While Western educators caution against contrived collegiality in the midst of enthusiasm for peer coaching as a form of teacher development, Hong Kong educators are struggling to detach discussion and observation of classroom teaching from staff appraisal. The challenges for this task are twofold: to secure a niche for peer coaching in the practice of staff development, and to ward off contrived collegiality in the course. Using an action research paradigm, the present project attempted to meet these challenges in two schools. As a joint work between various parties, the present project had to negotiate its way cautiously to achieve genuine collaboration and avoid imposition from the administrators and outsiders to the front-line teachers. During the course, innovative strategies were taken to cope with various difficulties, including time constraints, teachers' psychological pressure, and the possibility of contrived collegiality and implementation partnership. The evaluation of the project showed that the teachers generally accepted peer coaching and found it helpful to their professional development. The experience in the two schools indicated that true collaboration might emerge from organizationally induced collegiality under certain conditions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013188011010xxxx]

Hong Kong secondary schools have difficulty in integrating guidance, or counselling, and discipline into schooling. In some schools, discipline is overdeveloped while guidance is underdeveloped. The positive aspect of the caring system is distorted as part of the provision of discipline. This article looks at the distinction between guidance and discipline, and deals with what relatively little is known about in current research, that is, how guidance and discipline function within a school organization. It uses the perspectives of interactionism and social constructionism to contrast the relationship between guidance and discipline in two Hong Kong secondary schools. It employs case study and qualitative methods for data collection. Data for the two schools show that the contextual and organizational factors have a profound impact on the connectedness between guidance and discipline at the three levels of whole school, department and classroom. Finally, the implications for their implementation and integration will be given.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131910701427355]

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Hong Kong (HK) school curriculum, especially the general curriculum for civic education and other social subjects, in relation to the political events of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, and the return of HK's sovereignty from the United Kingdom (UK) to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1997. This paper will argue that since 1984, the school curriculum of HK has been marked by tensions brought about by political cultures shaped by the UK and the PRC, the bureaucratic mechanisms of which are used to make sure that those curriculum contents that are judged to be politically correct are taught in school. Over the last two decades the school curriculum has been depicted as being shaped by the emergence of the nation-state and the transfer of sovereignty. Granted that political and national education forms part of the school culture, the question of how to shape students to be patriotic through the curriculum will continue to be contentious.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596300701289045]

Universities in a capitalistic society have been expected to produce graduates for the labour market which in turn contributes to the economic development of the nation. In today's environment where the social spending on education grows faster than the economy, it becomes increasingly difficult for the education system to maintain an existing level of provision. Hence, institutions are required to legitimate themselves through the value they provide. The capitalistic process in Hong Kong has generated the demand for lifelong learning in the higher education system. The resulting evolution of the system has compelled the policy makers of higher education to redefine the purpose of higher education and re-evaluate the university management. This paper discusses Liu's (1997) holistic approach of evaluating and planning for the university academic programmes as well as building an 'enterprise culture' at the institutional level with a Hong Kong case analysis. When strategically planning for the future in a volatile and transient environment, university management plays an important role in integrating continuing professional education (CPE) and mainstream academic programmes and in cultivating a market-oriented 'institutional enterprise-culture' which responds to environmental changes more proactively.
[Copyright of International Journal of Lifelong Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/026013799293513]

Cross-cultural analysis of the effects of transformational leadership on organizational learning in elementary and secondary schools in Hong Kong, Western Australia, Canada (Manitoba), and Taiwan.
[Copyright of School Leadership & Management is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1363243022000053448]