Research On Strategy Of Promoting Teachers' Professional Development By Distance Education

Being the significant determinant for success and failure of education reform, teachers' professional quality and level affect the quality of education deeply. The question of how to promote teachers' professional development and improve teachers' quality has drawn the concern of various circles. In the light of traditional lack of teachers' in-service continuing education and quick development of modern scientific and technological means, the author proposed vision based on distance education to promote teachers' development by means of computer, internet and multimedia providing education resources for teachers' professional development to be a backing for lifetime continuing development of teachers' professional knowledge and technology. The research proved that distance education was a feasible path for teachers' professional development which was suit for in-service teachers' self-research and self-improvement. The research and development of teachers' distance education system had significant practical meaning to promote teachers' professional development.The first chapter of the thesis discussed the function and position of modern distance education in teachers' professional development, contrasted to traditional face-to-face training, the author conceived that distance education was another important way to promote teachers' professional development, not only was a convenient access to high quality and abundant professional development resources and distance guidance from excellent and doyen teachers, but helped to establish lifetime professional development system suit for teachers' different lifetime stages for professional development which held the important position in teachers' lifetime development. The second chapter exhibited current specific condition of teachers' professional development by means of distance education in China and through investigation revealed the phenomenon that teachers' participating rate in distanceeducation was not high and more teachers' participation was merely task-oriented and the deep participating percentage was just one tenth among the total numbers. Considering the low participating rate of teachers' distance professional learning, Chapter Three explored the existing reasons and found that types of educational resources provided by teachers' distance education didn't meet teachers' requirement, online course design didn't correspond to students' psychology and teachers' were lack of driving forces in professional development. In Chapter Four the author came up with specific strategy to solve the above problems. First, provide teachers with corresponding resource backing and guidance according to different characteristics in teachers' different professional developmental stages and establish distance education resource system of teachers' lifetime continuing professional development in the stages of a teacher trainee, a new teacher, a professional teacher, an expert teacher to a retired teacher; second, design much practical knowledge content of professional development in the light of teachers' knowledge structure; third, elaborately design the online courses to appeal teachers to participate in distance learning; fourth, urge teachers' professional learning and developing in a way of combining stimulation and evaluation; finally, provide various kinds of distance backing platforms and use various forms such as distance teaching and research, distance class evaluation, distance preparation for lessons, distance workshops, teachers' blog ,and so on to promote teachers' professional development.