on teaching methods than that of the middle and high school teachers. Teachers from the rural pay more attention to quality improvement than that of the urban. The higher the teacher's educational level, the more attention is paid to communication and teamwork.Finally, we found some strong points as well as some shortcomings out of the UK's Professional Standards of Teachers. The two shortcomings are:a. the standards' content is slightly overlapped; b. there is a bit chaotic in the Standards' logical classifications. The strong points are:a. to build up a National Professional Standards for Teachers is imperative. b. much more attention should be paid to teacher professional development, teachers' quality, knowledge and skills, teacher exchanges, cooperation, and reflection. Moreover, we need to increase the consciousness of 'services' for students and parents and focus on the operability of the evaluation criteria.