In 2023, the Ministry of Education issued the "Opinions on the Implementation of the National Excellent Primary and Secondary School Teacher Training Program", aiming to promote high-level colleges and universities to train high-quality teachers at the postgraduate level for primary and secondary schools. The first batch of pilot projects of the "National Excellence Plan" was undertaken by 30 "double first-class" universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, focusing on training science teachers in primary and secondary schools. At present, the training of 30 pilot colleges and universities is in full swing, and how to train teachers who are "seamlessly connected" with the teaching practice of primary and secondary schools has attracted much attention from the society.
The "National Excellence Program" is an active exploration to improve the teacher education system with Chinese characteristics and consolidate the foundation for the cultivation of top-notch innovative talents, which is of great strategic significance for the implementation of the strategy of rejuvenating the country through science and education and accelerating the pace of national scientific and technological innovation. In the specific implementation process, the key to whether the plan can be truly effective is to clarify what kind of people to cultivate.
A strong country must first strengthen education, and a strong education must first strengthen teachers. The postgraduate training of the "National Excellence Program" has become a hot spot in basic education. In view of the uniqueness of its students, the originality of its training model and the talent demand of basic education, we should pay attention to the ideal characteristics of postgraduate training in the "National Excellence Program" to ensure that the policy objectives are better achieved.
An educational complex based on lifelong teaching. The teaching profession requires practitioners to be willing to be ordinary and willing to contribute. Since they want to become glorious teachers in the future, graduate students of the "National Excellence Program" should clarify their professional pursuit of long-term and lifelong teaching as early as possible. Therefore, it is a problem that cannot be ignored to accurately identify the real motivation of students to apply for the "National Excellence Program". The first batch of 30 pilot schools of the "National Excellence Program", including Peking University and Tsinghua University, have significant advantages in many aspects such as industry influence, resource allocation and geographical location. In view of this, it is suggested that when recruiting graduate students of the "National Excellence Program", it is necessary to pay attention to accurately identifying whether the applicants have a deep educational complex and great career potential. In addition to the written test, interviews, individual surveys, peer evaluations, etc., can also be used to check whether the applicants are happy to teach, suitable for teaching, and love to teach, so as to achieve accurate selection. In addition, we can also learn from the standardized employment policy for publicly-funded normal students, and issue relevant documents to clarify the requirements for targeted teaching and limited-term service after graduate students, so as to plug the loopholes.
Education is an art of verbal communication and spiritual influence, and it is very important to be able to develop IQ and EQ simultaneously and establish a harmonious teacher-student relationship with students. Whether there is the patience, carefulness and enthusiasm necessary for teachers, whether they are willing to put aside academic research for a while, or whether they have the professional potential of teachers, are also the priority issues that need to be considered in the selection process, and it is necessary to develop a scientific, reasonable, efficient and operable psychological and behavioral indication measurement system to achieve accurate screening.
The knowledge base for science education. The first batch of pilot schools of the "National Excellence Plan" are mainly concentrated in colleges and universities with strong science and engineering majors, aiming to use the resource advantages of well-known universities to empower science education in primary and secondary schools, improve the training level of top-notch innovative talents, and provide intellectual guarantee for a strong country in science and technology. Famous teachers produce high apprentices, so that excellent teachers can cultivate excellent students, and finally form a virtuous circle. Therefore, the graduate students of the "National Excellence Program" should have solid scientific literacy and strong innovative spirit of science and engineering students, so as to break through the bottleneck of cultivating top-notch innovative talents.
Needless to say, the current training system for science teachers in primary and secondary schools in China has not yet been perfected, and the professional quality of some science teachers is still difficult to meet the strategic requirements of rejuvenating the country through science and education. Science education at the primary school level is worthy of attention, but from an objective point of view, it is difficult to stimulate students' scientific thinking and ignite students' enthusiasm for dedication to science due to the imperfect evaluation mechanism. In middle school, some science teachers succumb to the pressure of taking the high school entrance examination and the college entrance examination, and become simple imparters of scientific knowledge, lacking the guidance to understand the essence of science and comprehending the true meaning of science, which makes it difficult to truly stimulate students' spirit of exploration, innovative thinking and teamwork ability, and fails to lead students to realize the deep transformation from knowing, understanding and loving science to participating in science and dedicating themselves to science.
At present, the importance of science education is becoming more and more prominent. The graduate students trained by the "National Excellence Program" should not only have solid scientific knowledge, pay attention to the cutting-edge trends of science and technology at home and abroad in a timely manner, but also continuously improve their heuristic and first-class teaching ability, make advanced scientific knowledge intuitive and visual, and implant the seeds of science in the hearts of primary and secondary school students.
Practical ability to be competent in classroom teaching. Among the first batch of 30 pilot universities of the "National Excellence Plan", there are only 5 traditional normal colleges. Generally speaking, the curriculum design of teacher training colleges pays more attention to educational skills and teaching methods, and has abundant resources and long-term practical experience. Most of the pilot universities are well-known research universities or science and engineering universities in China, which pay more attention to the cutting-edge knowledge of scientific disciplines and can provide a solid guarantee for students to engage in academic research. The "National Excellence Program" requires graduate students to complete the teacher education module courses including educational practice while completing academic courses, which effectively solves the problem of insufficient practical ability of non-normal graduate education and teaching, so as to realize the simultaneous development of academic literacy and teacher literacy.
In fact, it may be difficult to improve the level of academic research and improve the ability of practical operation at the same time. Academic research requires a lot of time, especially for science and engineering graduate students selected by secondary selection in the "National Excellence Program", which is facing relatively greater pressure. In the case that it is difficult to have both fish and bear's paws, it is necessary to create conditions to ensure that the graduate students of the "National Excellence Program" have enough time to complete the corresponding practical teacher education module courses in the practice base school according to the quantity and quality, so as to truly combine theory and practice. In addition, the "National Excellence Program" has changed the status quo of training outstanding secondary school teachers by high-quality normal colleges in the past. It is foreseeable that in the next 10 or 20 years, the helmsmen of some primary and secondary schools can be completely produced from these outstanding talents. Therefore, it is suggested that the pilot universities should choose the opportunity to offer elective courses to cultivate talents with leadership temperament, such as education management, speech and eloquence, etc., which will surely see positive results in the future.
In short, the graduate students of the "National Excellence Program" should be able to undertake the historical mission of strengthening the country through education, science and technology, and talents, adhere to long-term and lifelong teaching, and have scientific literacy and humanistic spirit in the future leading talents of basic education.
Author: Zhou Jianwen is a senior teacher at Jiangyan Middle School in Jiangsu Province