There has been little discussion about distributed leadership through the lens of beliefs. Principals and head teachers of two case-study kindergartens in Hong Kong were invited to be participants to examine how leaders think and act. Semi-structured interviews and shadowing were employed to collect data. The findings suggest that leaders' beliefs…

Students with intellectual disabilities in Hong Kong are placed in special schools in their neighborhoods according to their categories of intellectual disabilities. Music teachers in these special schools implement a school-based music curriculum that includes the learning objective "creativity and imagination." Reporting a qualitative…

Student-staff pedagogical partnership is a rapidly expanding practice documented by a growing body of scholarship. That scholarship includes a wide range of empirical examples of what students and staff experience through pedagogical partnership, an emerging set of theoretical frameworks for analysing those experiences, and practical guidelines to…

Purpose: This exploratory study investigates the relationship between teachers' perceptions of professional learning communities (PLCs) and their differentiated instruction (DI) practice in a Hong Kong primary education context. Design/Approach/Methods: Three subsidized primary schools participated in the study. A total of 121 teachers completed…

Much research has been conducted to investigate the impact of work environment on academics' job satisfaction. However, little is known about what contributes to academics' job dissatisfaction. Job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are two distinct entities because a lack of job satisfaction cannot be simply equated with job dissatisfaction.…

From the Americas to Asia, neoliberal policy restructuring continues to present major challenges to educational equity. In Hong Kong, teacher educators grapple with training students in pedagogy they believe in, versus the daily status quo of high-stakes exam prep, privatized "shadow education," and a system seemingly pushed to the brink…

Teaching in international schools is challenging for teachers and professional school staff due to language barriers, cultural shocks, teaching and learning expectations, support and even living standards. As a result, international schools often organise recruitment fairs to recruit professionals and prevent them from frequent departures. Such…

Although the goal of developing school students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) has long been advocated, there is still a lack of research that focuses on probing how science teachers, a kind of major stakeholder in NOS instruction, perceive the values of teaching NOS. Through semi-structured interviews, this study investigated the views…

The purpose of the study is to examine Hong Kong teachers' perceptions of distributed leadership. Data were collected from six primary schools with a total of 155 teachers responding to a self-developed survey. Descriptive, reliability, and MANOVA data analyses were done with the application of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS)…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between staff size and perceived organizational support (POS) in early childhood education (ECE) organizations. Design/methodology/approach: A territory-wide questionnaire survey was designed to investigate the perceptions of preschool teachers in Hong Kong on four dimensions of…

This article draws on data from cases of high-performing and improving schools in Hong Kong. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with principals, middle leaders, and senior teachers to identify key policies and steps taken for their enactment, and to solicit interpretations of the policies. Principals were found to actively select,…

This paper attempts to identify the leadership practices and qualities of school principals engaged in implementing a curriculum reform in Hong Kong. Based on interview data of school principals, this paper shows that the types of instructional leadership practices that school principals adopt and the contextual conditions in which these practices…

This study focused on the collaborative structure-building behavior of school principals and examined how such behavior affects teacher empowerment. More important, it tested the mediating effects of participative management and learning culture. By collecting nested data from 104 schools in Hong Kong and adopting multilevel structural equation…

Background: The literature suggests two main types of orientations influencing teachers' choice of assessment strategies--"Knowledge acquisition and retention (K orientation)" and "Understanding and Conceptual change (U orientation)" with the former more directly related to surface learning types of assessment strategies and…

A central issue in the class size debate is that while cutting class size might lead to improved teaching and learning, it is also possible that it may not if teachers do not seek to exploit the advantages of a smaller class size through an alternative pedagogy. Research suggests that teachers do not change their pedagogy when moving from large…