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.

Information Technology (IT) has been infiltrating in every aspects of life, revolutionizing different modes of life, and making it inevitable to be incorporated in education. With a vision that it will help to change the future of mankind for good, policies have been set up by governments, institutions including schools to encourage, support, and monitor the applications of it. Viewing the escalating development of mobile technology and the fascination it has in attracting almost everyone to own a computer, a smart phone, and social networking device such as the whatsapp, face book, it is unimaginable to do without this technology in education. The modes of teaching and learning in music education, with its long history of association with different kinds of technology/instruments again have significantly found to be facilitated by the new digital technology. This study explicates how the technology policy in education has been implemented by the new generation pre-service music teachers who have been widely submerged in the sea of the ever changing technology. A total of 40 music lessons delivered by 20 pre-service music teachers, 10 each from hong kong and nanjing are to be observed. An observation form with closed-ended and opened-ended questions related to how the teaching practices of these pre-service teachers have incorporated technologies in their lessons is designed to collect data for analysis. The kinds of technologies used and the effectiveness in facilitating learning are examined. The practices are triangulated with the technology policy of government, regions, and schools in connection to identify issues confronting pre-service music teachers. The aspects which excel in the application of technology by pre-service music teaching practice recognized to include domains in music creating, listening, and performance, as well as assessment would be discussed. The increase in the use of music e-books in primary schools provided by publishers, the incorporation

Education systems around the world need to recruit highly motivated individuals to become teachers and prepare professionally competent teacher education graduates to take up these broadened and deepened roles and responsibilities with a deep and lasting engagement to the profession. This article reports on a mixed-methods study that examines types of teaching motivation in relation to various facets of professional competence and planned engagement in future teaching. One hundred and thirty-two student teachers of a postgraduate diploma in education programme participated in the quantitative survey of whom seven were interviewed. The quantitative data analysis shows the positive association between 'intrinsic-altruistic motivation constellation' and selected facets of professional competence, with 'intrinsic-multifaceted and stimulating job nature' as the most distinctive type of teaching motivation. To complement the quantitative findings, the qualitative data analysis reveals two professional orientations of the 'intrinsic-altruistic motivation constellation', namely (1) student-centred orientation and (2) subject-centred orientation. In addition, three types of professional development aspirations are identified: 'classroom engaged careerists', 'highly engaged persisters' and 'pessimists'. The study provides insights into the design of appropriate ITE practices to support professional learning in the light of student teachers' motivations. It also suggests the importance of matching career opportunities and beginning teachers' professional development aspirations and supporting 'pessimists' in the face of the stringent job market.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2015.1010875]

Legitimate teacher authority is fundamental to effective teaching, but is often a thorny issue that teachers need to grapple with when teaching in cross-cultural teaching contexts. By interviewing 18 pre-service Chinese language teachers on their understanding of legitimate teacher authority throughout teaching practicum at international schools in Hong Kong, this study revealed that the teachers changed their perception about the essentiality and the nature of the pedagogical and interpersonal components of legitimate teacher authority. They developed a more nuanced and balanced understanding about legitimate teacher authority over time. However, their abilities in reaching the balance were constrained by their cultural knowledge and skills in achieving positive interpersonal dynamics when implementing student-centred pedagogies.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2015.1081717]

This article seeks to spark a dialectic discussion on the establishment of a set of professional competencies for quality assurance practitioners who serve in external quality assurance agencies in higher education. Such a need is identified due to the shortage of relevant and sufficient coverage in the quality assurance literature. To substantiate the need, the concepts of professionalism and profession, and how these concepts are linked to the quality assurance in higher education sector, are carefully examined through a desk-top research study. References are drawn from the experiences in several other occupations. The result reveals that the development of the essential competencies for external quality assurance practitioners in higher education is valuable and essential and it will be useful for the practitioners to transform themselves into a profession in the long run.
[Copyright of Quality in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2015.1051795]

This report introduces the experiential learning initiative at a major university in Hong Kong that prepares pre-service teachers with experience of engaging with social and cultural issues in teaching. It calls on teacher educators in different contexts to work together on similar initiatives that help pre-service teachers grow professionally through designing, developing, managing and promoting their experiential learning projects to enhance human development and improve human conditions.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2015.1080424]