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.

Many critics tended to oppose the education reforms in the last two decades in Hong Kong for its neoliberalist and managerialist origins and aim to achieve performativity, accountability and global competitiveness (e.g., Chee, 2012; Choi, 2005; Ho & Tsang, 2008). However, Ko, Cheng and Lee (2016) argued that these reforms also contributed to school autonomy, teacher professionalism, transparent school governance, flexibility in curriculum and resources management and the development of a self-evaluation culture. This paper examines the paradoxical interactions of professionalism and neoliberalism on professionalising school leadership and governance from findings in the interviews with school leaders from the middle to school-sponsoring body level. Unlike the academic critics, different actors (senior teachers, principals, school managers) were less concerned about the anti-neoliberalist issues but stronger expectations on developing their professionalism in changing times like innovative pedagogy, learner diversity, organisational learning, and crisis management. Copyright © 2019 The Education University of Hong Kong.

Valid feedback is essential for the administrators, educators, parents and, of course, for children to be able to steer their development in a sustainable way. Key influential theorists such as Montessori, Piaget, Vygotsky, and others all used observations extensively to understand how children learn and use knowledge about children's learning to improve pedagogies and children's lives. However, most adults including teachers in the ECEC settings have not always observed children and tracked their growth.The grantees of Hong Kong Research Grants Council, Dr James Ko, Professor Doris Cheng, and Dr Jyrki Reunamo, have collaborated to find relationships between young children's involvement, adaptation and agency in early childhood settings through systematic observations. More than 100,000 observations were documented in research and professional development programs conducted in Finland, Taiwan and Hong Kong. By using simple cross-tabulation, researchers and teachers can obtain information about the context-specific aspects of learning, emotions and social relations. For example, children’s strategies to confront bullying were connected to their observed activities (Reunamo, Ko, Cheng, Lee, Wang, & Salminen, 2016). Agency and openness orientations observed in children were found affecting their differential development trajectories including their school readiness (Ko, 2015) and some children may show a higher risk in certain aspects of growth (Ko, 2015; Reunamo et al., 2016). It is well-known that "play" related activities in Hong Kong are very different from Finnish one (Cheng & Stimpson, 2004, Cheng, 2012), though western teaching approaches are translated in the Hong Kong early childhood curriculum (Cheng, 2006). By systematic observations, Cheng and Chen (2017) also showed that children in play-based activities showed the strongest class involvement. Recently, three researchers have developed self-accessible training materials with video clips and demonstrated how