Teaching has become increasingly challenging as a result of high expectations and demands placed on education systems. With an overview of the pathways to become a teacher and the teacher policy context in Hong Kong, this chapter presents the case of an undergraduate ITE programme offered by the Education University of Hong Kong. The ITE programme aims at preparing high quality ITE graduates with the key attributes of Professional Excellence, Ethical Responsibility and Innovation. The heightened expectations and demands placed on teachers in Hong Kong have been exacerbated by the enormous difficulties at the societal level since 2019. The outbreak of the COVID-pandemic and the major socio-political issues have generated unprecedented uncertainties in society at large and the education community. The chapter examines how these extraordinary circumstances place novel demands on teachers’ professional competence, and hence requiring new professional knowledge. The creation of hybrid spaces in ITE and communicative safe spaces is needed to foster the co-construction of new professional knowledge. The chapter ends by arguing that professional competence coupled with teacher buoyancy can likely enhance the potential for ITE graduates to stand tall against immense everyday challenges of beginning teaching in an era of unprecedented uncertainties. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

This study examined the relationships between faculty trust, professional learning communities and teacher professional learning among a sample of 2120 kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong. Faculty trust was examined through trust in colleagues, trust in the principal and trust in parents to explore the effects of organizational factors in details. The results showed that professional learning communities significantly mediated the positive effects of faculty trust on teacher professional learning. However, while trust in colleagues exerted a positive effect on teacher professional learning, the effects of trust in parents and trust in the principals were found to be negative and having no significant effect respectively. Kindergartens are recommended to promote teacher learning through enhancing faculty trust and professional learning communities. Copyright © 2019 All Academic, Inc.

This project aims at promoting the idea and implementation of digital citizenship education to Hong Kong schools and supporting in-serve teachers in professional development. Twenty teacher participants from seven local secondary schools joined the project and attended our 6-sessions (9 hours) of professional development training workshops in the academic year of 2019/2020. The training workshops delivered digital citizenship education framework and related concepts and teaching methods to the teachers, including digital citizenship, media literacy, digital commerce, digital footprint, digital etiquette, and cyberbullying. Our team also supported teachers to design their school-based digital citizenship curriculum for trial teaching and discussion of feasible pedagogies after the training workshops. After conducting quantitative data analysis before and after the training workshops, the result found that over 90% of teachers are satisfied with the training workshops. Moreover, there was a significant statistical difference in their teaching of digital citizenship on digital law, digital commerce, and digital security and safety dimensions between pre and posttest. They are more willing to teach these topics after the training. Facing the challenges caused by COVID19 in 2020, however, all Hong Kong schools were forced to close down. Therefore, our class observation has been delayed but we still found that teachers can utilize different online learning activities to implement digital citizenship education, though some teachers also reported that they were not confident to teach certain aspects such as legal dimension. This project suggests a need of equipping teachers’ understanding and teaching of digital citizenship education, and revisiting the relevant curriculum. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

An educational reform proposal in 2000 emphasized the need to upgrade the professional teaching competence of Hong Kong educators at all levels, with one area of focus being multiculturalism. In the current study we test a conceptual model in which teachers’ knowledge and skills of multiculturalism and teaching relationship (cultural harmony) are associated with developmentally appropriate and inappropriate beliefs and practices in the classroom. Participants were 347 preschool teachers from 12 preschools including342 women (98.6 %) and 5 men (1.4%) ages from 24 to 45 located across all five districts of Hong Kong. The hypothesized model of multicultural teaching competency as a predictor of developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices, is confirmed in the present study. Multicultural teaching knowledge can enhance developmentally appropriate teaching beliefs and practices, and reduce developmentally inappropriate practices. It is highly recommended that multicultural education be embedded in early childhood education programs for both in-service and pre-service teachers. In addition, it is suggested that researchers further study teachers’ attitudes toward multicultural education in terms of teaching beliefs and practices with a series of implicit attitude tests. Future research should also focus on environmental influences on multicultural teaching, such as school bureaucracy. Copyright © 2018 Institute of Research and Journals.

Dialogic teaching has been demonstrated to be conducive to the development of such important competencies and skills as creativity, communication skills, and critical thinking skills. However, the literature confirms that teacher-student interactions in the classroom are predominantly monologic rather than dialogic across subjects, grades, and countries. This article reports the results of a study that assesses the effectiveness of a Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme in facilitating the development of dialogic and inquiry teaching in teachers in Hong Kong. In the study, training and support were provided for teachers to enable them to teach P4C to their students during Integrated Humanities and English lessons. P4C was found to help increase the teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom in terms of their ability to engage in dialogic and inquiry teaching, to develop relevant curricular materials for such teaching, to reflect on their own teaching, to recognise their students’ capacity for constructing knowledge through dialogic inquiry, to transfer the teaching strategies learned in P4C to other non-P4C lessons, and to identify and analyse philosophical concepts in the school curriculum. The findings of this study suggest that P4C plays a significant role in promoting the professional development of teachers. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This chapter describes how Free Learning was adopted at the Education University of Hong Kong in a course which is part of the bachelor of education – Minor in Teaching and Learning in International Schools, a pre-service teacher education programme. The decision to adopt Free Learning at university level since January 2019 was the result of positive findings of a case study at International College Hong Kong in 2018 and the promises Free Learning seemed to hold for wider application (see Chapter 13 this volume). The rationale, description and evaluation of the adoption process of Free Learning in this chapter is given with the purpose of getting tertiary educators to consider their thinking about the why and how of innovative practices and to connect their courses to a complex and crisis-ridden world. The chapter emphasises the importance of developing students as responsible and thoughtful individuals and also how Free Learning – with this in mind – could be considered in different contexts. Copyright © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Ross Parker, David Coniam and Peter Falvey; individual chapters, the contributors.

IB課程中的漢語教學是國際漢語教學多樣化類別中的一個分支。在教學理念、教學方法、評估考核等方面，IB漢語教學均體現了IB的核心理念和特質，這對IB漢語師資的培訓提出了更高的目標和要求。本文結合IB課程理念及漢語作為第二語言教學理論，以香港教育大學漢語師資培訓課程作為個案，探索IB漢語師資培訓課程的任務和發展方向，為國際漢語教學的課程發展和師資培訓提供參考。 International Baccalaureate (IB) Chinese curriculum is a branch of the diversified international Chinese teaching. IB Chinese teaching should reflect the IB core concepts and attributes in teaching philosophy, teaching methods and assessment. This sets higher goals and requirements for the Chinese teaching training programme. Incorporating the concepts of IB and the theory of CSL teaching, this paper explores the mission and development direction of the IB Chinese teacher training programme by sharing the experience in The Education University of Hong Kong. Copyright © 2021 北京語言大學.

This paper compares teachers’ values (risk-taking, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance) that prevail in Hong Kong and Singapore, and the teachers’ collaborative professional development practices in school to develop insights to how different approaches to school reforms shape convergent / divergent ways of cultivating teachers’ professional capabilities. Using statistical cluster analysis, teachers are sorted into different levels of PLC engagement (high, medium, and low professional capital) in the respective contexts, and compared for differences in teachers’ values relative to their local compatriots. The results are compared between teachers in Hong Kong and Singapore to identify policy implications arising from different approaches to reforms in collaborative teacher professional development in two Chinese contexts. Copyright © 2021 CESHK.

Collective academic supervision (CAS) is a collective model for students' academic supervision to reduce their isolation and as a measure to establish a congenial culture and to develop networks with their peers. Most studies focus on the benefits of online CAS, leaving the pedagogical process and students' learning experiences understudied. This research examines the participation and learning experience of a cohort of Master of Education (MEd) students in online supervision that took place on a Moodle platform. This article reports a case study of Moodle-based CAS in Hong Kong that aims to train postgraduate students into teacher-researchers. A class of MEd students and their supervisors were observed, and their online dialogues were analysed. The bio-ecological student engagement model was used to explain the online supervision process. The results indicated that the students' learning was situated and embodied in the online social processes facilitated by peers' and supervisors' replies. The online interaction behaviours mainly included proposing questions or problems, providing information or solutions, and making comments. The findings have provided an exemplary case regarding the application of the online learning environment in supporting CAS and active research-based learning. The productive online CAS seems to benefit both teacher candidates and their supervisors by promoting the co-construction of the knowledge and skills of educational research, although more evidence is needed. Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.