Korean Educational Development Institute(KEDI)

Improving Teacher Education Curriculum

Diverse approaches are adopted in many places to improve educational competitiveness in preparation for the future society. In particular, teachers draw our special attention as the one of the most influential variables for attaining the quality of education. Thus we become more deeply interested than ever in how to raise our teachers' competencies and how to educate pre-service teachers to become excellent in-service teachers. With this research interest in mind, this research report mainly analyzes a survey on in-service teachers' opinions about, first, what the expertise, knowledge and competencies of successful teachers capable of adapting to social changes or fulfilling national policies are, and second, which elements teacher education curriculum should further emphasize in order to foster such expertise, knowledge and competencies.

The scope of teacher education curriculum reform that this research proposes is in fact beyond the scope that particular teacher education majors such as English education or mathematics education can take. Thus the proposal of this article must be adopted as a call for reforming overall teacher-related systems such as teacher qualification process and pre-service teacher recruitment rather than only for altering the contents of curriculum at each school of education, as the whole system must cooperate to attain the ultimate goal to equip our teachers with proper experiences and knowledge. Additionally, as teacher education curriculum are managed at the level of each school of education at each university, the type of overall suggestions that this research report presents would better fit for practical contexts than specific prescriptions for every program.