Whilst institute-school partnerships have been investigated extensively as potentially valuable routes for the professional preparations of student teachers (Booth, Furling and Wilkin, 1990; McCullough and Fidler, 1994), considerably less is known as to how co-operating teachers/ teaching advisers process their roles and the nature of effect of their dynamic relationships with student teachers on their own professional lives. This paper attempts to present the voices of four teaching advisers who participated in the Honorary Teaching Adviser Scheme of an initial teacher education programme in Hong Kong. Data collected through semi-structured interviews, lesson observations, and post-observation conferences present a general picture of the challenges and promises of the Scheme as perceived by the teaching advisers on their own professional growth. Findings point to the need for re- envisioning the full potential of mentoring in teacher preparation and continuing professional development. Data from a previous study will also be contrasted to illustrate teachers' progression from resistance to readiness to assume an expanding role in teacher preparation. The paper will conclude with suggestions for fostering an effective and productive professional learning experience for both student teachers and teaching advisers.

This paper reports the processes and ways in which a dedicated website has been developed by a group of seven colleagues at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) Science Department to support their student-teachers' development of teaching competence during various kinds of field experience activities such as practicum, teaching practice and school visits etc. From the outcome of our project, a comprehensive web-based system was created with the following specially selected features to help our student-teachers develop confidence and skills for the effective teaching of various science topics in schools: A data bank of 20 sets of video clips on exemplary parts of students' teaching performance in schools or microteaching at HKIEd as identified and selected by their supervisors. A collection of virtual reality resources which include a typical classroom or laboratory environment with a 3D/panoramic view etc. A website called Field Experience Support on Science (FESS) being developed at http://www.ied.edu.hk/fess/ which provides a platform for the management of the aforementioned 2 types of resources in the WWW plus various synchronous or 2 asynchronous communication channels as well as sharing of lesson plans, schemes of work and other teaching resources etc.

Many teacher educator researchers often stand outside of schools to teach others about what is going on inside of them. In 1994 a team of researchers sought a different approach when they embarked upon a journey to enhance the professional development of primary teachers within the teachers' own school settings. The goal of this journey was to facilitate the development of literature-based reading programmes in selected Hong Kong primary schools. This colloquium will describe the process of facilitating and charting the development of the teachers as well as monitoring the growth of their students in reading over a three year period. The conditions and factors that influence teacher development will report briefly on the work in their respective schools and the approaches used to facilitate teacher development. Researchers will offer insights into their personal successes and failures and indicate directions for continuing teachers' professional development after the project. The limitations and strengths of adopting a long term approach to enhancing and studying teacher development from a curriculum initiative and research perspective, will be examined and recommendations offered for the way forward into the new century.

Schön's notion of artistry of professional practice as defined in the notion of 'framing' offers a way to capture an essential process of the practitioner's learning in practice in professional development. In the process of interacting with the practical situation, the practitioner has to rely on his/her past experience and understanding to experimentally impose meaning on the situation in action (Furlong et al, 1988). This involves 'a constant proves of interpretation, action, reflection and adjustment' (ibid: 123) in action-learning cycles, which is important to teachers' development of expertise (Pang, 2005). Applying such a notion of teaching to understand the processes provided in the action-learning cycles inherent in the design of Learning Study carried out in Hong Kong, this paper aims to report on a Learning Study carried out in the context of English language teaching at primary level, in which four primary ELT teachers were involved in an Institute-school collaboration project. In the process of the Learning Study which consisted of 10 to 12 meetings, the teachers involved and the researcher contributed in a collaborative manner their experiences and understandings to the framing of the lesson in focus. While reporting on the stages of the Learning Study, and the effectiveness of learning of the topic in focus, the paper will focus particularly on how the teachers had benefited in such a process of collective framing in addressing the pedagogical problem in focus. Implications will be drawn on the use of Learning Study as a tool for expertise development in teaching.

The focus of teacher education research in recent years has shifted from a behavioural research paradigm (Beatie, 1995), which examines how teacher behaviour influences student learning, to one which studies teacher cognition, and its relationship with professional actions (Watkins and Biggs, 2001). Such a shift is premised on the belief that what teachers do is directed by what they think (Clark & Peterson, 1986), and that teachers' implicit theories which impact their behaviours are guided by a personally held system of beliefs, values and principles (Zeichner, and Liston, 1987). This paper explores the practicum experiences of a group of Chinese student teachers learning to teach English in Hong Kong. Data were collected through interviews, journal entries and field notes based on practicum teaching observations. Major themes emerging from the data reveal the interplay between the student teachers' conceptions of teaching and argue for a shift away from a didactic approach in teacher education towards a dialectic and reflextive approach in foreign language teacher education.