A Study On Alternative-Route Teacher Education In America

Alternative-route teacher education emerged in1980s. Based on its differentfeatures from the traditional-route teacher education, alternative-route teachereducation has become an important route of teacher education in current America. Itsfeatures show in: recruiting people with different cultural backgrounds; shortpre-service training periods; flexible and diversified training ways; continuingprofessional training for in-service teachers.Alternative-route teacher education has relieved the problem of teacher shortageeffectively, especially the poor and remote areas and the fields of mathematics,science and special education. Besides, it has also met the new requirements ofAmerican teacher education reform in New Age. The Act No Child Left Behind hasput forward definitely that alternative-route teacher education is an effective way totrain high qualified teachers.Alternative-route teacher education has gained many great achievements in itsdevelopment process, but at same time it has also confronted various criticisms andquestions. For instance, does alternative route of teacher education really have thealternative? Can Alternative teachers match with the traditional teachers? As shownby its last more than20years’ experience, alternative-route teacher education haswithstood every kind of ordeals. So to some extent, it can be seen as an effectiveteacher training route for current and future American teacher education. In recentyears, our country has also concerned on the reform of teacher education greatly.Exploring effective routes of teacher education has become an important study topic.Thus, this thesis aims to firstly understand the development course of alternative-routein America, then exploring its ideology basis, basic framework, feature and futuredevelopment trend, at last getting some thoughts and revelations considering thepresent state and problems of our country’s teacher education route.The main parts of this thesis consist of five chapters:The first chapter traces the origin and development of alternative-route teachereducation. This chapter introduces and describes the overall conditions of alternative-route teacher education from its realistic background of coming into being, ideologybasis and present state of development.The second chapter elaborates the basic framework of alternative-route teacher education. This chapter introduces the specific implementation contents ofalternative-route teacher education from alternative teacher’s recruitment andselection, alternative teacher’s training, professional support and evaluation foralternative teacher. This chapter foreshadows the third chapter——a case study ofalternative-route teacher education.The third chapter analyses the typical case of alternative-route teachereducation——“Teach for America” program. It is the typical program which hasgotten success in alternative teacher education program. Also it has been praised byAmerican federal government and various circles in the society. Thus, this thesisintends to choose it as the case study. This chapter will do a full–scale analysis of“Teach for America” program from the aspects of its origin and development,ideology basis, concrete implementation, acquired achievements and existingproblems, hoping to show the complete picture of alternative-route teacher educationmore vividly and directly.The fourth chapter summarizes the features of alternative-route teacher education.This chapter has summarized its five features: exploiting subjects’ pluralism, recruits’diversity and universality, training contents’ practice, training methods’ flexibility,goal settings’ pointedness.The fifth chapter is the thinking part. This chapter elucidates the thoughts thatalternative-route teacher education has given us, including its future developmenttrends. Combined with the present state of Chinese teacher education, this chapterintends to point out some problems about our country’s teacher education route.Several advices will be listed, based on the successful experience of alternative-routeteacher education in America.