There has been a growing concern over the quality of teachers. Critics argue that there are many
unqualifying teachers in our schools threatening the children's right to have a high-quality education.
Accompanying these criticism are calls for reform, for making lasting and fundamental changes in
teacher education.
In this paper, we report our efforts to change the preservice education program at Ewha Womans
University in Korea. In particular, we focus on our efforts to develop Ewha Standards for Teacher
Education(ESTE) in this paper.
The Ewha Teacher Education Program aims to educate teachers to become adaptive experts based
on Ewha sprit. ESTE, based on this vision of teachers, is consisted of four Standards. The first is
the Ewha Standards for Teaching Profession which involves 10 core abilities required to become
adaptive expert teachers. The second is the ESTE-Curriculum Standards which involves the
Professional Education, Contents, Methods, and Field Experiences. The third is the ESTE-Teaching
Standards which involves Reflection, Understanding, Enactment, Metacognition, and Collaboration.
The fourth is the ESTE-Evaluation Standards which involve the guidelines and methods for assessing
whether and to what extent the prospective teachers meet the Ewha Standards for Teaching
Profession.
The ESTE is the response of Ewha community to numerous calls for reform in teacher education
and offers a vision of teacher education for the 21st century. Our next step is to develop a teacher
education program based on the ESTE and so put our vision of teacher education into practice.