The Learning Centre (LC) Scheme is a collaborative project between the Education and Manpower Bureau, a primary school, a secondary school, and the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) for facilitating the implementation of the recent education reform in various key learning areas. The LC teachers need to take up the role of cascading good practices in curriculum and pedagogical changes through working with other teachers in workshops and outreach school-based support. The LCs work with the HKIEd, which provides mentoring and consultancy services, and evaluates the project. The LC scheme is structured into three phases: the initial phase in leadership or teacher development understanding, the implementation phase, and the evaluation phase. Using structured interviews, the authors identified the professional development that the LC teachers experienced in the initial phase of the scheme, and the support and/or facilitating conditions they hope to obtain in later phases. The findings suggest that support from the funding allocation, the school administration and the HKIEd are essential for the success of the scheme. This support helped the LC teachers realize a new perspective in understanding learning and teaching from the standpoint of a teacher educator, and consider how to facilitate other teachers’ teaching by adopting innovative approaches. The chapter concludes with recommendations for further support and future directions of development of the scheme.
[Copyright © 2008 The Chinese University Press, Hong Kong Institute of Educational Research.]

The findings reported in this paper is part of an international project “Schools Around the World” (SAW) that aims to enhance teacher development in the area of assessing students’ work in science. The aim of this paper is to review the current assessment practices that teachers adopt in science at both the primary and secondary levels. This review helps researcher and science educators to identify the needs of the teachers and chart out possible directions to improve the assessment of students’ science learning in future. Moreover, drawing on the findings, the SAW project team may also identify ways of facilitating such changes. Teachers teaching primary four General Studies, secondary teachers teaching secondary two Integrated Science and secondary four Biology were interviewed. The interview questions focused on revealing their current practices in assigning students’ work; factors influencing the assignment of students’ work; performance criteria they set on students’ work, feedback they provided for students, their views about science assessment and their opinions on alternative forms of science assessment. In this paper, students’ work include all different forms of tasks that the teachers assign to students which may be formative or summative assessment tasks conducted during or after lessons. Findings reveal that homework in the form of written assignments, laboratory reports, workbooks and tests are at present the major forms of students’ work, though the teachers realized the importance of project work and experimental work in science learning. Results also show that the teachers are ready for a change from the current practice to give more emphasis on project work and formative assessment tasks. In the SAW project, teachers are encouraged to attempt the use of alternative form of students’ work in assessing students’ science learning and engage in professional discussion with teachers from other countries participating in the project.
[Copyright © 2002

Though the notion of a mentor or cooperating teacher in initial teacher education has been implemented in other countries for many years (Haberman, 1971; Spillane & Levenson, 1976), it was first attempted in initial primary teacher education in Hong Kong only in 1994. The present study aims to investigate this new attempt by the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) to foster supporting relationships in teacher education. The paper focuses on the Cooperating Teacher Scheme (CTS) as a learning experience for student-teachers and the different roles of the school, cooperating teachers, and HKIEd lecturers. The study includes a quantitative component and a qualitative component. Eighty schools were selected randomly from a list of 130 schools participating in the Scheme in 1995-96. Four agents, viz. school heads, co-operating teachers, lecturers and student-teachers involved in the CTS were invited to complete a questionnaire and representatives from each category were interviewed. The findings consider student-teachers' learning as well as varying perceptions of the roles of the four agents in the scheme. Based on the findings, implications of the CTS in initial and further teacher education as well as the collaboration between schools and the Institute are drawn.
[Copyright © 1998 Routledge.]