Facing the immense pressure to catch up with the international trend, our city, Hong Kong’s education authority has pronounced creativity, play and ICT as the key aims in the kindergarten curriculum (Curriculum Development Council, 2017). However, it is not easy to promote changes in schools which usually ends with ostensible technology integration (Law et al., 2011). Identifying the quality of lessons and barriers to teachers’ profession on this topic is the initial step to developing strategies for improvement. This paper aims to explore the potential for combining these three aspects and ground uses for teaching Creativity with ICT-Play, as well as reforming a better Early Childhood Education (ECE) curriculum of the concept. This article defines creativity and ICT-Play in ECE and studies an integration model applicable to local kindergarten curricula with feasible pedagogies, followed by an evaluation of the current practices and problems in this issue based on interview data with the support from the i-CREATE model and Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice. The study shows how are the quality of teaching creativity with ICT-Play and the impacts of different capitals mentioned in Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice on teachers affect their implementation of ICT-Play pedagogies in local kindergartens. Copyright © 2023 EARLI.

This paper reports the preliminary findings of an ongoing project to understand and compare the teaching practices and their contexts of teachers regarded by principals of some outstanding schools and the accomplished teachers who were awarded The Chief Executive's Award for Teaching Excellence (CEATE) by the Education Bureau in Hong Kong (Education Bureau, 2023) for their exemplary teaching practices. Most education systems, including Hong Kong and the USA, rely on principals to identify effective teachers, evidence of principals' subjective performance evaluations of teachers was reliable for identifying teachers who generated the most significant and most negligible achievement gains in students than those in the midrange (Jacob & Lefgren, 2008). Fifty-eight teachers from thirteen primary, secondary and special school sectors were recruited for lesson observations and interviews. The overall teaching quality between the two groups of teachers in systematic classroom observations was similar, suggesting that CEATE teachers did not necessarily perform significantly better in teaching. Interviews revealed that CEATE awards reflected incidental collaborations of teachers that were hard to replicate by other individual teachers or subject departments. Teacher learning networks also played a significant role where a mentor could support junior teachers. Distributed leadership promote collective capacities through organizational culture rather than enacting school policies and initiatives. These results contributed to establishing a new theoretical model that extends Gu and Day's (2007) teacher resilience theory to explain the professional growth of teachers and leaders as a function of context and organizational capacity in addition to resilience for achieving teaching quality sustainability. Copyright © 2023 World Education Research Association.

Theoretically, abundant conversation experiences are necessary for young children to develop their preliteracy skills – the foundation for reading comprehension. But very few studies have provided empirical evidence on it. This study investigated whether K1 children experiencing a higher quality of teacher-child conversations would perform significantly better in preliteracy skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness and oral language) and word reading and whether the quality of teacher-child conversations could moderate the contribution of preliteracy skills to word reading. Results supported the theoretical importance of good teacher-child dialogues in developing young children’s preliteracy skills and suggested that the effectiveness of preliteracy skills training might depend on the verbal environment children experience at preschools. Copyright © 2023 AERA.

Along with the global trend of developing students’ 21st-century skills, teacher education must enable preservice teachers (PSTs) to improve students’ learning outcomes with Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and school practicum plays an essential role in the process. This study investigated Hong Kong PSTs’ ICT competency with or without teaching practicum completed and explored factors contributing to ICT competency in and beyond the practicum. This mixed-methods study began with a questionnaire to give a broad picture of the ICT competence of Hong Kong PSTs of English (N = 127), who were found to perceive themselves as competent with educational technology and their competencies of understanding ICT related policy and using ICT for professional development was enhanced after school practicum. A purposeful subset of the sample (N = 10) was interviewed based on their ICT competency scores, exploring the factors shaping interviewees’ readiness and ICT use in their teaching practicum. It highlights that digital native students do not naturally transform into teachers with ICT competency to facilitate 21st-century learning, and the practicum could play a more critical role in enhancing their ICT competence to future-proof their skills. Promoting ICT-friendly school culture and designing better teaching practicum programmes are suggested. Copyright © 2022 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Objectives: This study had two aims. The first was to delineate the boundary between effective and inspiring teaching practices with cluster analysis again with a widely-researched instrument, International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching (ICALT) (van de Grift, 2007; 2014) after initial success with Comparative Analysis of Effective and Inspiring Teaching (CETIT), a newly-developed classroom observation instrument that combined features of both effective and inspiring teaching (First Author et al., 2019) (Figure 1). Then, models hypothesizing some theoretical relationships of inspiring teaching behaviors were tested with structural equation modelling (SEM).Theoretical framework: Behavioral characteristics of inspiring teaching were initially characterized with a small sample by Sammons and colleagues (2014; 2016), but were found somewhat overlapped with those characteristics often associated with effective teaching.Methods: The hierarchical cluster analysis were conducted with SPSS 25 with five CETIT factors and seven ICALT factors. For SEM performed in LISREL 8.8, only the CETIT factors were used to explore the second aim. An inter-rater reliability over 0.7 (Gwet, 2014) was established using two different training videos before viewing the lesson samples.Data sources: The lesson sample was based on 260 videotaped lessons from both primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, selected from a pool of 500+ lessons in an earlier study by First Author and colleagues (2015). Table 1 summarizes the descriptive and correlation results.Results and conclusions: The hierarchical cluster analysis results showed two clusters identified (Figure 2). Average linkage to estimate the distance among factors was employed to overcome the shortcoming of single and complete linkage (Yim & Ramdeen, 2015). Together with the Agglomeration Coefficients, the results suggested location should stay at stage 10 with an elbow effect (Figure 3), where the factors

Effective teaching is a key factor in educational effectiveness and improvement. To facilitate the knowledge exchange regarding effective teaching in secondary education internationally, there has been a growing interest in using classroom observation measures. However, little is known regarding the comparability of observation measures across various national contexts (measurement invariance). Consequently, comparing effective teaching behaviour across contexts is compromised by issues of construct and measurement equivalence. In the present study, we investigated measurement invariance of the International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching (ICALT) for measuring teaching behaviour across various national contexts including the Netherlands, South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia, Hong Kong-China, and Pakistan. Results showed that ICALT indicates full strict invariance in four out of the six countries, which provides a possibility to compare teaching behaviour in the Netherlands, South Korea, South Africa, and Indonesia. South Korea indicated the highest quality of teaching behaviour, while Indonesia indicated the lowest. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.