Effective teaching and learning strategy is one of the most important topics in the field of teachers' professional development. Teachers' education and pre-service teachers' training programmes provide necessary coursework, field experience, and student teaching internship experience to pre-service, potential, and second career teachers who are seeking initial license status. Due to the rapid developments in Hong Kong, China, school teachers face challenges, difficulties, and social problems due to excess enrolment of teachers from different backgrounds. The regular curriculum and material also fail to cover all these issues. The current study applied the seminar technique as recommended in Polya's "Four-Step Problem-Solving Model" with targeted discussion topics and engaged 12 STEM pre-service teachers at one of the Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) programmes. The results indicated that beyond regular coursework, field experience, and internship experiences embedded in the curriculum, additional seminars allowed the participants to establish inter-disciplinary teaching strategies and critical thinking skills. The results of this study serve as a blueprint for teachers' education programme leaders and school administrators to establish similar seminars and conduct such sessions for their pre-service and in-service teachers to refresh and advance their teaching and learning strategies.
[Copyright of International Journal of Education and Practice is the property of Pak Publishing Group.]

Social diversity is now commonplace in many communities in today's globalised world. This diversity can be seen in any classroom of learners, and international studies have shown the complex ways in which disabilities, race, ethnicity, gender and social class can determine a child's opportunity to succeed or fail in the education system. In Hong Kong, like in many educational contexts around the world, teachers are grappling with increasing diversity amongst their students, including teaching students with special educational needs (SEN) and non-Chinese speaking students (NCS) living in Hong Kong. This paper examines how three primary TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teachers are constructing identities as inclusive practitioners as they grapple with enacting the inclusive education policy recently introduced into Hong Kong schools. The data are drawn from a small-scale collaborative reflective inquiry for teacher professional development. Drawing upon a sociocultural and critical framing of identity theory, we trace the three teachers' identity construction as EFL teachers and inclusive education practitioners. We view the role of discourse, self-positioning and social context as key processes in teacher identity formation. Implications for furthering the development of inclusive education in EFL classrooms are offered.

This study aims to report how Hong Kong teachers handle a seemingly conventional, orderly schooling phenomenonXthe teaching of the newly arrived children (NAC) migrated from mainland China. Semi-structured interviews with ten teachers from nine primary schools were conducted. The principal findings are that the teachers are not prepared for the challenges of teaching NAC, that the traditional approaches adopted by many teachers are ineffective, that subtle transformation of the pupil population due to the everlasting influx of NAC has yet to be appreciated by the teachers, and that teachers' logic - their worldview, mindset and conceptualisation of forces at work in Hong Kong schooling - remains unchanged. This paper highlights the various issues of monoculturalisation. Implications are discussed.
[Copyright of Teaching Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10476210500122691]

This study assessed perceptions of self-efficacy and successful intelligence among 220 Chinese prospective and in-service secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. Teacher self-efficacy in six domains - teaching highly able learners, classroom management, guidance and counselling, student engagement, teaching to accommodate diversity, and teaching for enriched learning - was related to the three triarchic dimensions (analytical, creative, and practical) of successful intelligence. Each of the three triarchic abilities was found to contribute independently and in combination to the prediction of the six domains of teacher self-efficacy. Practical abilities were the most significant predictor of self-efficacy beliefs in five domains. Teaching teachers for successful intelligence, in strategies to enhance teacher self-efficacy, is discussed.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410802259246]

This article reports the development of a teacher self-efficacy scale that aims to accommodate the complexity of teacher functioning in secondary schools in times of education reforms in Hong Kong. The scale was designed to assess six domains of teacher self-efficacy: teaching highly able learners, classroom management, guidance and counselling, student engagement, teaching to accommodate diversity, and teaching for enriched learning. The total scale and the six subscales were evaluated based on the responses of 159 Hong Kong Chinese prospective and in-service teachers for internal consistency and construct validity, and for convergent and discriminant validation with external measures.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410701491833]