Growing Up In Curriculum Reform

The growth stage of novice teachers is a critical period for the professional growth of teachers, as the quality of teacher education at this stage will have a major impact on their professional growth. While the curriculum reform is a new challenge to teachers, it also provides a new platform for their professional growth. How novice teachers take this as an opportunity to grow with the new curriculum is our concern.With the sampling method of selecting a primary Chinese teacher Zhang Ya as the object of study, we employ the narrative inquiry of qualitative research methods, which is increasingly used in the social sciences, to study the issues of novice teachers and the professional growth of teachers in the background of the curriculum reform. The purpose of this research is to promote the cooperative teachers and other teachers to reflect on and improve their practice, and to make researchers, teacher trainers or teacher educators, and people of other fields further understand the whole curriculum reform in primary and secondary schools and understand the teachers'lives, so as to provide vivid case-studies to explore how to train research-type teachers.This work is mainly manifested in the following aspects:First, we invited Zhang Ya to tell her personal life and teaching life in her own words, visited and investigated related people such as school leaders, colleagues, students'parents etc, entered her classroom to observe, gathered her teaching texts, audio-visual materials and electronic information. The material obtained by above means were further packed up and induced to build many meaningful stories about Zhang Ya, including "the life story of Zhang Ya", "Zhang Ya's description of her professional growth", "outsider's view", and so on. Through the creation of her growth story on the curriculum innovation, the process of her professional growth can be revealed.Secondly, inducing and summing up her teaching behavior characteristics and her development process of teaching expertise, according to the theory of Katz, Burden, and other scholars about the phases of professional growth of teachers, we divided her professional growth into four stages: 1. adaptation period (0.5 year) : The main feature is "seeking to adapt, survive", strive to" hold the podium". 2. Adjustment (0.5– 1.5 year) : the main characteristic is "working hard, learning a lot and accumulating experience, and thus becoming a competent teacher ASAP". 3. Development period (1.5 - 3 years) : the main characteristic is reflecting practice, enhancing ability, and gradually forming the teaching characteristics. 4. Maturity (after three years): having much profound teaching skills, forming a unique and stable teaching style, and making a figure in various competitions of teaching skills.Third, by comparing the novice teacher professional development-stage theory home and abroad, we found that Zhang Ya's professional growth showed a basic characteristic: although the growth track had confirmed the basic stages theory of novice teachers, in the growth cycle, Zhang Ya's professional growth showed significantly shorter cycle characteristics, and the pace of her development surpassed that of other general teachers ---- No matter what stage(adaptation, Adjustment, Development, or Maturity) Zhang Ya was in, her growth cycle was shorter than that of teacher professional growth theory.Finally, based on the thorough analysis of factors that affected Zhang Ya's professional growth, we convinced that her unique personal qualities and the opportunities provided by curriculum innovation played a crucial role. From internal factors, the pursuit of ideals, brightness and curiousness, strong expressive force, and naturally talented and beautiful personality endued Zhang Ya with professional growth advantages: The ideal pursuit of becoming an outstanding teacher and realizing self-worth is the intense impetus of professional growth; brightness and curiousness, active publicity, and strong expressive force made her have a strong professional independent sense and professional planning ability, and grasp all opportunities for self-development, self-performance, and enhance growth in challenges; Her been born beautiful gives more development opportunities than others. From the external conditions, the curriculum reform provided opportunities for her accelerated growth: New courses are advocating new ideas to break the traditional education approach, which makes all teachers start from the same starting line, and thus long seniority and experienced teachers are confronted with inertia obstacles while novice teachers are more easily and rapidly adapt to the new curriculum requirements; In order to carry out the course reform, research institutions organized a lot of training activities, and Zhang Ya, being a backbone teacher, had much more opportunities for training and expert guidance, which made her constantly adjust her teaching and rapidly build up in line with the new concept of learning courses; As new research and education programs create an unprecedented dense teaching and research atmosphere, Zhang Ya, being a member of the central group and the expertise group of curriculum reform in her county, experienced open classes, study classes, teaching classes match, and training materials, which promote her practical knowledge screwy rise in the ongoing "practice and reflection" and made her grow rapidly and become mature.