Among the various approaches that can be used to try to bring about changes in educational initiatives, the main strategies have been broadly classified into three types; those that center on problem solving processes, conceptual changes, and the power and authority of some agents over others (Morris 1996). In a highly centralized educational system such as Hong Kong, the change strategies employed in curriculum initiatives have always been associated with the third. Curriculum renewal tends to be imposed on teachers from the top such as the Education Department. Teachers as one of the major participants in the curriculum development process are rarely involved in the planning and decision-making.
This paper describes phase one of a one-year school-based teacher development initiative in which English teachers of a primary school take the initiative in making changes to their existing curriculum with on-site support from a team of teacher educators. This teacher development project aims at adopting a problem-solving and interactive approach to teacher change in curriculum initiative. It also attempts to explore the roles of teachers and teacher educators in the process of collaboration. It intends to seek the interface between theory and practice in the local educational context, in particular in empowering teachers through mutual communication, negotiation, consultation, rather than top-down persuasion.
This paper also reports the preliminary findings from the qualitative data collected and discusses implications in relation to interactive curriculum change strategies, the interface between theory and practice, and the roles of teachers and teacher educators in a collaborative project.
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Addressing the needs of students with learning difficulties in the mainstream English classroom in Hong Kong is a major challenge for a range of reasons, including a lack of research into the topic. This narrative suggests that such students are likely to be experiencing difficulty in a number of subject areas, and that a collaborative approach is an effective way of designing strategies to help them. This narrative further reports on an action research project, which has begun the task of developing strategies to meet the needs of this group of students and their teachers.
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This paper reports the details about a study which investigates the attitudes of Hong Kong English-as-a-Second-Language teachers concerning English language teaching problems. The research findings reveal that attitudinal patterns in resources, curriculum, and teacher competence and that most respondents wanted a more flexible curriculum, textbooks geared to student level, and more classroom reading materials.