With the unique character of Hong Kong in a postcolonial context, where eastern philosophies and approaches meet those of the west, it could be presumed that it is an ideal system for generating innovative ideas and practices (Bautista et al. in Int J Res Educ 46:203–260, 2022; Lu and Campbell in Practice 3:67–72, 2021). However, understanding the role, influence, and impact of teacher education as a career-long pursuit in Hong Kong remains both contested and under-theorised (Bautista et al. in Int J Res Educ 46:203–260, 2022). While Hong Kong enjoys a complex and sophisticated teacher education infrastructure which includes a range of opportunities and legislated time to dedicate to the varied forms of teacher education throughout a teachers’ career, such opportunities are frequently reported on as a being too demanding, rigid, or unrelated to practice (Lu and Campbell in Practice 3:67–72, 2021; Pang et al. in Asia Pac J Educ 36:231–247, 2016). This chapter begins by exploring the context of Hong Kong, and the nature and functions of teacher education. Following this, varying conceptualisations of teacher education, professional learning, and agency, with a particular focus on Hong Kong, are explored. Finally, this chapter explores new ways of understanding the role of teacher agency in the context of teacher education and the implications of this for policy, practice, and research as we imagine the future possibilities of teacher education and education more broadly. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This study arose from a desire to investigate initial teacher education for primary school mathematics teachers in Hong Kong. A conceptual framework for analyzing pre-service teachers’ mathematical knowledge and beliefs informed this qualitative investigation. The purpose of the study was to scrutinize both the cognitive and affective domains in mathematics teaching of pre-service primary teachers within the analytical framework. This paper seeks to capture three cases of Hong Kong pre-service primary teachers holding different views about mathematics teaching and learning as revealed by a beliefs survey. Their mathematical knowledge was examined along with a questionnaire, individual interviews, and an analysis of the lesson plans they provided. Through triangulation, it was found that these pre-service teachers’ beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning correspond to their pedagogical content knowledge to some extent. The results of lesson plan analysis were mostly consistent with those in the questionnaire and interviews although some of the interview data were inconsistent with the questionnaire results. Such inconsistency seemed to suggest that pre-service teachers’ reform-oriented mathematical beliefs were impacted by some traditional values such as Confucianism. Implications are discussed regarding the relationship between knowledge and beliefs in mathematics education as well as the theory of teacher competencies. © 2023 by the author.

This article reports a case study of one local primary school in Hong Kong implementing a continuous professional development cycle for English-as-a-second-language teachers during a COVID-19 pandemic. The study focused on factors that impacted teacher continuous professional development and explored whether technology could be used to facilitate school-based professional support. An intervention implementing the technology-integrated continuous professional development cycle was conceptualised and implemented in the study. A teacher educator, together with eight English teachers, implemented the technology-integrated continuous professional development cycle. A blended approach to school-based professional support revealed that teachers valued the technological tools that facilitated professional development. These tools (such as Google Drive, Google Meets and WhatsApp) allowed for teachers to collaboratively conduct action research with the teacher educator. The study identified what factors engaged teachers in professional development as well as how technology facilitated continuous professional development. The study concluded that a mixture of different modes of continuous professional development allowed for greater teacher professional development to take place, as well as leading to applying the professional development in the classroom context. © The Author(s) 2023.

This article reports on the findings from a technology-enhanced teacher learning project where the SETTVEO app (Self Evaluation of Teacher Talk through Video Enhanced Observation) was used to support teachers’ reflective practices and professional development. Participants in the project were a group of 40 student teachers (ST) from Hong Kong, who took part in a teaching practicum taught online owing to COVID-19 restrictions. They formed online professional learning communities (PLCs) with peers and tutors, shared their class recordings (tagged using the on SETTVEO app), and reflected on their teaching through weekly discussions. This study aims to characterize teacher learning mediated by video technology and dialogue, and to evaluate the impact of the app on STs’ reflective practices and emerging Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC, Walsh 2013). In this article, we focus on an individual ST's development over a period of eight weeks. Two sources of data are transcribed and analysed using an applied Conversation Analysis (CA) method: the first records the teacher's interactions while teaching, the second their dialogic reflections based on observations of these class recordings. Findings from the study enhance our understandings of the role of technology in influencing classroom practice and highlight its importance in promoting teacher noticing and professional development. © The Author(s) 2023.

Despite extensive research on student teachers' engagement with university coursework, teaching practicums, and research projects in teacher education curriculums, empirical studies on the coherence among these components are lacking. Coherence refers to the degree to which curriculum supports, reinforces , and reflects shared goals. This research explores curriculum coherence and its influences on teacher learning in a Hong Kong pre-service language teacher education program. The study attempts to answer: How do student teachers perceive the connections between the university courses, teaching practicum, and research projects in the program? © 2023 Informa UK Limited.

Despite a plethora of studies on how to teach critical thinking (CT) in different subject classrooms, there is limited research on how teachers foster their CT and learn to teach CT through pre-service teacher education. Such a gap gives impetus to the present study, which seeks to examine to what extent and how a group of student teachers are prepared to become CT-oriented teachers in a Hong Kong-based pre-service language teacher education programme. Adopting a qualitative research approach and informed by a tripartite conceptual framework (i.e. coverage, coherence, and applicability), the study explored student teachers’ perceptions and experiences via in-depth interviews and relevant documents, supplemented by data gathered from language teacher educators in the programme. The findings reveal a rich yet unbalanced coverage of CT instruction, the transferability of CT learning to its teaching, as well as the rhetoric-reality gap in developing CT-related pedagogy in the programme. In light of the findings, practical implications at classroom and curricula levels are drawn to facilitate the integration of CT into teacher education programmes. © 2023 Informa UK Limited.

The COVID-19 pandemic complicates ingrained educational inequalities around the globe and foregrounds the pertaining challenges that teachers have encountered due to school closures and the shift to distance learning. This cross-border teacher education project intended to examine how academics and pre-service teachers in different geographic locales could collaboratively explore equitable learning opportunities for diverse learners through the use of critical media literacies to respond to interconnected global crises. In this six-week cross-border teacher education project, we recruited four Mandarin and English literacy teacher candidates in Hong Kong to interact with one another and one Canadian professor as part of the teacher preparation phase of a larger-scale cross-border research project that connects youth from Hong Kong and Canada in a social networking space. For the purposes of teacher professional development, the Hong Kong teacher candidates and Canadian researchers engaged in collective exploration of how instructional designs in literacy education could promote equitable learning opportunities for diverse learners. Findings show that the cross-border teacher education project supported teacher candidates’ development of pedagogical skills and espoused their agency in promoting educational equity and collective problem-solving through critical media literacies. Findings relate the teacher candidates’ shifted perspectives from focusing on students’ decontextualized language skills to nurturing critical media skills. Changing from a deficit-oriented view about what literacy learners could not do, the teacher candidates also adopted an asset-oriented view about the linguistic and cultural repertoires that diverse learners could bring to literacy classrooms. © 2023 by the authors.

In-person teaching abroad experiences, where pre-service teachers spend a defined period teaching in schools in a foreign country, have received considerable research attention in recent years. However, virtual alternatives have yet to be explored. This exploratory study sought to understand the effects a virtual teaching abroad experience had on pre-service teachers' professional learning. Data included teaching logs and reflective writings of two groups of pre-service teachers from Hong Kong who participated in a virtual teaching abroad experience hosted by a university in the United Kingdom and interviews with their course coordinators. The findings suggest that the PSTs found the virtual teaching abroad experience novel and unique, contributing to professional learning. Specifically, the experience (a) increased the PSTs' confidence and flexibility; (b) improved their synchronous online teaching skills; (c) gave them greater awareness of learner differences and needs; and (d) exposed them to innovative pedagogical approaches. The study suggests that virtual teaching abroad experiences could have a place within initial teacher education, especially as the financial costs associated with them are lower than in-person experiences. However, they do not seem adequate to replace a sustained period immersed in an overseas school context. Copyright ©2023 Routledge.

To prepare teachers for blended teaching, this study proposed ongoing teacher professional development activities that utilize the learning-by-doing approach within a professional learning community with the objective of developing the technological, pedagogical, content knowledge (TPACK) of teachers. The study explored the TPACK of 11 teachers and their perceptions of blended teaching through interviews and questionnaires. Analyses of interview data demonstrated that teachers perceived the technological benefits (e.g., supporting citywide resources) but noted that the teacher professional development training required high levels of self-regulation skills. The questionnaire results indicated significant improvements in TPACK, TCK, and TPCK but not for other dimensions of TPACK. Lastly, the study presented discussions and implications accordingly. Copyright © 2023 Education Research Institute, Seoul National University.

To transform existing education practices in tackling different challenges and future uncertainties, it is essential to engage teachers as active agents in students' learning, collegial collaboration, school development and societal issues throughout the career. This study investigates the change and continuity of teacher professional agency associated with the individual position and socio-cultural factors in Hong Kong. Data from semi-structured interviews were collected with 14 teachers over a two-year period in 2018 and 2020, and narrative analysis was utilized to examine teacher agency. The changes and continuity were categorized into four types: 1) expanding, 2) strategic, 3) exploring, and 4) withering agencies. The way teachers took and made work-related actions and decisions on their career trajectories could be associated with the changes in individual positions, the organizational culture, and the leadership style in the socio-cultural context. This study contributes to the existing understanding of the temporal development and enactment of professional agency. Despite the strong hierarchical structure embedded in the school managerial practices, a trusting management and collaborative work community that allow channels to receive bottom-up suggestions and spaces to enable individual learning could support positive changes and the continuity of professional agency. Copyright ©2023 Routledge.