In recent years, many governments of East Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong have initiated educational reforms to transform schools for sustainable outcomes. Promoting teacher leadership has been identified as part of the educational reform agenda in global quality discourses. This paper aims to offer insights into the practice of teacher leadership in a Chinese early childhood education context. The central tenet of teacher leadership is change agentry. Like its counterparts in the Asia Pacific Region, early childhood education in Hong Kong has historically been characterized by minimum training and a modified form of apprenticeship. Therefore, preschool teaching is likely to be identified as non-professional occupation. Preschool teachers seldom play a key role in supporting, stimulating, or catalyzing change. After the change of sovereignty from British to China in 1997, the local government has increased investment in early childhood education. Over the past 20 years, upgrading teacher professional qualifications has been used as amain strategy to enhance the quality of ECE. This raise an important question: Can preschool teachers move beyond the role of apprentice and become change agents for school development? Adopting a case study approach, the study reported in this paper is to examine the changing role of teachers in school development. The construct of change agency was examined from the perspectives of various school stakeholders (i.e. preschool principals, key stage coordinators, and classroom teachers). The findings indicated that the key stage coordinators who are teachers holding functional posts acted as teacher leaders to play the role of agents in leading changes beyond classroom in various areas including curriculum and pedagogy, teacher professional development, home-school collaboration, and community-school involvement. Meanwhile, the classroom teachers mainly acted as followers in the change process. The practice

The findings are based on a larger study on systematically comparing leadership development and practice in seven differentially performing education systems (Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, England, Indonesia, Russia, and Singapore) (Harris et al.). The contextual background of principalship training in Hong Kong was the Principals’ Continuing Professional Development Framework introduced since 2002 (Education Department, 2002). Under this Framework, all existing and newly appointed principals have been required to undergo continuous professional development or prior certification (Education Bureau, 2010). Based on 20 interviews with principals, key staff and teachers of three secondary schools in three different bandings. One of key themes identified in the data is the roles of the school principal as a change agent. This key finding is compatible with findings that highlighted the prominent role of the principal as a key change agent for the successful implementation of school-based management, both in Hong Kong (e.g. Cheng, 1992; Ma, 1993; Ko & Walker, 2014; Ko, Cheng & Lee, 2016) and in schools worldwide (e.g. Hallinger, 1992; Hopkins & Reynolds, 2001; Marks & Printy, 2003; Wohlstetter et al., 2008).More specifically, the roles of school principals are discussed in relation to the different conceptualisations and charaterisations of principalship in transactional, instructional, transformational, and distributed leadership theories.

The focus of this study is to understand the impact of culture on learning that gives insight into how teacher education can be improved. This paper begins by inquiring into the Confucian Heritage Culture and explaining how it shapes Hong Kong Chinese learners into bicultural individuals who are still sticking to a traditional mode of learning. Two cases, explored through a teacher educator's interpretations of experience, are presented to illustrate how a narrative approach is adopted to change the learning habits of student teachers. This study argues that story telling offers opportunities for both teachers and learners to make meanings from their experiences of cultural tensions to facilitate reflection that gives rise to changes in learning.

Hong Kong is an international city, with people of different races. In recent years, the number of people from South Asia, especially from Nepal, Pakistan, and India, is rising rapidly. Increasingly more of them are choosing to study in public schools, where learning the Chinese language is compulsory. However, the Chinese language is too difficult for them to learn, and their failure in the public examination usually presents an obstacle to further study in universities as well as to their career prospects in Hong Kong. Moreover, many non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) students have experienced racial discrimination in daily life in public transport, public places, and schools in Hong Kong. They find it difficult to make friends with the local people because they do not know Cantonese or use inaccurate pronunciations. Since 2006, the mission to provide formal education to NCS students was buttressed by ‘designated schools’ which were nominated by the Education Bureau (EDB) to admit more NCS students. However, recent complaints regarding the allocation of NCS children in multiethnic schools as a form of cultural segregation and discrimination has resulted in an increasing demand for spaces in mainstream schools where Chinese is the main medium of instruction. Hence, NCS students have to face more difficulties in learning and in managing interactions with local students. In this research, a case study of a multiethnic school was performed to examine the major challenges faced by the non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students when learning Chinese and how the school helped these students overcome their challenges. How the multiethnic school developed a suitable environment for promoting multicultural integration and harmony in the school was also studied. Through investigations of school documents, observation of lessons and activities, and discussion with teachers and students, the school was determined to have applied a suitable range of strategies to provide pleasurable and

This study explored the nature and effects of leadership for learning in the context of Hong Kong primary schools. Employing a mediated model of leadership for learning, the study examined how school leadership practices are perceived and shaped in the high accountability context of Hong Kong school education. Consistent with other recent empirical studies of school leadership effects, the research explored the relationship between school leadership, school-level capacity for improvement and student learning outcomes. Regression analyses found a negative impact of principal leadership practices related to strategic direction and policy environments, but a positive impact of staff management and resource management practices in terms of enhancing support for students. Contrary to expectations, schools’ capacity in supporting students had less impact on student academic outcomes than the negative impact of resources capacity and workload of teachers. Instead, mixed impact was found between principal leadership and student academic outcomes; it was negative regarding practices in strategic direction and policy environment, but positive in leader and teacher growth and development. The study refines our understanding of how the socio-cultural and organisational contexts of schools shape successful school leadership.
[Copyright © 2015 Philip Hallinger and James Ko.]

科主任作為中層領導的角色，既要掌握管理能力，又要在學科專業知能有所增長，才能發揮學科領導的功能。如何培訓科主任，讓他們協助學校有效推動校本課程政策、帶領學科發展及促進教學效能？過往在這方面的討論較少，而香港語文科教師在獲委任當科主任前，大多沒有得到適當的培訓。本文擬通過一個支援科主任專業成長計劃的經驗，讓業界對小學中文科主任，尤其是新任的科主任的專業成長及其所需培訓重點有更清楚的了解。
[Copyright © 2015 香港教師中心.]

Recent research has documented the rapid growth in the number of universities offering degree courses using English as the medium of instruction (EMI) throughout Asia. While some of this research has considered the impact of EMI instruction on student learning, only limited attention has been given to the experiences of other stakeholders, such as academic staff who are expected to deliver EMI courses in tertiary institutions. Therefore, this chapter explores the perspectives and experiences of academic staff at a large EMI tertiary institution in Hong Kong. Using a framework of teacher identity, the chapter considers the role of EMI policy and practice in the ability of academic staff to negotiate multiple identities, including ‘academic economist’, ‘researcher’, and ‘teacher’, by revealing the dominant discourses that constrained and enabled their professional identity construction. The data describes the challenges that academic staff experience in constructing their preferred identities in an EMI environment and how they negotiated such challenges. Implications for policymakers wishing to support the identity construction of academic staff at EMI tertiary institutions throughout Asia and beyond are considered and suggestions for future research discussed.

Higher education institutions around the world have increasingly been concerned with staff professional development (SPD) programmes for academic and teaching (A/T) staff. Since its establishment in 1994, an education university in Hong Kong (which we will refer to as the University) has offered primarily teacher education to foster the development of quality teachers. To meet the demand for students’ holistic and whole-person development for the twenty-first century, the University has sought to broaden the range of programmes offered, introducing the concept of ‘Education-Plus’. Under the ‘Education-Plus’ vision, the University has been expanding non-education programmes rapidly since 2010. Many new A/T staff with limited teaching experience have been recruited, needing professional development (PD) to enhance their skills and knowledge. Since 2013, the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology (LTTC) has designed and developed an SPD programme to allow A/T staff to enrich their PD and ultimately enhance student learning. The evaluation of the current SPD programme activities revealed that the PD activities were beneficial to A/T’s teaching and their PD, but the question has arisen as to whether the current SPD programme is effective, e.g. whether A/T staff have obtained and applied new knowledge and skills to teaching. This paper will discuss the design of the current SPD programme and analyze its activities. The design outlined in ‘Three Stages of Professional Development: The Cycle of Change’ (Bellanca, 2009) will be referred to in order to develop an effective SPD programme. The paper will also design and propose a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the SPD programme and its implementation cycle.

The paper explores how Learning Study, a collaborative action research approach, can be integrated with eLearning activities to enhance personal knowledge management (PKM) competencies of pre-service teachers for effective instructional design and assessment for learning. PKM competencies are conceptualized as knowledge retrieving, organizing, analyzing and collaborative skills for effective learning. The study adopts Cheng’s (2011) PKM model to proposal a curriculum for developing teacher’s PKM skills through a teaching development project conducted in The Hong Kong Institute of Education. A Solomon four group quasi-experimental research design was adopted to collect data from pre and posttest of PKM measurement from the participants of the Learning Study course. All items were measured using a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Another professional study course is set as the control group. Lesson observation and qualitative interviews were conducted to evaluate the development of the pre-service teacher. The effectiveness of the e-learning activities, the use of PKM tools and the collaborative action research approach were evaluated. Results showed that integrating learning activities in the Learning Study course had impacts on the retrieving, organizing, analyzing skills for instructional design and student assessment. A set of learning activities for planning the PKM curriculum could be articulated from the result of this study. For example, access databases and websites for information retrieval; operate electronic tools for information integration to design lesson plans; use spreadsheet and statistical software for data and information analysis to assess student learning problems; use collaborative PKM tools to support both synchronous and asynchronous communication for the purpose of collective learning; and construct knowledge that is based on an appropriate understanding of the nature of data, sound inference