Given that the concept of community college in Hong Kong has only been introduced 10 years ago, with the new “3-3-4” education structural reform, the leadership in community college will become more challenging. In this paper, the aim is to provide a personal philosophy on how educational leaders should lead in community college settings given the highly diverse student backgrounds. The perspective of why we, as educational leaders, should reflect, reconstruct, and reengineer on community college leadership will be discussed. We will give insights on how different it is between leading in university and in community college, particularly in Hong Kong. Common issues and difficulties encountered by top managements, supporting staff, teachers, and students are identified and explained. The importance of relationship and dialogues in our context of building a true community is presented. The paper will conclude with the notion of how an authentic leader should be in leading community college in Hong Kong. It is expected that the direction of this personal philosophy will have a major impact in the both local and global leadership in education.

Environmental education has been widely promoted in Hong Kong schools since the 1990s. Teachers have a crucial role in educating students to be well-informed, environmentally aware and responsible green citizens. The environmental literacy and tendencies of teachers are seen as having far-reaching influences on the development of environmental education in Hong Kong. This paper aims to elucidate teachers’ competence in implementing environmental education in schools through their narrative dialogues regarding their engagement in classroom practice and thinking about environmental education. The teachers were selected from a pool of teacher respondents categorized according to their scores for environmental knowledge, attitude and behaviour in a territory-wide survey of Hong Kong primary school teachers. Follow-up interviews with three teachers of varying levels were conducted to explicate their personal stories, focusing on how the teachers’ knowledge–attitude–behaviour associations influence their implementation of environmental education in schools. The teachers’ experiences and perspectives behind their stories provide crucial, specific baseline information, informing the development of more relevant teacher education programmes in environmental education, and subsequently, enhancing environmental education in schools.
[Copyright © 2014 Taylor & Francis]

15-year free education has been implemented in Macau and some parts of Mainland China in recent decade. In light of the implementations, local early childhood educators and experts have since been debating whether Hong Kong should follow suit to offer the 3 years of early childhood education (ECE) for free on top of the existing 12-year free education. With reference to the policy implementation and outcomes in Macau and Mainland China, as well as the ECE context in Hong Kong, this paper seeks to (1) delineate the dilemmas in the debate about 15-year free education in Hong Kong; and (2) suggest how free ECE could be offered in a context-appropriate manner. We will discuss the issues based on the “3A1S” theoretical framework, which looks into the affordability, accessibility, accountability, and sustainability of ECE. Practical solutions for settling the ceaseless debate about 15-year free education in Hong Kong will also be proposed.
[Copyright © 2014 Hong Kong Teachers' Centre]