Factors leading to successful professional learning communities (PLCs) have been widely discussed in the West, but little is known about how/whether teachers' beliefs contribute to PLCs in the Chinese context. This qualitative case study aimed to investigate teachers' beliefs about teacher learning in PLCs and their influence on collegial learning activities in two departments of a Hong Kong secondary school. Semi-structured interviews and observations were employed to collect data. The findings indicate that teachers in the Chinese Department believed that learning could be achieved in PLCs and their practices of collegial activities were conducive to teacher learning. Conversely, teachers in the English Department did not believe that interacting with colleagues would foster learning and their collegial activities yielded limited accomplishment in teacher growth. It is suggested that teachers' beliefs play an important role in facilitating or impeding reform initiatives on teacher development. Implications for teacher education and further studies are discussed.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2013.872025]

This study focused on the collaborative structure-building behavior of school principals and examined how such behavior affects teacher empowerment. More important, it tested the mediating effects of participative management and learning culture. By collecting nested data from 104 schools in Hong Kong and adopting multilevel structural equation modeling, we found that teachers' sense of autonomy and self-efficacy were correlated at the individual level but were independent at the school level. The effect of building collaborative structures on teachers' self-efficacy was mediated by both participative management and learning culture, whereas the effect on autonomy was mediated by participative management only. The findings contribute to the literature in at least 2 ways. First, the inclusion of both principal leadership and school-level factors provides more refined predications of teacher empowerment. Second, the testing of the theory-grounded hypotheses in an Asian society verifies the validity of certain cultural assertions about this region.
[Copyright of School Effectiveness and School Improvement is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2014.888086]

Short-term international experience programmes are a common element of English second language (ESL) teacher education in many countries. This study problematizes the belief that such programmes necessarily result in beneficial changes in pre-service teachers thinking about themselves as teachers - their beliefs, habits, and values - by exploring the experiences of eight pre-service ESL teachers from Hong Kong as they undertook a short-term international experience programme in Australia. Drawing on a theory of identity construction, the findings suggest that identity conflicts impacted how the student teachers experienced this programme as they struggled to reconcile past, present, and future trajectories of teacher identity. In particular, the student teachers constructed rigid divisions between different types of teachers and teaching they experienced at home and abroad. These divisions were reflected in antagonistic relations between the types of English language teachers and teaching they aligned their own teaching activities and practices with and the teacher identities that they perceived to be available to them within the Hong Kong education system. Implications for addressing such identity conflicts throughout international experience programmes are considered and implications for future research are discussed.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2011.566997]

In this article the author discusses some of the approaches that she takes in challenging student teachers to understand education in global context, rather than in a decontextualised or instrumental way. These approaches draw on the author's experience of being an educator from the 'global South' (the Caribbean) now working in the 'global North' (Australia). As the first black teacher that most Australian student teachers have encountered in their entire education, the author finds that she can offer them provocative educational narratives and questions stemming from a lifetime career in education, studying and working in various roles in schools, colleges, universities and ministries of education in Jamaica, Grenada, Hong Kong, the UK, the USA and Australia. The author sets out to disrupt the preconceptions of her students as a starting point in a collective journey of thinking differently about education.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher’s website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2011.581513]