The paper draws upon a collaborative action research project using Photovoice aiming at empowering participants to voice and critically reflect by thinking deeply about their context and difficulties, and using images to foster critical consciousness. Nineteen prospective teachers in a Hong Kong public university participated in this collaborative action research project. Findings highlight the obstacles and concerns that prospective teachers faced, core reflections, and action plans for overcoming such challenges. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using Photovoice to facilitate reflective dialogues in developing professional teachers in initial teacher education. Copyright © 2021 Routledge.

This small-scale exploratory study explores the practices and experiences of two experienced Hong Kong Education Bureau Advisory Teachers (ATs) engaged in school-based professional support (SBPS) of teachers during school closure caused the COVID-19 pandemic. It documents the ATs usual practices, conditions for effective SBPS, the effect the pandemic had on their practices, and the specific support they provided remotely during the pandemic. Key findings indicate that effective SBPS requires clear role expectations, a collaborative support approach, building strong relationships and durability. The SBPS model is resilient and allows ATs and teachers to adjust to the evolving situation. ATs have continued to provide support throughout the school closures, something that would not have been possible without the existing SBPS model, relationship cultivated over an extended period of support and available technology. The authors recommend that Education Bureaus explore SBPS as a way to continue supporting teachers during school closures. Copyright © 2021 Taylor and Francis.

Globalisation and massification are creating significant expansion in the higher education sector in Asia and forcing institutions to professionalise their teaching. Merely implementing academic development, however, does not ensure improvement in teaching quality. We report an action research project, which demonstrated that the combination of teaching development through Teaching Advantage Global, alongside professional recognition through fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, significantly improved the teaching self-efficacy of academics in China and Hong Kong SAR. The results of this research demonstrate that professional development and recognition can support and evidence sector-wide strategic change. Copyright © 2021 Routledge.

Today's teacher operates in a globalised space where people everywhere are inextricably connected, and whose lives no longer exist in an isolated vacuum, but intersect and collide as part of a dynamic vortex. Teachers must now think, and teach beyond local boundaries, such that definitions of teacher professionalism will be reshaped by forces of globalisation. But have they, and in what ways? This article examines the intersection of globalisation and teacher professionalism. It begins with working definitions of globalisation and professionalism. These definitions will conceptually frame an analysis of policy documents about teacher professionalism, specifically standards for teachers in Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia. As a benchmark for teacher professionalism, an analysis of teacher standards across this international sample affords a broad portrait of what teachers are expected to know and do, juxtaposed against a rapidly evolving and globalising world. Copyright © 2021 Routledge.

Teaching has become increasingly challenging as a result of high expectations and demands placed on education systems. With an overview of the pathways to become a teacher and the teacher policy context in Hong Kong, this chapter presents the case of an undergraduate ITE programme offered by the Education University of Hong Kong. The ITE programme aims at preparing high quality ITE graduates with the key attributes of Professional Excellence, Ethical Responsibility and Innovation. The heightened expectations and demands placed on teachers in Hong Kong have been exacerbated by the enormous difficulties at the societal level since 2019. The outbreak of the COVID-pandemic and the major socio-political issues have generated unprecedented uncertainties in society at large and the education community. The chapter examines how these extraordinary circumstances place novel demands on teachers’ professional competence, and hence requiring new professional knowledge. The creation of hybrid spaces in ITE and communicative safe spaces is needed to foster the co-construction of new professional knowledge. The chapter ends by arguing that professional competence coupled with teacher buoyancy can likely enhance the potential for ITE graduates to stand tall against immense everyday challenges of beginning teaching in an era of unprecedented uncertainties. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

This study examined the relationships between faculty trust, professional learning communities and teacher professional learning among a sample of 2120 kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong. Faculty trust was examined through trust in colleagues, trust in the principal and trust in parents to explore the effects of organizational factors in details. The results showed that professional learning communities significantly mediated the positive effects of faculty trust on teacher professional learning. However, while trust in colleagues exerted a positive effect on teacher professional learning, the effects of trust in parents and trust in the principals were found to be negative and having no significant effect respectively. Kindergartens are recommended to promote teacher learning through enhancing faculty trust and professional learning communities. Copyright © 2019 All Academic, Inc.

This project aims at promoting the idea and implementation of digital citizenship education to Hong Kong schools and supporting in-serve teachers in professional development. Twenty teacher participants from seven local secondary schools joined the project and attended our 6-sessions (9 hours) of professional development training workshops in the academic year of 2019/2020. The training workshops delivered digital citizenship education framework and related concepts and teaching methods to the teachers, including digital citizenship, media literacy, digital commerce, digital footprint, digital etiquette, and cyberbullying. Our team also supported teachers to design their school-based digital citizenship curriculum for trial teaching and discussion of feasible pedagogies after the training workshops. After conducting quantitative data analysis before and after the training workshops, the result found that over 90% of teachers are satisfied with the training workshops. Moreover, there was a significant statistical difference in their teaching of digital citizenship on digital law, digital commerce, and digital security and safety dimensions between pre and posttest. They are more willing to teach these topics after the training. Facing the challenges caused by COVID19 in 2020, however, all Hong Kong schools were forced to close down. Therefore, our class observation has been delayed but we still found that teachers can utilize different online learning activities to implement digital citizenship education, though some teachers also reported that they were not confident to teach certain aspects such as legal dimension. This project suggests a need of equipping teachers’ understanding and teaching of digital citizenship education, and revisiting the relevant curriculum. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

An educational reform proposal in 2000 emphasized the need to upgrade the professional teaching competence of Hong Kong educators at all levels, with one area of focus being multiculturalism. In the current study we test a conceptual model in which teachers’ knowledge and skills of multiculturalism and teaching relationship (cultural harmony) are associated with developmentally appropriate and inappropriate beliefs and practices in the classroom. Participants were 347 preschool teachers from 12 preschools including342 women (98.6 %) and 5 men (1.4%) ages from 24 to 45 located across all five districts of Hong Kong. The hypothesized model of multicultural teaching competency as a predictor of developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices, is confirmed in the present study. Multicultural teaching knowledge can enhance developmentally appropriate teaching beliefs and practices, and reduce developmentally inappropriate practices. It is highly recommended that multicultural education be embedded in early childhood education programs for both in-service and pre-service teachers. In addition, it is suggested that researchers further study teachers’ attitudes toward multicultural education in terms of teaching beliefs and practices with a series of implicit attitude tests. Future research should also focus on environmental influences on multicultural teaching, such as school bureaucracy. Copyright © 2018 Institute of Research and Journals.

Dialogic teaching has been demonstrated to be conducive to the development of such important competencies and skills as creativity, communication skills, and critical thinking skills. However, the literature confirms that teacher-student interactions in the classroom are predominantly monologic rather than dialogic across subjects, grades, and countries. This article reports the results of a study that assesses the effectiveness of a Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme in facilitating the development of dialogic and inquiry teaching in teachers in Hong Kong. In the study, training and support were provided for teachers to enable them to teach P4C to their students during Integrated Humanities and English lessons. P4C was found to help increase the teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom in terms of their ability to engage in dialogic and inquiry teaching, to develop relevant curricular materials for such teaching, to reflect on their own teaching, to recognise their students’ capacity for constructing knowledge through dialogic inquiry, to transfer the teaching strategies learned in P4C to other non-P4C lessons, and to identify and analyse philosophical concepts in the school curriculum. The findings of this study suggest that P4C plays a significant role in promoting the professional development of teachers. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.