Many teacher educator researchers often stand outside of schools to teach others about what is going on inside of them. In 1994 a team of researchers sought a different approach when they embarked upon a journey to enhance the professional development of primary teachers within the teachers' own school settings. The goal of this journey was to facilitate the development of literature-based reading programmes in selected Hong Kong primary schools. This colloquium will describe the process of facilitating and charting the development of the teachers as well as monitoring the growth of their students in reading over a three year period. The conditions and factors that influence teacher development will report briefly on the work in their respective schools and the approaches used to facilitate teacher development. Researchers will offer insights into their personal successes and failures and indicate directions for continuing teachers' professional development after the project. The limitations and strengths of adopting a long term approach to enhancing and studying teacher development from a curriculum initiative and research perspective, will be examined and recommendations offered for the way forward into the new century.

At the end of three sixteen week in-service teacher-education courses for primary and secondary school English teachers and English Panel-Chairpersons in June 1994 at the former Institute of Education (now the Bonham Campus of the Hong Kong Institute of Education), 78 teachers agreed that the journals they had kept throughout the course could be used as data for a research project being carried out by a group of tutors. The following December, during the International Language in Education Conference at the University of Hong Kong, these tutors presented a colloquium on journal writing using data collected from the journals. This paper, which formed part of that colloquium, first explains why there was a negative attitude among the teachers towards poetry and its use in schools at the beginning of the course, and then goes on to show how and why there was a change in attitude among fifteen of the teachers towards poetry and its use in the classroom.
[Copyright © 1995 Language in Education Journal.]