Gifted students usually require much less time spent in practising and revising basic skills; instead, they benefit greatly from opportunities to work through the curriculum at a faster pace (acceleration). Teachers currently working with mixed-ability classes do not always find it easy to differentiate their teaching approach in this way, so there is a need to facilitate in-service professional development to provide teachers with practical strategies for implementing effective differentiation for gifted learners. In response, a project for primary school teachers was organized by a university in Hong Kong. The purposes of the project were (a) to "enhance the confidence of teachers" in planning and delivering differentiated lessons in specific key learning areas (KLAs) with particular reference to gifted students; (b) to "empower teachers with knowledge and strategies" necessary for designing and implementing a differentiated curriculum in KLA domains and (c) to establish a "professional development practice" that connects local academics with schools and teachers. The project was implemented by inviting curriculum leaders, panel chairpersons and subject teachers from primary schools to attend a 3-hour lecture and a 6-hour workshop in which differentiation practices were explored. The project was later evaluated based on feedback from participants and university consultants. Overall, the feedback was positive, but suggestions are provided here for enhancing future projects of a similar nature.
[Copyright of Gifted Education International is the property of SAGE Publications]

This paper reports a questionnaire study conducted with a group of 87 pre-teenage children (age 11-12 years) in Hong Kong to show their vernacular perception and experience of maps before they began formal mapwork learning in their first year of secondary education. This study reveals major findings that these pre- teenage children see the main purpose of using maps is to find unfamiliar places and to locate them in most everyday situations. As a result, they like to deal with practical, real maps such as street maps and the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) transport maps where the above- mentioned practical map purpose can be achieved. Most of these pre- teenage children are aware of maps available in their surroundings. However, they may not be observant enough to notice or pay attention to reading them carefully. It is rather a matter of map awareness that puts these pre-teenage children into the two broad groups of map and non-map- users. It also revealed that even those pre-teenage children who claimed to be non- map-users demonstrated some intuitive superficial understanding of simple map concepts and elements. Teachers are strongly encouraged to tap into the intuitions and experiences possessed by pre-teenage children in order to develop their map interest further in geography lessons and to make the understanding of maps a practical life skill for them to master.
[Copyright of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382049908667586 ]

Mentoring may be seen as a process that helps student teachers become professional teachers. In this context, a variety of significant roles played by mentors have been identified in the literature. This paper reports on mentors' perceptions of the most important roles selected from a given list, as revealed through questionnaire and interview data. This analysis forms part of a large-scale evaluative project of a school-university partnership scheme initiated by the University of Hong Kong. The findings indicate overwhelming attention given to the role of 'provider of feedback', which stresses the provision of pragmatic advice given to student teachers according to their personal strengths and weaknesses. However, for those mentors whose perception of the most important role had changed over time, the direction of change was towards roles such as 'counselor', 'equal partner' and 'critical friend', which emphasize a more relational aspect of working together with student teachers to achieve professional development.
[Copyright of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13598660500286267]

During 2001-2002 the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong undertook a large-scale evaluation of the school-university partnership scheme. As part of this study, all mentors were asked how, if at all, the mentoring process had enhanced their own professional development. An open-response questionnaire was administered with a selection of follow-up interviews. About 70% of the mentors claimed that they had benefited professionally from mentoring. Here we analyse mentors' responses and from them propose four constructs that we suggest lead to professional development, namely: learning through self-reflection, learning from student teachers, learning through mutual collaboration, and learning from university tutors. Of these, the first appears to be the most significant.
[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/10.1080/02607470500043532]

A school-based environmental field project "What Happens Around You and Your School Area?' was designed under the School-based Curriculum Project Scheme (2001–2002) supported by the Hong Kong Education Manpower Bureau (formerly the Education Department). This school-based environmental field project, with heavy inclusion of environmental elements, was designed in the form of issue-based field inquiry based on student-centred learning to encourage subsequent meaningful learning activities such as group discussion, role-playing exercises and photograph exhibition in class. The field project possesses distinctive geographical and environmental characteristics of the school surrounding environments to bring about meaningful learning among students who study in a local standard new town secondary school in Hong Kong. This paper aims to share this field project experience of designing meaningful issue-based field inquiry using the theory of learning and awareness (Marton & Booth, 1997) to open up the space of learning for students (Marton et al., 2004; Runesson & Marton, 2002). Also based on the framework of educational and environmental ideologies (Fien, 1993), the intended learning outcomes of the field project are to empower students to become active small environmentalists (Kwan, 1995) who are well prepared in terms of geographical and environmental knowledge, skills and values.
[Copyright of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14724040408668453 ]