This report introduces the experiential learning initiative at a major university in Hong Kong that prepares pre-service teachers with experience of engaging with social and cultural issues in teaching. It calls on teacher educators in different contexts to work together on similar initiatives that help pre-service teachers grow professionally through designing, developing, managing and promoting their experiential learning projects to enhance human development and improve human conditions.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2015.1080424]

Catering for learner diversity is one of the key areas in the recent educational reform in Hong Kong. Pre-service teacher education acts as a fundamental way to equip pre-service teachers ready for accommodating diverse learning needs and to build up pre-service teachers' self-efficacy. The purpose of the study is to examine prospective teachers' teaching beliefs toward differentiated instruction and teaching efficacy. Using a sequential mixed methods design that contains a questionnaire, focus group interviews, and individual interviews, prospective teachers undertaking a 13-session course regarding differentiated instruction as offered by a local university in Hong Kong participated in the study from January to April 2013. Changes in teaching beliefs regarding differentiated instruction as well as teaching efficacy levels were found. More positive attitudes toward differentiated teaching were found; however, there existed different concerns including class management and conflicts with personal teaching beliefs. These concerns may be related to practical experiences and confidence as well as expectations upon students. Implications for future course development and research are discussed at the end of the paper.
[Copyright of Teachers and Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2015.1055435]

This paper is based on research conducted at the Hong Kong Institute of Education with students in teacher training programs. Students in classes were surveyed to indicate the impact on their learning of the innovative use of teams by their non-native speaking lecturers. Traditional methods in the Hong Kong teacher education setting seldom involve teaming (Morris, 1995). Research on changes such as teaming indicates that they can more rapidly be carried out in Quality environment (Bryant, 1995). Experts in research on change and innovation indicate that there are at least 4 dimensions from which to study an educational innovation, such as teaming in a traditional educational setting such as Hong Kong: from the teacher's perspective, how the innovation is used in the classroom to enhance learning, the leadership role of effective change facilitators, and the various forms the innovation can take (Hord, Rutherford, Huling-Astin, & Hall; 1987). In addition the use of teams in the Hong Kong teacher education program will be studied in relation to model such as the Concerns Based Adoption Model (C-BAM) based on many years of intensive, school-based research (Hord, 1997), as well as from a Quality model (Deming. 1986). These diverse aspects will begin to shed light on how the use of an innovation such as teaming can impact the student learning. Initial findings indicate that student learning is enhanced through the use of teaming. Students report that they find working with their peers beneficial. They report learning not only course content, but also communication strategies. Students also identified many concerns and barriers that need to be addressed in the Hong Kong setting that need to be dealt with to make teaming more successful.

Teacher education is currently on the reform agenda where it needs to be, given the current status and working conditions of teachers in Hong Kong. Rationale of the design of teacher education program is under heated debate among players in education. One of the SIG (study interest group) in HKIEd in curriculum development and implementation would like to share their findings concerning issues that confront teachers and teacher educators. This symposium aims to discuss teacher education from several angles. It will discuss teacher education from the educational leader's perspectives; compare perception of training needs for primary school teachers between school practitioners and educators; and explore program development strategy for teacher education. Results from quantitative and qualitative surveys will be used as a base for the discussion. Perspectives of the players in education on impression, expectation, quality, strengths and weakness of teacher education are described. Suggestions for reform and proposed models for teacher education program are offered. Findings discussed in the symposium may be helpful in the preparation of future teacher education program.

As the world moves into the Information Age, Hong Kong’s educational application of technology in schools seem to lag far behind, let alone using effective GIS (Geographic Information System) technology in school teaching. This paper aims at introducing GIS literacy modules for teacher education through acute environmental issues in Hong Kong., environmental literacy among ordinary citizens is badly lacking, as evidenced by the deteriorating air and water quality in and around the territory, as well as the serious landsliding and flooding after every rainstorms. Since 1993, a Hong Kong Ecological Database has been created by World Wide Fund for Nature Hong Kong using state-of-the-art GIS, which emphasizes biodiversity. Although the database provides a good resource to promote environmental literacy, it has not been taken up vigorously by educators. The ignorance of incorporating advanced knowledge and skills such as GIS in curriculum reform is partly attributed to weak communication of professional and academic studies and partly attributed to a not well-connected curriculum design under the colonial tertiary and secondary systems. This perhaps is one of the most critical education problems today unsolved in Hong Kong. As the theme of this paper indicates, systems of teacher education at various levels are experiencing significant reforms throughout the Asian pacific region and China. This paper will focus on one of the targets of these reforms – to put GIS into the curriculum change. It is found that GIS application can (1) help create systematic database by using multiple-sourced data; (2) facilitate the use of multimedia technologies in school teaching and learning; (3) train student-teachers on important local environmental issues through fieldwork, hypothesis testing, data analysis, and data visualization. Hence GIS is not confined to a single compartment of knowledge or to one branch of education, but is truly universal in its utility.

This paper reports on a macro-level the findings of a VITAL project (Variation for Improvement of Teaching And Learning). VITAL is a large project funded by Hong Kong Education Bureau, under which, each of the selected 120 schools in Hong Kong will participate in a Learning Study project in a selected subject area at a selected grade. This paper will report findings at systemic level, school level and subject level and investigate its impact in teacher professional development, construction of learning communities and student learning outcomes. Finally, the paper will discuss about how the VITAL projects facilitate the education reform in Hong Kong.

This paper aims to explore the mechanism of Learning Study in enhancing teacher learning by adopting community of practices as the analytical framework. Under the curriculum reform in Hong Kong, schools are facing challenges in acquiring pedagogical content knowledge for implementing new curriculum. How to enhance teacher learning for building school capacity is critical for sustainable development. Learning Study is a school improvement project which aims to improve the quality of student learning via enhancing teacher professional development by creating a community of practice among teachers, researchers and educators involved in the design, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of a research lesson, with ultimate goal of developing Learning Community in the school. This study will explore how the community of practice set up by the Learning Study Project can effectively help teachers build their pedagogical content knowledge. Wenger's theory of Communities of Practices, which postulate that participants have a mutual engagement for a negotiated joint enterprise and they develop a shared repertoire, is adopted as the theoretical framework for exploring teacher learning and professional growth. The study adopts ethnographic approach to investigate social phenomena of teacher interactions in a case selected from Learning Study Project. Results show that the collaborative features of the Learning Study provide opportunities for teachers to create shared knowledge, values and beliefs and to establish overlapping histories among them. Learning Study enhances teacher learning by creating a community of practice for knowledge sharing and reflective practices on teaching and learning.

Since Learning Study has been regarded as an effective approach for teacher professional development, it was introduced as a core module in the training programmes for over 400 year two pre-service teachers in the Hong Kong Institute of Education in 2007, This paper first illustrates the arrangements of the Learning Study module, including the module schedule, module content, mode of assessment and student profiles. It then draws on the data of an evaluation study of the module conduced in year 2007-08 to illustrate the experience of these pre-service teachers in Learning Study, focusing on how they learned to teach via participating in Learning Study and what difficulty they had encountered in the process. The paper also reviews the effectiveness of the module and puts forward suggestions for further improvement. It finally concludes with implications on applying Learning Study as a model of initial teacher education.

This paper explores the importance of student teachers' epistemological beliefs in the process of learning to teach. It examines the problematic nature of the conceptual basis of the field and then reports on a series of studies undertaken in Hong Kong to develop a set of scales to map student teachers' epistemological beliefs. By exploring the assumptions and methods used by Schommer to measure such beliefs it is concluded that the basis of her empirical work may be questionable. Adopting her 63 questionnaire and the critique of Hofer and Pintrich the paper reports on studies attempting to map the epistemological beliefs of Hong Kong teacher education students. Conclusions about the assumptions underpinning the study of epistemological beliefs and cross cultural analysis of such beliefs are considered. Additionally, implications of the work for teacher education are considered.

Personal definitions of creativity are described as the implicit theories of creativity, while the conceptions offered by scholars or researchers are referred to as explicit theories of creativity. The implicit theories of creativity may vary from one person to another, from one field to another, and from one culture to another. In this study, twenty pre-service student teachers and ten teacher trainers of Hong Kong Institute of Education are interviewed or asked to complete a questionnaire. They are invited to give their own opinions on: (1) What is teacher creativity? (2) How can you describe a creative teacher? and (3) How do you decide whether a teaching idea is creative or not? The results of this study reveal that, not only imaginative and novel teaching ideas are considered to be creative, however, flexibility in teaching, modifications and improvements of existing teaching ideas and abilities to solve daily problems are also regarded as forms of teacher creativity. As another difference to creativity defined in other (artistic) fields, respondents refer creativity of teaching ideas not only to their newness, but put strong emphasis on their effectiveness in teaching and how interesting they are to students. Unlike findings in western societies, being humorous is not considered necessarily to be a personality trait of a creative teacher. Study on these implicit theories of teacher creativity are important because they usually act as standards for judging and assessing creative behaviors in teaching, and also serve as the basis for training and self-development in the area of teacher creativity.