This paper aims to find out the views of 26 pre-service and 8 in-service English teachers in Hong Kong about the information technology courses in their teacher education programmes. The findings of the study show that while both software applications and technology integration in teaching are highlighted in the course outline, the instructor focused more on the application aspect, with the technology integration being less emphasised. Another important finding is that PowerPoint was still the most commonly used application in teaching and the involved pre-service and in-service teachers usually just simply used different computer applications as alternatives to traditional teaching resources. This may reflect the fact that the Information technology courses are not adequate to prepare teachers to teach with it.
[Copyright © 2011 Universidad Nacional de Colombia. The journal web site is located at http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_serial&pid=1657-0790&lng=en&nrm=iso]

This study explores a beginning early childhood teacher’s reflective practices and looks for evidence of characteristics of a reflective practitioner. The participant took part in a series of reflective thinking activities over five months. The findings of this study revealed the participant’s reflective practice in the following aspects: on students learning, teacher-students interaction and teaching behaviour. Most of her reflections focused on technical and practical levels. The participant had the characteristic of a reflective practitioner. Through this case study the author wishes to facilitate reflective teaching by early childhood educators which in turn is expected to help improve the quality of their teaching, besides promoting reflective practice among early childhood educators.
[Copyright © 2011 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

This paper presents an evaluative study exploring a tripartite field experience model of an initial teacher education programme for enhancing pre-service teachers’ learning. The learning process of the model incorporates campus-based courses, school mentor supports, and activating pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy. A cross-sectional quasi-experimental questionnaire was applied to collect data from 229 pre-service teachers of the biggest teacher education institute in Hong Kong. A structural equation model was applied to explore the relationships between the learning process and their learning outcomes in their teaching practices. The results show that the model could improve pre-service teachers’ skills in instructional design, assessment strategies, and managing class activities.
[Copyright © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.]

Elsewhere, serious research attention has been paid to the needs and concerns of beginning teachers so that rational efforts can be expanded to optimize the benefits of teacher education programs for supporting and reinforcing those teachers’ professional development. Hong Kong researchers, however, have yet to place a premium on collecting and analyzing those teacher needs and concerns. The authors perceived the research need and had conducted a study that involved the administration of a questionnaire to 500 final year student teachers and interviews with 19 student teachers. The principal findings are that the student teachers in Hong Kong were at the stage of task concerns and had begun to realize the importance of academic impact concern, that they stressed more on impact concerns with regard to the role of a primary teacher and on task concerns when they considered the daily assignments of a teacher, and that the female student teachers were more concerned with student discipline and welfare than the male counterparts.
[Copyright © 2002 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Information Technology (IT) has become pervasive in our society and it is playing an increasingly important role in education. There is a growing expectation that teachers will be able to make effective use of IT in all facets of their work in schools. There are at least two major reasons which underpin the need to prepare IT teachers in secondary schools. First, schools are expected to prepare students for future jobs. It is quite clear that most of the jobs of the future will require some knowledge of IT. It is therefore important that students learn about IT while they are in schools. This indicates that there is a great need for more teachers who are competent in IT. In particular, secondary schools are short of teachers who are capable of teaching IT as a subject and to incorporate the current learning theories into practice. Second, given the increasing deployment and application of IT in secondary schools, there will be a serious shortage of teachers who are capable of managing and coordinating the use of IT across the school in the secondary context. Under these circumstances, we are offering the IT major in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Secondary) (PGDE(S)) Programme in our Institute. The IT Major is designed to prepare university graduates in technology discipline to be able to act as competent IT subject teachers for all levels in Hong Kong secondary schools. This article will discuss the rationale, principles and approach in designing the programme.
[Copyright © 2005 The Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.]

This paper reports on a qualitative study that examined the perceptions of eight preservice English language teachers from mainland China about their English language learning experiences within an undergraduate teacher education program in Hong Kong. Based upon a framework of identity construction, and using in-depth interviews conducted at regular intervals during their freshman year, the study explored how the participants’ constructed identities as English language learners as they crossed geographical and educational boundaries to pursue higher education in Hong Kong. The study illustrates that the participants’ experienced challenges in realizing the multiple language learner identities they sought to attain and that this may have resulted in conflicts and antagonism between different identities positions. Implications for providing language learning opportunities to mainland Chinese learners enrolled in higher education institutions in English speaking environments are discussed and suggestions for future research considered.
[Copyright © 2011 The Asian Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.]

This chapter, which outlines the roles of teachers in the twenty-first century, will help readers develop a personal orientation towards teacher development and lead them to understand the professional capacity of teachers in these challenging times. The chapter focuses on professional teachers in East Asia, particularly in countries with a confucian culture, such as Hong Kong. After completing this chapter, readers will be able to: •recognize the role of teachers in the contemporary classroom; •appreciate reflective practice as an important process in the professionalization of teachers; •comprehend various reflective practices that support teacher development; •understand the concept of a teacher as a researcher; •appreciate the techniques involved in conducting action research; •understand teacher development as an important ongoing process in the professionalization of teachers; and •develop a clear orientation towards teacher development.

Teacher leadership ties in the heart of school improvement while principal plays a salient role in fostering teachers’ leadership. This study aims to examine a group of beginning teachers in Hong Kong to address research questions: (1) To what extent are the teachers’ developments of teacher leadership? (2) What are the teachers’ perceptions of principal-teacher interactions? (3) How principal-teacher interactions attribute to the teacher leadership development? Multiple data sources, including interviews, documentary evidence and questionnaires were collected. Results show that principal-teacher interactions that reflected trust, value communication and encourage professional development are key to facilitating teacher leadership. Three types of impact illustrating principal-teacher interactions attribute to teacher leadership development are identified. Implication for school leaders and teacher educators are discussed.

Choral singing is a key musical activity in Hong Kong schools, having grown from modest beginnings into an important aspect of the informal curriculum. It is an extension of the classroom singing experience and serves as a platform for students to nurture their singing skills, enhancing musicianship and facilitating artistic experience through choral performance. It also attracts one of the highest participation rates for young people in non-formal cultural and artistic activities. Choral teachers must manage limited rehearsal time efficiently and effectively to complete numerous musical tasks and objectives in time for performance deadlines. Class music teachers in schools are given the responsibility to build, maintain and mange school choirs but few are properly trained to fulfill the expectations of this role. While teacher education institutions are responsible for the training of music teachers in Hong Kong, there has been no curriculum, which focused on the skills and pedagogy of choral conducting and directing. This paper reports the implementation of a community-based school choral mentoring scheme launched in the Hong Kong institute of education with funding support from Tai Po district advancement association, awarding scholarships to a group of selected student choral teachers in promoting quality choral education in both school and community from 2006-2009. The author served as the founding project coordinator, with the institute’s music faculty and identified school choral teachers to work as supervisors and mentors to provide professional support for the student choral teacher awardees. The aim of this study is to investigate on how to support student choral teacher’s choral learning and teaching practice in a real school setting towards a collaborative and reflective approach. In this scheme the choral learning and teaching process of the selected student choral teachers were observed and reviewed by the institute’s supervisors and school mentors. Student

Similar to many other countries, creativity has been included in the arts education curriculum in schools of Hong Kong since 2003. in order to prepare preservice music teachers to cope with the requirement of the curriculum, a specific course titled “Creativity in Music” has been introduced to a B.Ed program at a major teacher education institution in Hong Kong. The course was designed with an outcome-based learning approach in which the learning outcomes of the students are clearly defined and assessed formatively and summatively. This presentation introduces the specific aims, content and assessment method of the course. A number of 30 final year music majors took part in the course from September to October 2011 and afterwards they participated in a field experience for their teaching practice in schools for eight weeks. They were required to employ collaborative creative music-making activities in their teaching practice. Semi-structured interviews with observation of video recordings were used to collect qualitative data in order to examine these research questions: to what extent the course could nurture the student teachers in teaching musical creativity effectively? And, what and how should the course be improved to further enhance the learning effectiveness in schools? The findings of this study would shed light on how pre-service teachers respond to an existing course in teacher education program and provide evidence on the effectiveness of such course. Implications for other countries’ references are to be made.