According to the aims of the current junior science curriculum for Hong Kong, students are expected to master inquiry skills for problem?solving, understand the nature of scientific knowledge, and appreciate the limitations of science. These aims are, however, difficult to achieve because available science textbooks focus mainly on the transmission of scientific facts and concepts and most science teachers do not have a good understanding of the nature of science. In order to improve this situation, the Integrated Science course of the Postgraduate Diploma in Education Program of the Faculty of Education, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has in recent years incorporated a unit that aims at facilitating teachers to construct understanding of the nature of science. This article reports a small-scale study of the effect of this unit on a group of in?service science teachers. The unit consists of a number of historical vignettes that illustrate the process of development of scientific ideas, through which teachers were guided to construct the key steps of the scientific methods and appreciate the nature of scientific knowledge. A pre-test was administered to the subjects to identify their alternative conceptions on the nature of science. Comparison of the scores of the pre?test and post?test indicates that the subjects were found to demonstrate substantial improvement in their understanding of the nature of science after intervention, but some alternative conceptions were still persistent in most subjects. Implications were made for ways to integrate the historical approach into science teaching in schools.
[Copyright of Teaching Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10476210600680382]

While Western educators caution against contrived collegiality in the midst of enthusiasm for peer coaching as a form of teacher development, Hong Kong educators are struggling to detach discussion and observation of classroom teaching from staff appraisal. The challenges for this task are twofold: to secure a niche for peer coaching in the practice of staff development, and to ward off contrived collegiality in the course. Using an action research paradigm, the present project attempted to meet these challenges in two schools. As a joint work between various parties, the present project had to negotiate its way cautiously to achieve genuine collaboration and avoid imposition from the administrators and outsiders to the front-line teachers. During the course, innovative strategies were taken to cope with various difficulties, including time constraints, teachers' psychological pressure, and the possibility of contrived collegiality and implementation partnership. The evaluation of the project showed that the teachers generally accepted peer coaching and found it helpful to their professional development. The experience in the two schools indicated that true collaboration might emerge from organizationally induced collegiality under certain conditions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013188011010xxxx]

The field experience component in the four year Bachelor of Education programme (Primary) at The Hong Kong Institute of Education offers a number of opportunities for students to observe or teach in a school. The aim of this article is to analyse the learning of the studentVteachers and the supporting teachers during the field experience period in the second and the final years of the programme and to explain this learning using a sociocultural view of learning. StudentVteachers and their supporting teachers in their second year of study in 1999-2000 as well as those in their final year of study in 2001-02 were interviewed. The findings describe the professional development of the studentVteachers and the construction of knowledge in teaching. The article analyses the role of supporting teachers as social agents, and describes their use of mediational means, including teaching resources, and information about pupils abilities and habits, in facilitating the learning of the studentVteachers. The findings also compare the sharing of aims between the lecturers and the supporting teachers. Finally, the paper summarizes suggestions on how professional development of the student-teachers during the field experience may be analysed by adopting a sociocultural view of learning.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530500200259 ]

The current global movement in the reform of education seems to focus on a number of issues that include standards, quality and teacher preparation. With regard to the latter, while teacher education curricula in most parts of the world attempt to strike a balance between content and professional training, the emerging scenario is that of training expert teachers. Three types of knowledge identified as necessary for expert teaching are content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. For Hong Kong to embark on a satisfactory and effective public education reform, it is essential that its most valuable human resource (i.e. teachers) must be comprehensively and adequately developed. Attention must be paid to both pre-service and in-service to raise an excellent quality-oriented teaching force. Teacher educators and researchers make important and well-informed decisions about what should be included in pre-service and in-service teacher development programmes. However, it is also important to take into account the teachers' own perceptions about the areas in which they feel confident and knowledgeable and those inwhich they do not. One practical avenue of sourcing such information is the teacher in training who is learning to acquire and display expertise. This paper reports on an investigation using a sample of 183 science and mathematics trainee teachers. A 60-item instrument, the Science and Mathematics Expert Teacher Preparation Survey (SMETPS),was developed to gather data on trainee teachers' perceptions of their current knowledge and what they think they need to know to become expert teachers. The data, analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistics, indicated some of the areas in which trainee teachers identified the need for future professional development that would contribute towards expert training. Several issues which emerged from the results are discussed, with reference to implications for current efforts in expert teacher

Interviews with key scientists involved in research on severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), together with analysis of media reports and documentaries produced during and after the SARS epidemic, revealed many interesting aspects of nature of science (NOS) and authentic scientific inquiry. This novel insight into practice in the rapidly growing field of molecular biology was used in the development of instructional materials for use in the pre-service and in-service teacher education programme at The University of Hong Kong. The elements of NOS and scientific inquiry identified in the scientific research on SARS were explicitly emphasized in our instructional materials. The contemporary real-life context of SARS was found to be effective in promoting student-teachers' understanding of NOS and scientific inquiry, particularly in terms of: the realization of inseparable links between science and the social, cultural, and political environment; deeper understanding of how science and technology impact on each other; and a richer appreciation of the processes of authentic scientific inquiry and the humanistic character of scientists. The effectiveness is attributed to immediacy, relevance, and familiarity, making the abstract tangible, personal experience of science history, and the powerful affective impact of the interviews with scientists.
[Copyright of International Journal of Science Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500690701528808]

Changing educational priorities are reflected both in the literature and the models that seek to describe initial teachers' professional formation and learning. However, do new teachers' experiences conform to these models? A sampling of Hong Kong secondary school teachers over their first year as full-time teachers provides data from questionnaires and longitudinal interviews supporting a variety of processes and related models which highlight that becoming a teacher reflects individual differences. To account for this array of individual differences an interaction model is proposed that reflects the Chinese cultural context of this study - the 'dim-sum' model - a model that sites initial teachers' professional formation and learning within a multi-perspective and interactive learning context.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530500200252 ]

The study that we report in this paper, named as learning study, is a hybrid between a design experiment as characterized by Brown and Collins, and a Japanese lesson study as characterized by Yoshida, and Stigler and Hiebert. This paper aims at tracing the development of the learning study and examining its impact on teacher professional learning, through the example of an empirical study conducted in Hong Kong. First, the notion of learning study is explicated, together with the related ideas of the lesson study approach, the teaching research group and design experiments. Second, an empirical study is reported, which documents how a group of economics teachers in Hong Kong worked collaboratively within the learning study model to improve student learning, and in doing so enhanced their own professional learning. Finally, the implication of learning study for teacher professional learning is discussed.
[Copyright of Teaching Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10476210500527915]