This paper will report on the mediation effects of the key artifacts upon teacher participation in two school-based leadership development projects in schools in 2005 and 2006 respectively. This structural approach to taking up more curriculum responsibilities by the schools in Hong Kong was recommended by the Government in 2001, and yet there is little empirical evidence about its implementation and effectiveness. The projects will collaborate with two active schools, setting up two curriculum development teams in each to bring about planned innovations in pedagogy. The teams will conduct a cycle of curriculum activities in the first and second semesters, reviewing the current curriculum, planning an innovation, and designing and implementing it in classroom settings. Afterwards, each team will conduct reflection for further improvement. All participating teachers will be interviewed 4 times during participation. All meetings and tryout lessons will be video-taped. The interview data will be analyzed by identifying and classifying key emerging themes which will illuminate our understanding of the participating teachers' experiences in the curriculum process. The meeting data will be analyzed using activity theory to identify the key factors that facilitate or constrain the effectiveness of the teacher participation. The findings will deepen our understanding of the effectiveness of teacher participation in school-based curriculum development.

The In-service Courses of Training for Teachers (ICTT) in Hong Kong played a key hole in meeting the minimum training needs of thousands of unqualified non-graduate teachers during the expansion of mass education from the 1950s to 1970s. Though these remedial courses have all along been perceived by the community as of dubious quality, they have lasted for five decades, as untrained teachers continued to join the teaching force, in the absence of a government policy requiring new teachers to be pre-service trained. It is not until recently that their phasing out has become a possibility. This paper provides a critical review of education policies which have allowed the prolongation of these courses for half a century. It illustrates the long and difficult process by which Hong Kong has been moving towards an “all trained” teaching profession.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been changes in the rationale and practice of Hong Kong’s teacher education. Apart from the expansion of the initial teacher education, there is also an increase in the provision of refresher teacher training programmes. Many of these training programmes are offered by the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Some of them have become credit-bearing since 1998. To ensure these programmes are effective in meeting the needs of schools, evaluation studies are necessary. Based on a longitudinal investigation with interviews and questionnaires, and with a sample of around 120 course participants, this study attempts to evaluate a primary refresher training programme called “The School as an Organization (SAO)”. The research methodology and preliminary findings from the pilot group are discussed.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education]

Non-traditional pathways or alternative routes for initial teacher education have proliferated in the United States and the United Kingdom (Berliner, 2006; Furlong, 2005), and are being advocated in Australia and a number of European countries (Buckingham, 2005; Eurydice, 2004). The impetus for this development has been largely contributed by government efforts to alleviate critical teacher shortages in high need subjects and geographical districts. However, the development has been accompanied by politicized attacks on the traditional requirements of university- or college-based initial teacher education which were perceived as deterring talented prospective teachers from entering the profession. Furthermore, a more fundamental change has been the criticism of the quality of university-based teacher education, and the shift of teacher education to school-based and employment-based routes (Abell Foundation, 2001; US Department of Education, 2002). This paper first provides a comparative analysis of the policy context and the development of alternative routes to teacher education in various countries, and reviews the research literature on the arguments for and against traditional and alternative routes of teacher education. It then traces the development of teacher education policy since the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 1997. It argues that there is substantial evidence to support the claim that government policy has been influenced by the developments of alternative routes of teacher preparation elsewhere, which has partly contributed to its wavering over whether to implement the "all graduate, all trained" policy objective announced by the Chief Executive in 1997. This policy shift has illustrated the long and difficult process of teacher professionalization in Hong Kong and may provide useful insights for other parts of the world.

From the perspective of a teacher education institution, the most important partner to work together is certainly the school itself. In fact, the partnership between tertiary and schools has received considerable attentions from teacher educators and policy makers since the late 80s. In Hong Kong, recent developments in teacher education programmes have also placed increasing emphasis on establishing links with the school sectors. This paper reports a pilot study of the Honorary teaching Adviser (HTA) Scheme, which seeks to involve school teachers to support the professional development of participants on pre-service and in-service initial teacher education programmes for cultural and technology subject teachers. The research aims to compare, between pre-service and in-service initial teacher education, the supporting strategies adopted by the HTA to facilitate student teachers' professional learning and the mode of team teaching and professional dialogues engaged in by the student teachers and the HTA. Views of the stakeholders including school principals/school co-ordinators, Institute supervisors and Honorary Teaching Advisers towards the partnership are solicited. Finally, issues and challenges in the HTA Scheme of pre-service and in-service initial teacher education programmes are identified for future implementation.