No matter whether in the context of Hong Kong or other parts of the world, the school reform towards school-based management is a complicated change process involving the multiple school constituencies and creating uncertainties as well as opportunities for them to learn, change, and develop. This paper aims to report and analyze some significant and interesting phenomena observed in the development and implementation of the school-based management policy in Hong Kong. The findings suggest that the school-based management reform is a long-term process of policy development, in which all concerned constituencies can contribute to further define, develop, and shape the policy. Only when the involved actors perceive more positive meanings from the change, they are more effective in creating and using opportunities for development and maximizing all potential benefits from the process of school reform. Hopefully, the Hong Kong case of school-based management can provide useful implications for school-based management movements in both local and international contexts.

Contemporary practice of school-based management world-wide aims at providing schools with increased autonomy so that they may acquire the necessary flexibility, responsiveness and proactiveness to meet the challenges ahead in the changing external and internal school environment. Theoretically, schools practicing school-based management may therefore be more effective. However, researchers do not have convergent views regarding the effect of school-based management. Some noted very encouraging and positive effects. On the other hand, some observed fairly negative results with the absence of empirical evidence that school-based management is related to students’ educational outcomes. Responding to these observations, Cheung & Cheng (1996a) asserted that the effectiveness of school-based management depends largely on the self management behavior of teachers working in groups and individually. In order to maximize the benefit of school-based management, key actors should practice self management cycles at the school, group and teacher levels. This paper discusses how the practice of this self management framework could facilitate the school, groups and individual teachers in continuous self learning and development, and in turn enhance multi-level performance in school. Taking the practice of School Management Initiative (SMI – as one type of school-based management) in Hong Kong schools as an example, the paper first analyses the recommendations set out in the SMI policy document. Then the authors examine the degree to which these recommendations could facilitate multi-level self management of the key actors in school. Based on the result of the analysis and the conception of Cheung & Cheng (1996a), the paper proposes directions for further development of school-based management in Hong Kong. It is hoped that the recommended directions may provide insights for both the policy makers and school practitioners to further develop the practice of school-based management

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

Initial teacher education programs offered worldwide all aim at developing student teachers with the best and most comprehensive preparation before joining the teaching profession. However, teacher education research reveal that there are discrepancies between the outcome and what is intended in the program. Without sufficient field experience, beginning teachers always find difficulties in assisting administrative duties and curriculum planning in schools. It is a common practice that teachers are expected to perform different roles apart from regular classroom teaching. It appears that current teacher education programs do not provide solid preparation for beginning teachers in these areas. When beginning teachers function in school with a rather low level of competence in various areas, the chance of becoming burnout might be higher. To bridge the gap in teacher training, a Summer Creative School Project has been developed and launched in the summer vacation in 1998 in Hong Kong. The aim of the whole project was to provide opportunities for student-teachers to experience the management of a school for four weeks. The project has three stages, viz., the pre-field stage, field work stage and the debriefing stage. In this program, participants were given a series of intensive training in the form of seminars and workshops. There were a total of 80 student-teachers participating in the project. In the field work stage, a total of four Hong Kong public sector primary school were involved. Twenty student-teachers took over the management of 10-12 classes of one school. All student-teachers took up different functional posts as head teacher, deputy head teacher, coordinators of curriculum and extra-curricular activities, etc. They also designed their own curriculum with creativity development as the central theme. In the debriefing stage, the experience and limitations of student-teachers throughout the project are debriefed. This paper gives a full account

Recent mega changes in the social, political and educational context of Hong Kong and the subsequent impacts on language teachers have put great demands on English teachers' effectiveness. Some of these irresistible changes are, for example, the implementation of TOC in primary schools, the proposed benchmark qualification assessment recommended in the Education Commission Report 6, the fast changing diversity in students' needs and ability due to the influx of immigrant children from the mainland, and most important of all, the insistent demands on quality teaching and learning of English despite a declining status of the language due to the change of sovereignty. Working in this changing environment, English teachers very often encounter unexpected challenges and great demands of effectiveness as professional language teachers. Responding to this, the present paper offers an emerging perspective to the perplexing question of how English teachers can function effectively in an age of megatrends. It suggests that to enable these ELF/ESL teachers to be responsive and adaptive to the megatrends in schools, the answer lies in a shift in the paradigm of teacher learning and development. The authors propose that English teachers should embark on self-learning while self-managing their work in schools so as to be able to face new challenges in the ever changing internal and external environment of the school. This paper attempts to apply the self-learning framework developed by Cheung & Cheng (1995 & 1996) to illustrate the concrete stages of how English teachers could engage themselves in an iterative process of self-learning. Cheung & Cheng's (1996) self-learning framework comprises two self-learning cycles: the Major Cycle and the Support Cycle. The Major Cycle consists of five sequential stages: namely, Environmental Analysis, Planning & Affiliating, Developing & Directing, Implementing, and Evaluating & Monitoring. The Major Cycle provides an overall mechanism for practicing

Since the publication of the Education Commission Report No. 5 in 1992, the Hong Kong community like other international communities, put increasing emphasis on creating a quality professional teacher work force in schools. This is culminated at the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in July 1997 when the Chief Executive, Mr. Tung Che Hwa, announced in his Inauguration Speech that all new primary and secondary teachers should be degree holders with formal professional training. Among the many needs and initiatives to upgrade the teaching force, the situation in primary school sector draws great attentions of the education community. At present, over 80% of the primary school teachers are non-graduates but professionally trained. At the same time, the primary school sector also attracts quite a number of the fresh university graduates without professional training to take up teaching posts. This phenomenon is not encouraging to the healthy development of a strong graduate teaching force in the primary school. In order to improve the situation, two areas of work need to be carried out. First the Hong Kong community needs to create opportunities for non-graduate teachers to upgrade themselves to become graduates. Second, postgraduate training program should be developed urgently for untrained graduate teachers in the primary school. Responding to the above, this paper examine the issues related to the development of a Postgraduate Diploma in Education program (PGDE) for in-service primary school teachers with special reference to the expectation of the school principals who are the key actors in the primary school sector. Data of the present study are drawn from a large market study for PGDE program development. Two types of data are available for analysis, namely the quantitative data from survey to a random sample of 392 primary schools (return rate was 80.6%), and qualitative data from interviews with 21 primary school principals. The expectations