Although a quality preschool supports young children's health and safety, 'quality' has been defined diversely enough that its delivery has been varied among kindergarten teachers. The current study was the first to examine and compare perceptions of school safety between urban and rural kindergarten teachers. Sixty-seven Hong Kong teachers (from an urban region of China) and 111 Yunnan teachers (from a rural region of China) rated their perceived knowledge and attitudes regarding child safety and perceived school safety for young children. The results showed that although Yunnan teachers rated their schools' safety less favourably than did Hong Kong teachers, they rated themselves as having better knowledge and stronger attitudes about child safety. Hong Kong teachers' age and total teaching experience and Yunnan teachers' perceived knowledge significantly predicted their perceived school safety for young children. The implications for 'quality' as a multi-level construct in relation to quality teacher education are discussed.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2016.1151418]

Purpose – Teacher learning communities (TLCs) formed within subject departments are conceptualized as reform platform for facilitating school improvement and teacher development. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which three TLCs were structured and managed for generating change capability in secondary schools in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach – A review of the literature on the contribution of learning communities to teacher professional development, and the functions and styles of subject leadership provides the theoretical background of the study. Participant observations and semi-structured interviews were employed as the main instruments for the investigation into the potentials of TLCs for enhancing professional renewals. Narrative accounts were obtained from a total of 21 teachers (including three subject leaders) on the nature and process of their participation in the renewal projects. Findings – The findings of the interview study reveal the landscape of subject leadership orientations that shaped the collaborative practices, power relations and knowledge representations within TLCs. Variability is noted in the subject leaders’ concerns for harmonious relationship, executive control, professional growth and leadership empowerment. The spectrum of knowledge structure in these communities is marked by a hierarchical relationship on one end, and a heterarchical relationship on the other. Research limitations/implications – This paper portrays the dynamics within three TLCs, and depicts a continuum of three leadership styles. The literature on subject leadership in TLCs could be enriched with further investigations into the contextual variables and sources of influence that affect the choice of leadership orientations of subject leaders who grapple with a balance between managerial imperative for control and accountability and a learning imperative for participative explorations that satisfy teachers’ aspirations for autonomy

This study tests mediated principal leadership effects on teacher professional learning through collegial trust, communication and collaboration in Hong Kong primary schools. It is based on a series of single mediator studies, and uses the same convenience sample of 970 teachers from 32 local primary schools. It also adopts regression-based macros, integrated with bootstrapping, to examine and compare sizes and proportions of potential mediating effects of the three human relational variables. The findings affirm the role and nature trust, communication, and collaboration play in the mediated relationship. In contrast, the mediating power of collaboration is non-significantly stronger than that of communication, and is more than double that of trust. The conclusion is that a school environment featuring mutual trust, effective communication and genuine collaboration is a core condition for teacher learning and change. Provided that the forces that bind people together in schools are multiple, principals are recommended to create school culture and conditions strategically for teacher learning to thrive.
[Copyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis.]

香港曾經是個很特別的殖民地，英國佔領香港非因掠奪資源，而是因地理上接近中國的優勢。香港的政治主權，並不是古典殖民主義描述的一對一關係，而是結連與中國、英國的多邊關係。本文以三個階段分析香港的教師教育：即（1）從中央書院至1945年第二次世界大戰結束；（2）戰後至1984年中英談判；（3）過渡時期至高等教育急速發展的20世紀90年代，探討殖民管治與香港教師教育的關係。回歸之前，教師教育在中、英互動的政經脈絡中發展，政策源於回應中國社會變遷的權衡之計。教師教育政策響應社會需求，有效保持香港社會穩定，長久以來是個失落的教育議程。本文從歷史探索香港教師教育的發展。
[Copyright © 2014 香港中文大學香港教育研究所.]

Competence to work in schools is an important dimension of professional competence, although it is often a neglected dimension of teacher development. This article reports a qualitative study that examined student teachers’ learning experiences in initial teacher education (ITE) in relation to competence to work in schools. In-depth interviews were conducted with 12 student teachers on an undergraduate ITE programme in Hong Kong. The findings of the study show that competence to work in schools is characterised by student teachers’ deep contextualised learning. In addition, it offers a deeper understanding of this competence in the ITE context by identifying its three facets, namely understanding of the micro-political realities of schools, social capital building and social strategies. The study provides insights for ITE and schools to support student teachers’ development of their competence to work in schools, including the design of ITE curricula, ITE processes and co-curricular activities in undergraduate studies. Moreover, it suggests the importance of developing schools as growth-fostering and positive micro-political sites for ITE fieldwork and teacher induction.
[Copyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis.]

This study aims to understand teacher emotions through interviewing 25 and surveying 1492 primary teachers in China using a mixed method. Deductive content analysis was employed to analyze the data allocating the five nested ecological system – microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macro-system, and chronosystem. Results show that the number of emotions that teachers reported decreased as the distance from the teachers increased. The highest intensity of teacher emotions, especially with regard to teacher-student interaction and classroom management, was reported at the microsystem level. Given the powerful role that emotions and relationships play in teaching and learning, it is critical for teacher education in both preservice and inservice settings to support the development of knowledge and skills for emotional self-regulation, the nurturing of relationships in classrooms, and the improvement of their will-being.

The aim of the survey was to examine the attitudes of general primary PE teachers toward integrated PE and the relationships of gender, teaching experience, and class size. Eighty three teachers participated in the survey. The results indicated a neutral attitude towards integrated PE by teachers. There was a significant difference between male and female teachers in their perception of whether "students with disabilities like my teaching" (p = 0.018), but no significant differences with other attitudes by gender. There was a significant difference between teachers' teaching experiences and their perceptions of whether "Little support offered to integrated PE" (p = 0.006), however, no significant differences with other items by experience. There was also a relationship between perceived teaching competency and class size (p < 0.001, r = 0.454). The results were mainly discussed in relation to teaching competency, support, teaching experience and class size.
[Copyright © 2012 Hong Kong Baptist University.]

The current article examines the issue of teachers' high job stress and low motivation to develop their careers, in Hong Kong, whose situation echoes the ones in many other parts of the globe. Based on some previous research, we propose that the giving of social support from teachers to students is helpful to protect teachers from this negative effect. We carried out a pilot study with a sample of 41 local teachers who have a range of ages and teaching experience, whose position in school is at the middle management level, across 41 different schools. Questionnaires were used to examine the teachers giving of social support to their students, work-related self-efficacy, job satisfaction and aspiration. Regression analysis revealed that offering social support to students is associated positively with the teachers' work-related self-efficacy, which in turn is positively associated with the job satisfaction and aspiration of the teachers. Based on this, it is suggested that prompting teachers to give social support to their students is an effective way to tackle the current problem of teachers' high job stress and low motivation for teacher development. Implications are discussed.
[Copyright © 2015 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.]