Attempts to incorporate all the views of competence and quality in teaching into definitive check lists of behaviours are doomed to failure, despite the current political pressure to constrain the assessment of teaching. The reflective process in education, expressed through PCP and Self-Organised-Learning is discussed and located within the competence debate in teaching and current models of competence. The value of a conversational and reflective approach in the assessment and understanding of teaching is stressed. Twelve members of staff engaged in teacher training completed a SPACed-FOCUSed repertory grid and their personal constructs of teaching competence at the end of a four year B.Ed course were elicited. A further reiterative process of review reflection and structures of meaning exercises resulted in the production of an initial set of criteria of competence that represented the staff group#s construct dimensions. The initial criteria set was applied to students undertaking their final teaching practice and the results fed back to the staff in the form of a feedback for learning exercise. This application is compared with a review undertaken as part of a conversational methodology. Three further groups followed a broadly similar pattern to that of the staff group - Students; Newly Qualified Teachers and their Mentors. with each undertaking a group repertory grid exercise. The constructs/elements elicited lead to a criteria or competency set for each group. Comparisons are drawn between all groups, and a detailed analysis is made of each group's responses with Circular 14/93 (DFE 1993A). Recommendations for future practice are made which return to the central theme that criteria or competency sets alone cannot adequately describe the complex set of activities that is called teaching. Profiling approaches, different forms of evidence and professional development portfolios are proposed as some alternatives and additions to present practice. The final chapter reviews the author's personal learning prior to and during the research process. Influences are discussed, and critical incidents listed and analysed through a SPACed-FOCUSed repertory grid employing a conversational and reflexive processs that mirrors the study methodology.

Due to the development of the broadband Internet access and advanced learning technology, online synchronous teaching with teachers and students located at many different countries becomes feasible nowadays. Online international teaching not only enhances the varieties of teaching environments but also arouses learners to generate multiple thoughts through interacting with foreign instructors and classmates without living their own countries. However, online international teaching is a more complex educational environment, the cross-cultural differences and the characteristic of computer-mediated communication result that a single instructor would not be possible to handle all the matters in an online synchronous classroom. In the past, international instructors employed teaching assistants to reduce problems of cultural differences. This idea can be applied to online international teaching, a group of instructors can form a teaching team which includes different nations¡¦ instructors, teaching assistants and technicians such that the problems caused by the cross-cultural communication and challenges of information technology can be reduced. Online international team teaching is a brand new teaching environment, there are few researches being done in this kind of teaching environment so far. Therefore, this study wants to explore the components and the important criteria for online international team teaching. The case we adopted for this study was an online international team teaching course called ¡§Business English and Communication¡¨ offered by the MIS department of NSYSU. This research used participant observation and in depth interview to get primary data, and then use the phenomenology to analyze the secondary data which extracted from course discussion boards. The research findings are three main components and 17 criteria in total for online international team teaching. The three main components are ¡§online international teaching¡¨, ¡§online collaboration by teaching team¡¨ and ¡§interacting instruments¡¨. ¡§Online international teaching¡¨ includes 6 criteria offering guidelines for international teaching. ¡§Online collaboration by teaching team¡¨ includes 5 criteria offering suggestions for international collaboration. And ¡§interacting instruments¡¨ includes 3 criteria related to the interacting instruments of online international team teaching course. The last 3 criteria are for the common intersection of the three main components. We also proposed suitable suggestions from three different aspects, teaching aspect, material/ system aspect and learning aspect for researchers to do further study and for instructors to better teach online international team teaching courses.