Teacher Professional Development: Experiences of Three Selected African Countries and the Lessons Based Chinese Practices

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to review teacher professional development in three African countries: (Tanzania, Ethiopia and Sudan). As teacher professional development has a wide sense in modern trends, evolving teacher lifelong learning, from pre- service up to retirement; so it would be difficult to cover the topic in this wide sense. Therefore the paper is more focused on in- service teacher training.The paper contains three parts: The first part is an overview of teacher professional development in general; its significance, modern trends and challenges. The second part is a review of the experiences of the three selected countries in teacher professional development; focusing on teacher education, forms of teacher professional development and the challenges  facing the three countries in teacher professional development. The third part is a conclusion providing some policy recommendations for improving teacher professional development in the three countries and overcoming some of the challenges, based on the Chinese experiences; as China’s experience in reform of teacher education and teacher professional development is an innovative and quite exceptional.