This article provides two 'portraits' of headteachers in primary schools in England and Hong Kong, derived from semi-structured interviews with these individuals. Contrary to some claims that such a small sample is worthless, this article argues that what is most meaningful is sometimes derived from the singular and unique; that generalisations in education are as likely to be useful if they are 'fuzzy' generalisations as if they are from scientific or statistical generalisations; and that the individual case can strip away the clutter of large contexts and allow recognition of a common shared humanity. What these portraits also show is that responses to larger contexts are heavily dependent on personality and local context, and that if policy implementation and professional development are to have impact, then an attention to the personal and the local are going to be critical factors in any success in these areas
[Copyright of Education 3-13 is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004270701577347]

Research literature has long indicated that action research may stimulate practitioners themselves to actively evaluate the quality of their practice. This study is designed to report the use of action research for the development of early years professional practice by analyzing the pre-project and the post-project video-filmed teaching events. The finding was that action research might support knowledge development in the teacher profession. However, the teacher's ability to accommodate outside knowledge might be limited by one's inside knowledge. The study helps to clarify the assumptions and potentials of action research for teachers learning to teach.
[Copyright of Educational Action Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09650790802011908]

Changes that occur in teachers' careers are typically conceptualized in research as occurring in several demarcated and sequential stages/phases. This study examines secondary schoolteachers' understandings of their careers and whether they could identify stages/phases in their career development. It is based on experienced teachers' recall of their career development and their in-depth interviews. The findings demonstrate the need to acknowledge the individual ways in which teachers develop as well as the need for the use of multiple frameworks for describing teachers' career development. Using a single a priori model to describe their career development, as has been common in certain previous research, does not do justice to teachers' understanding of their own careers. Furthermore, the findings of this study shed light on the contextualized nature of experience and expertise. Accordingly, implications for teacher education and policy-making in the area are drawn.
[Copyright of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13450600500083832 ]

Good tutoring requires appropriate interpersonal and pedagogical skills. Tutor personality is a major factor affecting how tutors communicate and deals with students, and yet it is a largely unexplored context of distance education. Using the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI)* this paper examines how the personality of tutors' affects their teaching effectiveness at a distance learning institution in Hong Kong. The results are compared to those reported by Chan (2001) in a similar study using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The results indicate that certain scales on the Chinese Tradition factor of the CPAI are significantly related to tutors' teaching performance, and that the MBTI could not subsume all the CPAI scales. Future research with the CPAI should explore whether this Chinese Tradition factor is unique to the Chinese culture or whether it comprises elements of a universal domain useful in understanding key interpersonal aspects of personality that have been absent from Western personality inventories.
[Copyright of International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning is the property of International Rice Research Institute.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/index]

Traditional studies of teacher commitment often ignore the effect of interactions between personal characteristics and school environment and the implications of their findings are inevitably limited. Responding to this research gap, the present study aims to investigate the contingency relationship of school organizational health to teacher commitment with multi-level statistical analysis. The study was a survey involving 20 aided primary schools and 423 teachers in Hong Kong. The findings suggest that three school organizational health factors such as morale, consideration and institutional integrity are related to teacher commitment through interactions with the teacher personal characteristics such as position, marital status, and length of service in the school. The result supports that the relationship between school organizational health and teacher commitment is contingent upon teacher characteristics. The interesting findings can provide implications for school improvement and future research.
[Copyright of Educational Research & Evaluation is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1076/edre.5.3.249.3883]

For some time, change has been the driving force in language teaching and learning. This seems to be even truer today than it was in the past, and seems set to be even more so in the future, which raises the questions of how to identify what is known and what is needed by teachers managing the changes, and how to address any needs. In this study, we asked 35 experienced secondary school teachers of English in Hong Kong to rate their own change-related knowledge, skills and personality characteristics, to find out how they would rate themselves in the various areas, and to consider whether such information can be of use in identifying change-related support needs. The results show that the teachers self-assessed some of their change-related knowledge, skills and personality characteristics as more and some less developed than others. Reasons are put forward to explain these different ratings, and ways in which such information might be used to identify teachers' change- related needs are discussed.
[Copyright of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13598660120061327]