Continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers must be situated within the context of the practice of teachers and be relevant to their teaching and learning needs. A CPD project was conducted in a Hong Kong kindergarten class. For five years prior to the CPD project, the class had used a mixed curriculum of project approach topics and thematic units. The novice teachers, however, repeatedly expressed their concerns regarding the project work, including their lack of control over its direction. The author (the school consultant) offered to conduct a school-based CPD project at the kindergarten in order to enhance the teachers' professional development using the project approach. This paper tracks a novice teacher's professional growth and development through her experience in the CPD project. Specifically, the paper discusses how a project involving kindergarten children evolved in the classroom, as well as the reflections of a novice teacher regarding the project approach and CPD.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2012.722440]

Changing educational priorities are reflected both in the literature and the models that seek to describe initial teachers' professional formation and learning. However, do new teachers' experiences conform to these models? A sampling of Hong Kong secondary school teachers over their first year as full-time teachers provides data from questionnaires and longitudinal interviews supporting a variety of processes and related models which highlight that becoming a teacher reflects individual differences. To account for this array of individual differences an interaction model is proposed that reflects the Chinese cultural context of this study - the 'dim-sum' model - a model that sites initial teachers' professional formation and learning within a multi-perspective and interactive learning context.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530500200252 ]