ABSTRACT

China has tried to nurture world-class teachers for over a century, and the recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results of Shanghai students confirmed the outcomes of such national endeavours. Although there has been a plethora of studies on Chinese teachers and teacher education reform, the impact of national policies on teacher education institutions (TEIs) still remains a mystery. Yangtze Normal University (YNU) is a provincial key normal university with a long history, providing comparatively complete programs in science and liberal arts for training teachers. The rational framework has been selected as it matches well the purpose of this study and the reality of the sociopolitical context of China. When the rational framework is applied, China's quest for world-class teachers through the reform of teacher education can be viewed as rational collective behaviour, in terms of policy initiation and formation as well as the implementation process and evaluation.