The pursuit of a new knowledge base for teacher education and development in the new century

In an era of rapidly changing educational environments in the Asia-Pacific region and other parts of the world, policy, practice, and research on teacher education and development should be broadened to cover a wider range of changing teacher roles in a complicated context, if we want to maximize teacher effectiveness. This paper aims to point out that teacher education and development, as a field of inquiry, should include at least three interrelated domains: (1) Teacher effectiveness in the classroom; (2) Teacher effectiveness in the school organization; and (3) Teacher effectiveness in multiple school functions at multi-levels. In these domains, different sets of new models and strategies can be established to conceptualize sophisticated research on the complex nature of teacher effectiveness and build up a new knowledge base to support initiatives and efforts in teacher education and development in the new century. Copyright © 1998 Australian Teacher Education Association.