美国基于合作伙伴的幼儿教师教育改革述评

美国大学与基础学校建构合作伙伴关系的历史悠久。当下,大学与幼儿园建立合作伙伴关系成为美国幼儿教师教育改革的重要策略,其实质是促进幼儿职前教师培养和在职教师的专业发展。美国基于合作伙伴的幼儿教师教育有效模式包括：威斯康辛大学的合作幼儿教师准备计划、莱特州立大学的创新性幼儿课程、哈特福德大学的专业研究共同体、宾西法尼亚大学的教师教育研究团队。近年来,为了提升幼儿教师教育质量,美国不断改进大学与幼儿园的伙伴关系,确保合作伙伴的有效性。     

Learning Classroom Management Through Web-Based Case Instruction: Implications for Early Childhood Teacher Education

In this article, we report a research project on web-based case instruction that was developed and implemented to allow prospective early childhood teachers to be exposed to various dilemmas faced by practicing teachers. The goal of this project was to design an instructional tool and method that could help prospective teachers expand their notion of classroom management beyond a set of techniques. We collected 23 prospective teachers’ pre and postessays before and after the 3-week implementation of the web-based case instruction, along with surveys and a focus group interview data. The initial data analysis results indicated that this instructional method was effective for (a) promoting prospective teachers’ awareness of multiple perspectives, (b) encouraging them to explore diverse ways of problem solving, and (c) articulating their justification based on a sense of moral responsibility and affective engagement. We conclude with implications for future research and early childhood teacher education.

Life in the Village: Teacher Community and Autonomy in an Early Childhood Education Center

This article presents findings from a qualitative case study of a public early childhood education center whose motto, the familiar African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child,” reflects the emphasis given to teacher community in the official school discourse. The meanings teachers gave to professional community were investigated. Interviews and observations were conducted at the school over a period of 12 months. Data analysis revealed an inherent tension between community ethos and personal autonomy. These findings suggest that professional teaching community is complex and contradictory, and that explicitly addressing the tension between community and autonomy would enhance teacher education and professional development.     

Early Childhood Teacher Education in Australia

The complexity of preparing personnel for early childhood services seems common to many countries of the world. Issues and problems include length of courses, pre‐requisites for entry to courses, core curriculum content, age range covered in courses, education and care elements and practicum requirements. This paper discusses early childhood teacher education provision in Australia and acknowledges that teacher educators in countries of the world have much to share and the discussion of solutions can only better the preparation of early childhood courses. A common theme is the need to raise the status and strengthen the early childhood profession by the provision of quality courses.     

Early Childhood Teacher Education: A Global Perspective

A couple of years ago I attended a presentation at a professional meeting that made a major impact upon my life. The session, “Ways of Achieving Excellence in a Global Community,” included presentations by early childhood educators from Australia, Hungary and Finland. At the conclusion of this sharing of ideas regarding what other countries are doing to improve the lives of children, I overheard an American colleague whisper to her neighbor in amazement, “My God! We're a Third World country when it comes to child care.” Without contrasts brought out by this session, however, this educator might have never been open to the world of ideas for improving children's lives.     

教师专业发展：在线学习共同体的作用

本描述了信息通信技术在教师专业发展中可以起到的作用。信息通信技术为在场的教师专业发展超越时间和空间的限制提供了两个支点：一是提供资源的任意连接；二是扩展了教师学习共同体的广度和范图。最后，本描述了信息通信技术作为教师专业发展的途径可能存在的问题，提出了可能的解决方案。     

Preservice Teacher Learning within a Kindergarten Internship: Insights for Early Childhood Teacher Educators

This study is an examination of early childhood preservice teachers' kindergarten internship experiences to identify the supportive and challenging conditions for their learning and explore in what ways those conditions are productive or unproductive for them, based on ecological perspective as a theoretical framework. Qualitative data were collected from weekly seminar notes and field notes by the researchers, a focus group with the preservice teachers, and course evaluation feedback. Through a constant comparative analysis approach, the findings indicate that both supportive and challenging learning conditions were created by collaborating teachers, preservice teachers, and the university supervisors. The findings illuminate the complex responsibilities of early childhood teacher educators to develop horizontal expertise for both themselves and preservice teachers so they can negotiate the best practices from research and the reality of school contexts.     

Australian Early Childhood Teacher Education: Developments and Concerns

The history of early childhood teacher education in Australia dates back to 1897 with the establishment of the Kindergarten Union Teachers' Training College in Sydney. Since the 1970's, small, specialized, private teachers' colleges in each state have emerged to become part of the national government system of Colleges of Advanced Education (CAE's). These institutions had as a primary goal to teach rather than to conduct research about teaching. CAE's have historically been primarily responsible for vocationally-oriented professional courses of study such as nursing, teaching, social welfare, media and communications, fine arts and health studies. It was in this CAE's system where students were prepared to be early childhood, elementary, and secondary teachers. These programs lead to a three-year Diploma of Teaching or a four-year Bachelor of Education. This approach was based on the Australian pattern of specialized teacher training which was generally provided immediately upon graduation from high school. Universities provided training in early childhood-related areas such as psychology, psychiatry, social work and medicine but did not include specialized early childhood teacher preparation per se (although they do provide secondary teacher preparation).     

Student-Produced Action Research in Early Childhood Teacher Education

This article describes how preservice teachers accomplish and write up action research projects as part of their teacher preparation at one university in the United States. The paper is divided into four major sections. In the first section, the instructor describes how teacher research is introduced to teacher education students and how they are guided through the processes of conceptualizing, doing, and writing up their projects. The next two sections are the stories of two 1st-year teachers who describe and reflect on what they learned from completing action research projects under the direction of the instructor. The concluding section offers generalizations that synthesize lessons learned by the authors.     

Innovations in Early Childhood Teacher Education: Reflections on Practice

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the instruction in a teacher education science content course that applied the theories that underlie cognitive constructivism. The methods used aimed to develop positive dispositions toward teaching practices that encourage exploration, collaboration, and individual student responsibility. Nurturing a love of science and an excitement towards learning through discovery were also goals. The theories spanned intersubjectivity and scaffolding from Vygotsky, individual responsibility for learning, and assimilation and accommodation of ideas to allow for individual construction of knowledge from Piaget. Project work, suggested by Katz and Chard, was also included, as were application of the experiential social construction of knowledge theories of Dewey and multiple intelligences from Gardner. Modeling the application of the theories behind cognitive constructivism fostered students’understanding of their appropriate use in elementary classrooms.     

幼儿英语教育师资培养浅谈

随着中国对外交流的拓展与加深,英语教育受到的重视程度与日俱增。在这种背景下,幼儿英语教育在全国大中城市普遍开展,但是整体现状却不尽如人意,教学水平参差不齐。因此,加强幼儿英语教育师资培养对于改变这一现象具有重要意义。本文针对幼儿英语教育师资培养提出了一些浅见和建议,以期对幼儿英语教育师资培养提供新的视角和助益。     

Electronic Portfolios in Teacher Education: A Case Study of Early Childhood Teacher Candidates

The use of electronic portfolios is increasingly becoming popular in teacher education programs. The electronic portfolio allows learners to express their work and take ownership over their own ability to plan and assess and reflect upon their learning during a specific period of time. While many teacher education programs have adopted electronic portfolios in order to meet accreditation requirements, others use electronic portfolios to develop and improve on students’ technology skills—train students on how to better use technology in instruction and student assessment. Irrespective of the reasons for adoption, there is the need to assess students’ perceptions of electronic portfolios, and especially to explore the benefits and challenges students face in using electronic portfolios in their course work. Using a qualitative research design, the current study explored teacher candidates’ attitudes toward electronic portfolios and the differences that electronic portfolios bring to their profession. Such a study is necessary to help administrators identify students’ needs to ensure that they are gaining the maximum benefits from the use of electronic portfolios in their programs of study.     

Inquiry-Based Early Childhood Teacher Preparation: The Personal Learning Plan Method

The purpose of this paper is to describe a Personal Learning Plan method used in undergraduate early childhood education courses as a specific case of learner-centered, inquiry-based instruction. A rationale for this approach to instruction, the instructional context in which the specific method was developed and used, the method framework (i.e., preliminary and final plans, activities, products, and reflections), and the evaluation process will be discussed. Finally, a discussion of the perceived benefits and challenges of the method as it has been implemented will be presented.     

Making Research Relevant in Preservice Early Childhood Teacher Education

Increasingly, researchers, teacher educators and governmental agencies underline the need for early childhood professionals to be able to conduct and use relevant research in their practice. In contrast, early childhood teachers tend to draw exclusively on practical advice rather than research evidence to evaluate and develop their teaching. To address these contradictions in expectations, recently developed preservice early childhood teacher education programs have included a core research subject that aims to foster an appreciation of the value of research and its contributions to professional practice. This study examines the effectiveness of teaching and learning approaches designed to make research relevant to undergraduates at an Australian regional university by tracking students' changing views about research during a one-semester teaching period. The findings of this study show that relevant learning experiences, such as designing and conducting a simple research project, modeling research, collaborative inquiry, focused reading, and organizing a research conference, significantly changed student perceptions of the relevance of research to their teaching and their future role as early childhood professionals.