This study investigates the characteristics of the organizational environment perceived by 627 teachers in 64 Hong Kong secondary schools. From the cluster analysis, the perceived school organizational environments can be classified into four typical styles: commitment, control, disengagement, and headless. All of them have contrasting organizational characteristics. The findings are consistent with the studies conducted in Western societies.

There are increasing commitments from the education sector to cultivate our next generation with a life-long and forward-looking concern for the environment, preparing them to make well-informed, reasoned and practical decisions, and to take actions leading to the creation of a sustainable environment. In 2005, the United Nations declared the year as the start of the “United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development”, where “sustainable development” is defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This has become the guiding principle of environmental education focusing on the three major aspects of awareness, attitudes and actions. Through enhancing our students’ awareness of environmental issues and cultivating their positive attitudes towards conservation work, it is believed that they will be more willing to take environmental friendly actions. In response, guidelines have been issued to schools in Hong Kong urging energy saving and waste reduction. Current work on Education For Sustainability (EFS) includes elements of sustainable development infused into the curricula of various subjects at different levels of schooling, from kindergarten to secondary. In addition, a whole range of programmes related to the promotion of sustainable development have been organized. However, at a recent symposium on plastic waste management attended by educators, policy makers, personnel from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and scientists, there were discussions that in spite of these programmes aiming to help our students better understand the interactions between human activities and the natural environment as well as the environmental problems they face locally and globally, our next generation cannot contribute much to alleviating these problems in their daily lives. This presentation will share the existing challenges and opportunities of EFS on plastic waste

This paper discusses the findings of a research study investigating user acceptance of bring your own device (BYOD) practice to support teaching and learning in a Hong Kong university. Forty-four undergraduate students and two teachers participated in the study. To collect their ratings of agreement with respect to several BYOD-related issues, student participants were asked to complete pre- and post-user acceptance questionnaires at the beginning and at the end of a 13-week semester. Post-event focus group interview sessions were also organised to further elicit students’ and teachers’ views on the use of personally owned devices for learning. While most of the findings from this study support the use of BYOD in higher education, a number of concerns about its implementation are raised. Insights derived from this research will help inform pedagogies, research and practices in BYOD-mediated learning environments.
[Copyright © 2016 by the University of Georgia.]

Field experience at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) is viewed as a central aspect to our programmes. The proposed chapter will discuss a project that aimed to enhance student teachers' professional development in FE by adopting mobile technology and cloud services. Also, the use of digital forms of FE documents such as TP supervision forms, FE portfolios, and reflective journals enables student teachers and Institute supervisors to build their own e-portfolio for further sharing of their professional practices within and outside the Institute.
[Copyright © 2016, IGI Global.]

Teachers and school administrators in Hong Kong have had to cope with more work and performance pressure as they strive to implement educational reforms aimed at deepening students' life-long learning skills. Management systems, which save time and transfer ideas, experiences, and knowledge more efficiently could help schools meet reform goals and relieve the occupational stress that inevitably accompanies change and progress. This paper explores the effect of knowledge management (KM) for school development by reviewing three cases selected from a school improvement project entitled "Knowledge Management and Primary School Development". The project was launched specifically to determine if KM practices can assist educators to cope with added pressures and rise to the challenges of education reforms. The case studies illustrate three separate approaches to incorporating KM systems. Problems faced by these case-schools included declining school competitiveness, time-consuming data storage and retrieval practices, and hierarchical communication structures that stunted feedback from the teachers who are on the front line of educational reform. Interviews were conducted with school principals, middle managers, and teachers. The results show that the core KM strategies of personalization and codification can be adopted to improve school development. Knowledge leadership, knowledge sharing culture, and knowledge management system support were identified as success factors for schools to implement KM.
[Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.]

This chapter outlines the background, purpose, strategies, and initial outcomes of one centre’s research agenda into school leadership and change in the East and South-East Asian region. The Centre is the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change (APCLC) at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). The first section outlines research on the state of indigenous knowledge in the region. This provides the context and justification for our research agenda. The second section presents our purpose statements, the broad research agenda, and the projects under this agenda. The third section describes progress to date. The fourth section summarises some of the key contributions of the Centre – the intention here is to illustrate our outcomes. The final section summarises what we see as the major contributions of the Centre to date.
[Copyright © 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland]

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between staff size and perceived organizational support (POS) in early childhood education (ECE) organizations. Design/methodology/approach–A territory-wide questionnaire survey was designed to investigate the perceptions of preschool teachers in Hong Kong on four dimensions of organizational support, namely, teacher participation in decision making, school management support, school performance in organizational support, and organizational negativity in organizational support. In total, 2,066 teachers from 189 schools were sampled with stratified random sampling. Confirmatory factor analysis and latent mean analysis were employed. Findings–There was a significant relationship between staff size and POS. Specifically, teachers working at small schools in terms of staff size reported significantly higher POS than their counterparts in medium and large schools in aspects including teacher participation in decision making, school management support, and school performance in POS. Conversely, both medium and large schools had higher scores on organizational negativity. Research limitations/implications–There may exist other factors (e.g. principal leadership), which are not investigated in this study, that influence POS. Future studies are needed to capture a fuller structural relationship among an array of factors that influence POS. Originality/value–Research on staff size and POS has been conducted separately, without one element informing the other. The findings of the present study will stimulate more research on POS and staff size. The study will stimulate thinking about whether larger preschools are more efficient than smaller preschools in terms of scale of economies in a marker driven, ECE context. Building upon the foundation laid by the study, future studies may explore the interaction between staff size and POS on intended student outcomes in ECE.
[Copyright © 2016 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Although the essential role of school leaders in school improvement processes has been confirmed in the literature, the link between school leadership and student outcomes has only been recently addressed. Research suggests that the effect of school leaders on student outcomes is mediated through the creation of certain school conditions. Our study aimed to verify the mediating effect of some school conditions on the school leadership and student outcomes link. Based on empirical data collected from the principals and key staff in 49 secondary schools in Hong Kong, our results showed that staff collaboration was a mediating factor influencing the link and it was more commonly found in schools whose leaders were more attentive to the professional development of teachers.