This article reports on a qualitative study conducted at primary schools in Hong Kong exploring the use of microlearning to support the self-directed continuing professional development (CPD) of English language teachers. Microlearning refers to short, concise, and easily consumable segments of learning about a knowledge point or skill. These activities tend to be multimodal and delivered through digital platforms, making them accessible anytime and anywhere. Currently, little is known about teachers’ perceptions of microlearning. To address this gap, we developed and delivered a mobile course that followed a microlearning approach and covered various aspects of digital technologies and English language teaching. Eight primary school English teachers engaged in the course and shared their perceptions of the experience in semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that they found microlearning to be more enriching and conducive to developing their digital competence than traditional CPD. It allowed them to address their immediate needs, develop practical skills, and integrate technology into their practices. The study provides important insights into the use of microlearning to support self-directed CPD. Copyright © 2024 The Open University.

This paper reports the preliminary findings of an ongoing project to understand and compare the teaching practices and their contexts of teachers regarded by principals of some outstanding schools and the accomplished teachers who were awarded The Chief Executive's Award for Teaching Excellence (CEATE) by the Education Bureau in Hong Kong (Education Bureau, 2023) for their exemplary teaching practices. Most education systems, including Hong Kong and the USA, rely on principals to identify effective teachers, evidence of principals' subjective performance evaluations of teachers was reliable for identifying teachers who generated the most significant and most negligible achievement gains in students than those in the midrange (Jacob & Lefgren, 2008). Fifty-eight teachers from thirteen primary, secondary and special school sectors were recruited for lesson observations and interviews. The overall teaching quality between the two groups of teachers in systematic classroom observations was similar, suggesting that CEATE teachers did not necessarily perform significantly better in teaching. Interviews revealed that CEATE awards reflected incidental collaborations of teachers that were hard to replicate by other individual teachers or subject departments. Teacher learning networks also played a significant role where a mentor could support junior teachers. Distributed leadership promote collective capacities through organizational culture rather than enacting school policies and initiatives. These results contributed to establishing a new theoretical model that extends Gu and Day's (2007) teacher resilience theory to explain the professional growth of teachers and leaders as a function of context and organizational capacity in addition to resilience for achieving teaching quality sustainability. Copyright © 2023 World Education Research Association.

This study aimed to establish sex- and age-specific reference values for motor performance (MP) in Hong Kong preschoolers aged 3–5 years old and examine the relationship between MP and BMI status. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 5579 preschoolers in Hong Kong. Three MP tests were administered, and height and weight information were collected. GAMLSS was used to compute the normative values of the motor tests. Boys outperformed girls in activities requiring muscle strength and power, while girls outperformed boys in activities requiring balance and coordination. The MP scores increased with age for both overarm beanbag throw and standing long jump for both sexes, while the one-leg balance scores showed larger differences between P50 and P95 in older preschoolers. Children with excessive weight performed worse in standing long jump and one-leg balance compared to their healthy weight peers. This study provides valuable information on the MP of preschoolers in Hong Kong, including sex- and age-specific reference values and the association between BMI status and MP scores. These findings can serve as a reference for future studies and clinical practice and highlight the importance of promoting motor skill development in preschoolers, particularly those who are overweight or obese. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s).

Interpersonal teacher behaviour refers to the teacher–student interactions in the classroom. One way to measure these interactions is through the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI), which is based on the Model for Interpersonal Teacher Behaviour (MITB). This study examined the structure of the Chinese version of the QTI (C-QTI) among a convenience sample of 612 secondary-school students in Hong Kong, using Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) to cross-validate a previous study of primary students utilizing the same approach. Results indicated that the C-QTI fits the MITB circumplex structure in terms of the scale order in a circular structure. The SSA map yielded six sectors: leadership-understanding, helpful/friendly, student responsibility/freedom, uncertain, dissatisfied-admonishing and strict. The two merged sectors demonstrate students’ inability to distinguish between their distinct behaviours. Eight items appeared in a sector different from their original MITB location, which could be attributed to the meanings attached to the different behaviours in the Chinese cultural context of Hong Kong or to the items’ lack of clarity. Comparison of secondary and primary students indicated similarities in scale and item location. However, secondary students were better able to distinguish between the different behaviours, reflecting the possible effect of their developmental level. The study highlights the need to construct contextually-relevant items and examine their existence and clarity as reflected by students’ perceptions. It also suggests the utility of SSA as a useful approach to study interpersonal teacher behaviour and facilitate the QTI adaptation process. © 2021 The Author(s).

This paper investigates the making and governing of Hong Kong teachers along and beyond a Foucauldian governmentality lens, untangling how the three technologies along neoliberalism, Confucian thesis, and affective dimensions play with and against one another in conducting the conduct of teachers. Through a discourse analysis of 27 local teachers' interview texts, we find Hong Kong teachers are both morally divided and redeemed as an effect of the entangled governing dynamics. First, the neoliberalized technologies of performativity and accountability are turning teachers into "service providers" accountable for incessant evaluations from the institutions, students, and parents. Second, such neoliberal rationalities collide with a Confucian respect for teachers to the extent that teachers feel not-respected, sad, and disappointed. Last, some teachers, amidst such contested situations, turn to affective support, i.e., a family-like teacher-student relationship, that ends up redeeming them from a negative governing grid towards maintaining a congruent self-identification. With this finding, this paper further explicates Confucian affective teacher-student relationship as a foundational historical-cultural episteme that largely conditions today's teaching and learning in Confucian context. This recognition enables us to re-ponder the theoretical-methodological-epistemological complexities in applying Foucault's framework to an Asian context along a (de/anti/post)-colonial gesture. Copyright © 2023 Routledge.

This paper proposes and describes a context- and subject-specific professional digital competence (PDC) framework for beginning English language teachers in Hong Kong. Taking a localised approach, the framework was developed through a four-stage data collection process, (1) Literature review of empirical studies conducted in Hong Kong of English language teachers’ technology use, (2) Review of local government curriculum documents; (3) An online survey of English language teachers’ technology use (n = 83); (4) follow-up individual interviews (n = 22). The study revealed that the local subject-specific PDC of teachers includes five aspects; Technological proficiency; Pedagogical compatibility; Preparing students for the digital world; Risk, well-being and ethical awareness and Professional work. Each aspect includes ability statements. The framework can be used to evaluate existing teacher education programmes, support the development of pre-service English-language teachers and facilitate self-, peer- and teacher assessment. The elements of PDC can be converted into programme- and course-level learning outcomes or incorporated into assessment rubrics. In addition, the methods used to develop the framework can be used by scholars in other contexts and subject areas to develop localised subject-specific PDC frameworks. Copyright © 2023 De La Salle University.

Teachers’ well-being and self-efficacy are two important factors linked to quality education. Recent research examining their bidirectionality has revealed inconsistent findings, while those examining the relationships among pre-service and in-service teachers are scarce. This study investigates the reciprocal relationships between teachers’ well-being and self-efficacy in a sample of Hong Kong early childhood education teachers. Participants were 155 pre-service (n = 77) and in-service (n = 78) teachers (Mage = 23.97, SD = 4.46, female = 92.9%). Participants reported their teachers’ well-being (PERMA model including positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment) and teachers’ self-efficacy at two-time points. The results from the cross-lagged panel model revealed that teachers’ self-efficacy at baseline significantly predicted all aspects of prospective well-being except for engagement. In contrast, none of the teachers’ well-being components significantly predicted later teachers’ self-efficacy, except for accomplishment. The associations between teachers’ self-efficacy and well-being were invariant across pre-service and in-service teachers. The results underscored the importance of teachers’ self-efficacy in facilitating teachers’ well-being. The findings also highlight the utility of intervention efforts targeting teachers’ self-efficacy and well-being, especially in promoting teachers’ accomplishment, at an early stage of their careers. Copyright © 2023 De La Salle University.

Little attention has been given to computer-assisted language teaching (CALL) lecturers in community colleges in Hong Kong. In this chapter, we present a novel study of CALL lecturers’ emotions and well-being while coping with emergency remote teaching (ERT) at a community college in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, this study sheds light on emergency CALL teaching design and technical preparation, as well as synchronous and asynchronous online teaching and assessment in this context. We employed interviews to give vivid accounts of four CALL lecturers’ inner voices. The resulting data were coded and grouped into themes, and we report the findings as narrative accounts from the representative lecturers and in-depth thematic descriptions. We found that, overall, the CALL lecturers were stressed and overworked, and their physical conditions, especially eyesight, were impaired due to long-term online activities. They were also concerned about the quality of delivery, student feedback, student learning outcomes, and privacy issues. The analysis further revealed practical strategies that the lecturers adopted to address the difficulties they faced during the pandemic. Based on these strategies and the interviews, we present a conceptual emergency adjustment (EA) model to help understand the experiences, emotions, and well-being of CALL lecturers in community colleges in Hong Kong under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This research offers a significant contribution to the EA literature and the contextual adaptation of CALL lecturers in Hong Kong and elsewhere. In addition, the use of narrative accounts to present data could contribute to methodological developments in studying teaching and learning in an ERT environment. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Social contagion has been documented across various domains. However, this phenomenon has not been explored in relation to formative assessment in schools. This study examines the social contagion of school teachers’ formative assessment practices and self-efficacy. A sample of 296 teachers from 12 Hong Kong primary and secondary schools participated in this study. All participants completed the same questionnaire twice, one year apart. The longitudinal results showed that formative assessment practices and self-efficacy were socially contagious. When teachers had colleagues who engaged in formative assessment practices and had high self-efficacy, they were more likely to engage in formative assessment and become more efficacious themselves. Also, school-level formative assessment self-efficacy predicted individual-level formative assessment practices demonstrating the importance of collective efficacy. The findings can inform the provision of school support and the design of teacher professional development programmes for promoting formative assessment in schools. Copyright © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.