Over the past decades, the art curricula of the Hong Kong Institute have undergone revision in response to the current trend of art education and the needs of the society. In the process of on-going review and modification of course structure and contents, it is essential to study similar programmes offered by other institutions, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper aims to review the strength and weakness of the BEd. (P) art major programme by comparing its rationale, course structure and teaching contents with similar programmes of East China Normal University of Shanghai. The different approaches in course design in relation to individual regions’ historical contexts will be explored and recommendations will be made for future development.

There are still over 14,000 primary teachers and 4,500 secondary teachers in Hong Kong schools who do not have a degree, and there are large number of teachers in both primary and secondary schools who are teaching subjects without either the academic or professional qualifications that would normally be required in an advanced education system. There is also the ongoing need for all teachers, whether qualified or not, to keep up with advances in academic subject knowledge, with good practices in teaching and learning, and with how best to harness new technologies to educational purposes. This paper will draw on the experience of setting up a Division of Continuing Professional Education in the Hong Kong Institute of Education, and put forward a range of ideas for the development of a more robust, better articulated and higher quality continuing professional education scene for teachers in Hong Kong.

Early childhood education in Hong Kong has developed rapidly in the recent years in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, in the past three decades, the social status of early childhood education and early childhood educators were low comparing with other educational sections. The recent growth in early childhood education in Hong Kong has raised the early childhood teachers’ teacher identity. Teacher identity is an explicit view of self as teacher (Franzak, 2002) and is continually being informed, formed and reformed over time (Cooper and Olson, 1996). It evolves over career stages (Huberman, 1993) and is shaped by different forces: background, school experience, school, reform, and political contexts (Datnow et al., 2000; Sachs, 2000). In this study, my intention is to discuss how these social phenomenon and educational policies enhance three early childhood teachers’ professional identity over three decades.

This paper will present the findings of a project conducted at the Hong Kong Institute of Education that studied a teaching practicum design that incorporated multimodal support and feedback during a 14-week, semester-long trial with eleven B.Ed. students. The design increased the amount and quality of the critical engagement and reflective practice of student teachers by integrating these several support mechanisms.

By conducting in-depth interviews with new teachers who are about to become full-time teachers and then reinterviewing them two years later, the author of this article presents how beginning teachers think and feel about teaching and describes the challenges they face as beginning teachers in the context of Hong Kong. The stories of the teachers, as revealed by the interviews, suggest that changing educational ideals, school leaders' management style, and workload issues are some of the important challenges faced by beginning teachers. A short review of work on effective school research and school leadership suggests how school leaders can create an environment that is conducive to teachers' professional development.
[Copyright © University of Chicago Press].

This paper aims to examine how Lesson Study of an initial teacher education course develops the instructional design competency of pre-service teachers in Hong Kong. Lesson Study is a collaborative action research approach for developing teacher professional competency. This study assesses the effectiveness of the Lesson Study course conducted in a teacher education institute that based on a quasi-experimental design. There were 341 pre-service teachers participated to a questionnaire survey. Confirmatory factor analysis and reliability test were used to confirm the constructed validity and reliability of the survey instrument. Canonical correlation was applied to explore the relationship between the approaches of their learning process and their learning outcomes. Results show that action research tutorials and collaborative practice are predictors of their instructional design skills and teaching competency. This paper discusses the critical success factors and the potential for using Lesson Study as a model to help pre-service teachers develop their teaching competency.
[Copyright © Time Taylor Academic Journals].

This article describes the results of a qualitative multiple case study investigation of the experiences of preservice teachers during a teaching practicum in Hong Kong. The study uses in-depth interviews with pairs of student teachers and their school-based supporting teachers to understand how the former positioned themselves as particular types of teachers through mutual interactions with other communities of teachers during a teaching practicum. Three case studies explore the ways in which the pairs of student teachers not only supported each other within the context of a teaching team, but also jointly deployed strategies to establish and defend the values of teaching and learning that were afforded a premium by their community of preservice teachers. The results underscore the importance of investigating relations between different communities, such as student teachers, school-based teachers and school authorities if the learning goals of the teaching practicum are to be attained. Implications for how relations that foster the professional development of all teachers within and across different communities during a teaching practicum might be achieved and sustained are discussed and implications for future research considered.
[Copyright © Routledge].

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the personal knowledge management (PKM) competency of pre-service teachers and their instructional design skills. Supporting the sustainable development of teachers as professionals in the knowledge society is a critical issue in teacher education. This study attempts to identify an empirical model and a curriculum framework for nurturing pre-service teachers' PKM competency. Dorsey (2000) PKM skills were adopted for constructing the theoretical framework and the survey instrument. A quasi-experimental research design was used to collect data from pre-service teachers from Hong Kong's largest teacher education institution. A structural equation model was applied to explore the predictive power of PKM competency on their instructional design. Results show that a four-factor PKM competency model, which consists of retrieving, analyzing, organizing and collaborative skills, was identified as a predictor of instructional design. Use of PKM tools, e-learning activities and collaborative action research for developing pre-service teacher PKM competency are recommended to teaching education institute.
[Copyright © The Leadership Alliance Inc.].

This article reports the findings of a study conducted in an elementary school in 2007–2008. The design-based study, which is a replication of another study conducted in 2003–2005, analysed the influence of different leadership styles on teacher communication networks. Two curriculum development teams, namely English and General Studies teams, were set up to help in curriculum innovation, design and implementation in classrooms. Participating teachers conducted reflection meetings to evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented curriculum and discuss measures for improvement. Teacher interviews were conducted before and after each cycle of curriculum innovation. Meetings were videotaped. This study analyses the videotaped meetings through quantitative and qualitative approaches, and aims to show the effects of leadership styles and power on communication networking systems of the two teams. Results show that two modes of communication networking systems are prevalent in the videotaped meetings: restricted and extended modes. These two modes have different effects on space for teacher learning. The extended mode allows more space for teacher participation and reflection, whereas the restricted mode restricts teacher access to active participation. An effective leadership programme enhances the capacities of participants, creates conditions that allow the emergence of extended mode in meetings and provides guidance towards the realization of innovations.
[Copyright © Routledge].