Student engagement is recognised as a key process that can assist students’ learning. This paper reports a study in which three variables were examined to assess their potential in creating engaging and participative classrooms. The focus was on ‘teacher engagement in the community’, ‘teacher engagement in school’ and ‘teachers’ teaching confidence’ and their impact on the way teachers perceive their classrooms. Data was drawn from the International Civics and Citizenship Study, and the views of over 1400 teachers in 90 Hong Kong schools were analysed. The results of the study showed that teacher engagement is an important construct that directly supports teachers’ positive descriptions of their classroom activities. At the same time, teacher engagement also influenced teachers’ confidence in their teaching which in turn influenced the positive descriptions of their usual classroom activities. The theoretical foundations of these results are discussed as well as the implications for teachers’ professional lives, for policymakers concerned with enhancing teacher quality and for school leaders with responsibility for teacher professional development.

As classroom and schools are the “miniature political communities” that help incubate students’ civic experiences, they can influence their civic development and civic participation cognitively and behaviorally.Meanwhile, principals and teachers can act as school-site change agents for the development of civically responsive and responsible youngsters at the formative age. However, past studies have not extensively examined how participative classrooms lead to better civic learning and active civic lives in schools. Neither has any responded to the current political circumstances in Hong Kong by relating controversial issues such as students’ democratic values and civic attitudes to future civic engagement including illegal protest. To fill this research gap and provide policy directions, we propose and test amodel of how political socialization at school affects development of early adolescents’ democratic values, attitudes to civic institutions and the nation, and aspirations for conventional and unconventional civic action. As young people in Hong Kong are increasingly active and radical in recent years (e.g., Scholarism, Occupy Central Movement), we examine their possible roots. Specifically we testmultilevel structural equationmodels on a sample of 2902 Hong Kong secondary Form 2 students from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)’s 2009 International Civics and Citizenship Education study (ICCS). These young adults were at the age when the survey was conducted. Their aspirations expressed thenmight have translated into actions now. The results can inform policies to help schools fulfill their civic mission and nurture “politically literate, participatory, and critically thinking” future citizens.

Recent research has shown that schools and their leaders can exert a direct effect on students’ civic learning (Kennedy, Li & Chan, 2014; Li & Kennedy, 2015). These results are context bound so that any prescriptions for actions by schools need to take account of local issues confronting schools and their leaders. This is particularly important in Hong Kong where protest mobilization among Hong Kong young adults has become widespread (Ortman, 2014). The issue for schools is to have a clear understanding of students’ potential for future civic engagement and to develop programmes to enable future citizens to make wise choices about how they exercise their civic engagement options. To provide an evidence based approach to this issue, Hong Kong young adolescents’ civic beliefs and aspirations for civic engagement over ten years from 1999 to 2009 were examined using secondary data from two successive IEA studies. Conscious of the problems of variable-centred analysis, this study used person-centred analysis to maximize the identification of the full range of diverse views among students in two cohorts. This methodology allowed for vertical analyses at the two separate time points and horizontal analysis across time. The outcome was the identification of students’ civic values and aspirations as young adolescents. This provided the basis for articulating ways that school leaders can support the civic development of young people as they progress through adolescence and prepare for adulthood.

School participation rates in Hong Kong are acknowledged to be high but not always for the city’s ethnic minority students. Case study was used to portray the ‘out of school’ phenomenon for ethnic minority students at a secondary school in Hong Kong through the experiences of one such ethnic minority student. Morshed, a Pakistani student, participated with the researchers in an unstructured in-depth interview. In addition, interviews were also conducted with the principal, two teachers, and one support staff from the school. The study showed the complex interaction of school contexts and personal life issues that influenced Morshed’s dropping out of school. Implications are drawn for providing better school support that can facilitate more positive schooling experiences for Hong Kong’s ethnic minority students.
[Copyright © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.]

Various terms have been used to define civic education (CE) in Hong Kong since the colonial era. This has been particularly true since 2011, when CE has been given many names, causing confusion among educators. Mixed methods were employed to examine teachers’ perceptions of different conceptions of CE expressed as moral, civic and national education. The findings indicate that some teachers might not be able to differentiate among moral education, CE and national education. Most teachers contended that national education should be included in CE, while others believed the opposite. Teachers perceived that moral and civic education was more successful than moral and national education in cultivating students to become ‘good citizens’. Teachers’ comprehension of these terms has policy and pedagogical implications. While the study is set within the context of Hong Kong, the findings are valuable to policymakers and educators in other countries seeking to improve CE.
[Copyright © 2016 British Association for International and Comparative Education.]

Hong Kong has been considered as one of the world’s best performing school systems. Among the six factors attributing to the success of the educational system, three are related to decentralization of pedagogical decision-making and empowerment of school leadership and teachers. Teachers’ voices and their wisdom in decision-making processes in schools has become a prominent topic among policy makers and educators. In the last 40 years, international literature suggests that teacher leadership practices in school-based curriculum development (SBCD) as a form of school capacity building enhances teachers’ empowerment and their professional capabilities, which in turn may result in more effective student learning. This chapter reports a portion of the findings based on the interview data of a case study of school-based curriculum leadership in an elementary school in Hong Kong in 2007. The study adopted a design-based approach. Participating teachers engaged in cycles of planning the objectives of learning, experimenting on redesigning the lesson plans, and reflecting on practice lessons. Multiple data collection methods were adopted. Our findings show that a systematic approach in organizing curriculum development activities based on problem-solving approaches and a distributed leadership style among teachers can be effective in enhancing teacher learning in both curriculum leadership skills and powerful learning.

This paper reports a case study on Maneesha Rai, a Nepalese girl living in Hong Kong and an “out of school” student. Based on in-depth interviews, a case was constructed of her previous school days and current “out of school” days. These provided a vivid picture of her life and several themes were created using schema analysis that help explain the reasons for her “dropping out” of school after Form Five. It has been common to attribute school failure for ethnic minority students in Hong Kong to problems with Chinese language education. Yet Maneesha’s case study shows that her experience of failure in other subjects such as Mathematics and Science contributed to her lack of successful schooling. Maneesha’s school failure was more than simply a consequence of academic failure. Rather, there were many other interrelated factors such as peer and community factors, dropout history in the family, racism, differences in schooling culture found that contributed to her school failure. In addition, Maneesha, like many of her ethnic minority friends, enjoyed the freedom afforded her in Hong Kong, but it seemed such freedom also meant inadequate attention from her teachers.
[Copyright © 2016 National Institute of Education, Singapore.]

This study tests mediated principal leadership effects on teacher professional learning through collegial trust, communication and collaboration in Hong Kong primary schools. It is based on a series of single mediator studies, and uses the same convenience sample of 970 teachers from 32 local primary schools. It also adopts regression-based macros, integrated with bootstrapping, to examine and compare sizes and proportions of potential mediating effects of the three human relational variables. The findings affirm the role and nature trust, communication, and collaboration play in the mediated relationship. In contrast, the mediating power of collaboration is non-significantly stronger than that of communication, and is more than double that of trust. The conclusion is that a school environment featuring mutual trust, effective communication and genuine collaboration is a core condition for teacher learning and change. Provided that the forces that bind people together in schools are multiple, principals are recommended to create school culture and conditions strategically for teacher learning to thrive.
[Copyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis.]

Civic education is a component of the school curriculum in most countries yet it is not always given a high priority compared to subjects such as Mathematics, Science and Language. Given the current climate of concern related to youth radicalization, the apparent attractiveness of radical solutions to social problems and the importance of adolescence as a key time for political socialization, new efforts should be made to make civic education a more central and more relevant part of the school experience. In particular, the role school leadership can play in developing more civically-oriented schools should be examined. Kennedy, Li & Chan (2014) and Li & Kennedy (2015) reported studies of the individual school and community influences on Hong Kong students’ civic knowledge and understanding. The results suggested that school could be differentiated by the extent to which students were encouraged to participate in school civic activities. School with high levels of student participation tended to have students with higher levels of civic knowledge. At the same time, resources in the community were also a significant influence on students’ civic learning. This result highlighted the importance of leadership in creating a culture of participation and suggested that ‘leading for civic learning’ should be a priority in responding to the current need for more relevant and meaningful civic education in schools. The purpose of this paper is to explore in greater depth what it means to adopt ‘leading for civic learning’ as a motif for student civic development. Implications will be drawn for classroom pedagogy, the school curriculum and school policies in order to show how schools might respond to the current climate of youth disaffection and alienation.