The Study Of University-based Teacher Educators’ Expertise

The purpose of this study is to realize teacher educators’ professional knowledgethat in order to fulfill their tasks, and then to explore the differences of professionalknowledge between the university-based teacher educators and the teachers of basiceducation.In the research field of teacher education, people on the research of teachers’knowledge is being carried out, while the teacher of teachers——teacher educatorsmust have professional knowledge but gained little more attention from people. Thequality of the teacher educators have a great impact on the future teachers, during theprocess of teacher education, the profound theoretical attainment and solid practicalresearch of teacher educators make them become an irreplaceable factor in the teacherprofessional development under the background of the transformation of elementaryeducation. From a professional point of view, the task of university-based teachereducators is different from the task of primary and secondary school teachers, theyneed to have different professional knowledge to fulfil the task. Therefore, it isnecessary for us to explore the expertise that university-based teacher educatorsrequired, and compare them with the elementary education teachers’ in order to findout the difference between them, each completes their knowledge structure.This paper consists of six parts:Part One is introduction: including the research background, purpose andsignificance, and define the related concepts.Part Two: including the literature review of teacher educators’ characteristics,tasks, professional knowledge and ability and the professional standards,and thencombed the literature related to the teachers’ professional knowledge.Part Three: Research design and methods, including an introduction to theinterview method that this study uses and the two groups of different research objects,the design of the research tools (interview outline), and finally expounds theimplement process of research.Part Four: the analysis of the results. Clear up the two groups of surveyed answercontents, and order the answers according to the proportion of their respective groupsfrom high to low, find the viewpoints that the university-based teacher educators areconsistent with the basic education novice teachers. Analysis on these three questions:the tasks of university-based teacher educators, professional knowledge of university-based teacher educators and the difference in the required professionalknowledge between university-based teacher educators and basic education teachers.Part Five: Conclusion. The konwlege that the teacher educators need to have arethe following five:(1) the teacher educators should have the metacognitiveknowledge and self-monitoring ability;(2) the teacher educators should have moreextensive knowledge than basic education teachers;(3) the teacher educators musthave related knowledge of the scientific research;(4) the teacher educators shuouldhave the related knowledge of how to professor of children and adults;(5) the teachereducators should have a comprehensive understanding of the whole education system.Later, put forward six suggestions based on the conclusions in improving theknowledge structure of teacher educators.The last part is epilogue. Pointed out the continuation of this study and theexisting limitations in the survey.In this paper, there are both theoretical analysis and empirical investigation, it isconcluded the expertise that university-based teacher educators required through thecomparision with basic education teachers, which will contribute to enrich theresearch area of teacher education, and to promote the professional development ofteacher educators.