How to Promote the Professional Development of Rural Teachers in the Digital Intelligence Era?

At present, the digital transformation of education is profoundly reshaping the ecology of rural education and the path of rural teachers’ professional development. However, the professional development of rural teachers also presents the external promotion characteristics such as being “coercive”, “closed”, and “siphoning” driven by external resources, which is difficult to effectively stimulate their intrinsic growth motivation. Within the context of digital transformation, rural teachers’ professional development needs to be infused with subjectivity, meaning, and value to achieve endogenous development from being the “other” shaped by social needs to becoming “proactive agents” of self-aware growth. Based on a systematic analysis of the external promotion characteristics and internal needs of rural teachers’ professional development in the digital intelligence era, this paper constructed a three-dimensional framework encompassing “subject empowerment-meaning enhancement-value reinforcement” for rural teachers’ professional development. This framework started with strengthening teachers’ subject consciousness, utilized strengthening meaning generation as the driving force, and guided with strengthening value recognition, aiming to promote the professional development of rural teachers and ultimately achieve life completeness. Relying on this framework, the paper proposed support strategies for rural teachers’ professional development in the digital intelligence era from the perspectives of participation models, content system, support mechanisms, and platform construction, in order to systematically respond to the development demands of rural teachers in the educational digitalization process, provide practical guidance for building a professional development path rooted in the local context and stimulating internal growth, and had significant value in promoting the team construction of high-quality teachers and the digital transformation of rural education.