ABSTRACT
The quality of a country’s education is dependent on the quality of the teachers. Therefore countries around the world continue to actively reform their teacher education systems to train capable teachers and reinforce national competitiveness. In the United States, the Teaching and Higher Education Act of 1998, the Educational Excellence for All Children Act of 1999 and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 were introduced to emphasize the importance of competent teachers. In addition, the US government formulated and implemented numerous policies to improve teacher education (Peng, 2002). According to the 2002 annual report proposed by the US Department of Education (US DoE, 2002), which addressed the topic “Meeting the highly qualified teachers challenge”, the DOE proposed a streamlined teacher qualification method with high standards for verbal ability and content knowledge as an alternative channel to conventional teacher education programmes to train highly qualified teachers. In 2011, the topic “Building a high-quality teaching profession” was further addressed and discussed at the International Summit on the Teaching Profession, an event collaboratively organized by the US DoE and the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper 2010, published by the UK Department for Education (DfE), also emphasized that “no education system can be better than the quality of its teachers”. This publication essentially focused on enhancing education standards and advocated that teacher quality and teacher education are the key policies for future educational reform (DfE, 2012). In Taiwan, the Ministry of Education (Ministry of Education, 2012a) published the White Paper of Teacher Education in 2012, which contained policies for reform and future development and showed the value that the MOE placed on teacher education reform.
