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 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

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.]

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

Learning Study has been implemented for teacher professional development in Hong Kong since 2000. Guided by variation theory, Learning Study has three unique features. First, it focuses on student learning of the object of learning in planning, teaching and reviewing lessons. Second, variation is used as a pedagogical tool for lesson design in the hope of enabling students to discern the critical features. Thirdly, teachers collaborate together throughout the process of planning, teaching and reviewing lessons (Lo, et al., 2005). However, sustaining Learning Study may be inhibited by many challenges, including teachers’ pressures from the examination-oriented system, heavy workloads, pressures from parents and lack of support and trust among staff (Zhang, 2015). How to sustain Learning Study in schools is yet to be explored. This presentation reports a study investigating the Learning Study practices in two Hong Kong schools (a primary school and a secondary school), which have adopted Learning Study for teacher professional development for over 10 years. The study utilized qualitative research methods including interviews with school leaders and teachers (2 leaders and 4 teachers from each school) and observation of Learning Study activities to identify the forces facilitating and inhibiting Learning Study in the schools.
Content analysis (Northcutt & McCoy, 2004) of the data from interviews and observations was conducted and the data were coded with the theoretical framework in Markee (1997), which categorizes the contextual factors facilitating and inhibiting the sustainability of Learning Study into four aspects: features of Learning Study, macro-context (e.g., socio-economic development, education reform, teacher education), school leadership practices (e.g., understanding and developing staff in the school; designing organization and cultivating a learning culture; managing internal and external resources) and teacher characteristics (e.g., personality, motivation