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 Hayes’ (2013) regression-based macros, integrated with bootstrapping method, 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 doubled 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.

Teacher leadership plays a critical role of school improvement. However, the leadership development of beginning teachers is often neglected. This presentation examines the impacts of principal-teacher interactions on the teacher leadership development of twenty beginning teachers in Hong Kong. Case study approach was adopted. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and documentary evidence such as school development plans and school reports. Results show that the beginning teachers were able to take up formal and informal roles of teacher leadership early in their teaching career. The characteristics of the principal practice and three types of impacts of principal-teacher interactions on developing teacher leadership are identified. This presentation highlights the role of principal in teacher’s leadership development. Implications for school leadership and teacher education programmes are also discussed.

The four presentations of the symposium are as follows: 1. Professionalization of Teacher Education: An Initial Review of the Trends and Change Forces of Teacher Education in Hong Kong since the Second World War 2. An Evaluation of the Teacher Education Curriculum in Hong Kong 3. An Innovative and Effect System for Evaluation of Classroom Teaching 4. Teaching as a Profession in Hong Kong: Its Economic Status

The symposium aims at sharing the personal experience of the principals of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocesan Kindergartens on the effect of Staff Development Programme on promoting quality kindergarten programme in their schools. In order to promote the quality of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocesan Kindergarten education, the Management Committee of Hong Kong Catholic Diocesan Kindergartens had organized a series of staff development programme for the teaching staff and principals. The staff development programme which included a one workshop on teaching approaches, a 13-session staff development seminars for principals and head teachers funded by the Quality Education Fund and a project on reading stories with young children had been conducted from March 98 to July 98. the principals found that the series of staff development programme had enhanced their construction of professional knowledge and the management of their kindergartens. The symposium will provide opportunities for the presenters and the audience to share their first hand experience on the related issues.

This paper is concerned with the conceptions held by the HKIEd graduates of the certificate course in relation to the role of a professional teacher. While upgrading the professionalism of teachers is a stated policy of the SAR, the understanding of the teachers’ interpretations of their role as a professional teacher is deemed fundamental. This paper is based on data drawn from case studies of 8 graduates of the HKIEd before they started teaching in their primary schools in September 1998. It reports findings concerning the graduates’ expectations of what they should be able to do as a professional teacher and the factors that contribute to the formation of such conceptions. Informed by the perspective of symbolic interactionism, the paper relates the literature on teacher socialization and teacher development to the study of the scenario in Hong Kong. It examines the extent to which the graduates’ interpretations of the professional role of a teacher is an idiosyncratic process reflecting the differences in biography, personality and their selective interaction in the pre-service teacher education context. Implications on the structure and processes of pre-service teacher education are then discussed.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]