This article describes the current teacher professional development (PD) infrastructure of Hong Kong, one of the world’s top performers in education. Drawing on contemporary policy frameworks, institutional websites, and research literature, we outline how teachers from primary and secondary local schools are supported to enhance their professional capacity. After introducing the structure of the Hong Kong education system, we describe pre-service teacher education and the Professional Ladder framework, designed by the Education Bureau (EDB) to regulate in-service PD. We then describe the work done by the leading PD providers and the PD-related obstacles, difficulties, and constraints reported in the literature. The article shows that Hong Kong has developed a solid PD infrastructure with hybrid characteristics. While the system is based on compliance and external accountability mechanisms, teachers are encouraged to design their PD journeys based on their interests, needs, and career aspirations. Every three years, teachers are required to complete 90 to 150 hours of PD (depending on seniority), including core and elective training (approximately 1/3 and 2/3 of the PD allotment, respectively). Structured, on-the-job, project-based, whole-school, and individual PD activities are available. The article also describes the strategies recently adopted to tackle the challenges of COVID-19. We conclude that Hong Kong has made great efforts to design a high-quality PD infrastructure within a hierarchical educational system, in which quantity of provision and content coverage have been prioritized over teacher agency and autonomy. More research is required to investigate the actual impact of PD on teachers’ practices and students’ learning.تصف هذه المقالة البنية التحتية الحالية للتطوير المهني للمعلمين في هونج كونج، أحد أفضل الدول أداء في العالم من الناحية التعليمية. استناداً على أطر عمل السياسة المعاصرة، المواقع المؤسسية والأدبيات البحثية، وتوضح كيفية دعم المعلمين من المدارس

The quasi-market condition of education intensified the need to seek ongoing school improvements, manage uncertainty, and innovate school-wide pedagogy and curricula. Sequentially, interest in teachers’ entrepreneurial behavior (TEB) has grown rapidly in recent years, which established the importance of entrepreneurial behavior as an effective response to the changing, uncertain, and increasing demanding context in the education system. However, the notion of TEB has not been clearly conceptualized or operationalized. This study attempted to offer a clear definition of TEB and identify its conceptual components. We first offered a semi-systematic literature review of entrepreneurial behavior, and then conducted a multiple-site case study at three schools in Hong Kong. We identified three competency components and three attribute components of TEB, from which we established a conceptual definition of TEB. This clarification of TEB and its components enabled the linkage to prior literature and future research. Copyright © 2021 Springer Nature B.V.

Purpose: This study aims to understand of the role that teacher entrepreneurial behavior plays in developing teacher professional capital. The extant concepts around school leadership mostly encompass the transformative and instructional roles of school leaders in managing, mobilizing and supporting teachers for student achievement. However, school leadership has not focused strongly on promoting innovation and risk-taking for schools in a knowledge economy. As a timely promising response to the increasingly demanding and competitive school context, teacher entrepreneurial behaviour (TEB), which emphasizes teachers' willingness to take risks and be daring, has started to gain recognition in the school leadership literature, yet a nuanced understanding of TEB's potential impacts on schools is lacking.Design/methodology/approach: Based on a combined consideration of institutionalized recognition and expert judgement, this study identified three innovative entrepreneurial teachers/teacher groups that had won the most competitive teaching award in Hong Kong. Employing a multiple-site case study design, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 informants and collected supplementary school documents and records.Findings: This study found that TEB enables the implementation of innovation and promotes cross-subject alignment. It cultivates trusting and coherent relationships among teachers. Teachers with TEB scaled up innovation among other teachers. Furthermore, entrepreneurial teachers enhance school attractiveness by creating competitive advantages.Originality/value: This analysis showed that TEB enables formal and informal school leaders to bring forth critical school outcomes. This study elaborates how TEB enhances teachers' professional capital through building trusting and coherent relationships. It also adds to the research on school innovation by demonstrating that TEB fosters teachers' capacity for bottom-up innovation in the community. Copyright © 2020

This article analyzes how principals of high-performing secondary schools in England and Hong Kong establish structural arrangements aligned to their core values as educators. Such values-driven structures provide a platform by which principals create the conditions in which policy and reform can be managed and absorbed without compromising the core purpose and contextual priorities of these schools. The findings reveal how the participating school principals have carefully embedded and institutionalized these structures within the cultures of their organizations as part of a multilayered approach to leadership. Copyright © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This article draws on data from cases of high-performing and improving schools in Hong Kong. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with principals, middle leaders, and senior teachers to identify key policies and steps taken for their enactment, and to solicit interpretations of the policies. Principals were found to actively select, prioritize, and emphasize policies based on clearly articulated values. These values-led and contextually informed decisions formed the basis for redesigning the school organization and leadership structures, allocating resources, and aligning multiple initiatives to policies. School-based and mandated policies worked in synergy, and school principals responded rather than reacted to mandates. Copyright © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This chapter considers the cutting-edge of educational leadership in Asia, which people view as encompassing leadership research, policy, and practice. It uses the concept of geography, literally and metaphorically, to examine the terrain in which the three dimensions of educational leadership are enacted. To do this, the chapter first defines the broader Asian region to demonstrate its complexity and diversity. Then, it delineates the scope of the research knowledge base, the physical terrain, on educational leadership in Asia, focusing on the diverse Confucian heritage societies of East Asia, which tend to have newly emerging research capacities. The chapter uses the research knowledge base to examine the dimensions of policy and practice by considering the political influence on educational leadership and then on the cultural contexts. For this portion of the analysis, it focuses on five Confucian-heritage societies: mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Successive UK governments have pursued policies to diversify school provision across England nested in neo-liberal ideologies. Reforms has focused both on generating autonomy and distinctiveness with the state system of schools and the creation of new "types" of schools outside local democratic accountability. There are now approximately 70 "types" of schools, characterised through parental choice, provisions of private interests, and a trends toward private funding with subsidies from taxpayers. In short, public schools are increasingly privatised, owned and run by private individuals and consortia which profit from services rendered to and through the school. Business models dominate the training and performance of school principals as leaders. Consideration of school leadership in Asia suggests that research frameworks are bound by a range of factors that differentiate leadership and leadership research across the region. These include the following: socio-economic developments connected to the allocation of resources for research and the development of researchers’ capacities; a tendency for societies with emergent research capacity to communicate understanding of school leadership—sometimes empirical—through prescriptive or descriptive writing; the degree of boundedness to political realities and policy objectives shapes the principalship from being relatively autonomous to agents of the state, and the borrowing of policies which influences how the work of principals are prioritised and contextualised across the respective Asia societal cultures.

Purpose - In 1997, Joseph Boyle critiqued the Hong Kong government’s policy of recruiting native-speaking teachers (NSTs) of English into secondary schools. Boyle examined NSTs from a post-colonial and socio-linguistic stance. He concluded that the scheme was “largely ineffective” and that efforts to expand the scheme would likely fail due to the government's implicit lack of trust in the capacities of non-native speaking teachers’ of English. However, almost two decades later the scheme has expanded across the primary and secondary sectors. This paper explores how changing educational contexts and reform efforts have influenced conceptions of NSTs as articulated in Hong Kong policy. Design/methodology/approach - The research is approached retrospectively through an interpretivist paradigm, analysing policy documents, implementation materials, evaluation reports and interview transcripts. Over 41 scheme stakeholders participated in the interviews, inclusive of policy makers, government officials, academics, teacher educators, principals and teachers, who were active over different phases of the scheme. Findings - The intended role and perceived competencies of the NSTs have been impacted by imported education reforms leading to new rationales for maintaining and expanding NST deployment. These shifts, however, lead to new tensions among idealised images of NSTs, their capacities, and the aims of policymakers and scheme implementers. Originality/value - The value of this paper lies in its reconsideration of the role of NSTs in light of educational reform efforts influenced by global change. This perspective varies from conventional critiques that focus on NSTs' and NNSTs' differing capacities as English language teachers by considering the impact of historic developments on later policies, and the tendency of policy-makers to legitimise reform by importing international innovations. Second, it demonstrates how idealised images of NSTs simultaneously justify