The Lecturer Attachment Scheme (LAS) advocated in the Hong Kong Institute of Education aims at creating opportunities for the teaching staff to update their school teaching experience, participate in a real school setting and experience the work life of local teachers. Through the school attachment, the teacher educator will not only update their teaching experience and possibly build collaborative relationship with schools in staff development and research activities.
This paper describes two lecturers from the English Department of the Hong Kong Institute of Education who joined the Institute's attachment Scheme for their own professional benefit and development. During the two-week attachment period, the lecturers took over English teaching duties from two regular teachers and worked closely with the teachers. All their lessons were observed by the regular teachers and were video-taped. The lecturers tried different teaching approaches such as the incorporation of big books for the teaching of reading and materials adaptation. The lecturers brought with them what they perceive as 'good' language teaching in the classroom and attempted to verify whether theory and practice can be coherently integrated.
Field notes and journal data recording the lecturers' reflection and experience on the scheme and interview data probing into the teachers' evaluation of the LAS will be presented. It is affirmed that such attachment scheme can enhance professional development both for the teacher educators and for the teachers. It also enabled an avenue for follow-up school-based collaborative projects.
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Recent international studies have highlighted the success of students from Hong Kong in mathematics and problem-solving, and have begun to suggest some of the factors associated with this success. Other studies have suggested that Hong Kong students are averse to risk-taking, favouring memorisation and imitation in their solution strategies. Year 5 students in Hong Kong and Australia were given mathematics assessments of different types: orally presented mental computation problems, and a performance task that was undertaken in normal classroom conditions. Observations of the students' approaches to these tasks in the classroom and analyses of their responses revealed similarities and differences between the two countries. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the curriculum diversity and differences in metacognitive skills.
[Copyright of Evaluation & Research in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500790802485211 ]