Teacher Development Activities

Also, teacher development activities in Shanghai are carried out more frequently and are more related to each other. For example, members of teaching research group meet every week. They conduct lesson observations much more frequently, at least 15 times per school year (Dos Santos, 2017) while teachers in Hong Kong teacher are only required to open their classroom for 1 to 3 times per year for evaluation purposes (Lam, 2001). Also, lesson observation is usually carried out together with collaborative lesson planning, mentoring and teaching research. The teachers within the group can monitor each other’s progress. They have more opportunities to reflect on their teaching practice and receive critiques, which allow them to improve more rapidly

The first thing to do is to free up more time to do so. Teachers in Hong Kong have very heavy workload. They have to teach more than 18 lessons a week (Zhang, 2010), compared to only 10 to 12 lessons in Shanghai (Schleicher, 2016). Also, teachers in Hong Kong are also responsible for duties other than teaching such as being class teacher, holding extra-curricular activities, after-school tutorials, consultation with parents and so on. It is not uncommon for school leaders to put students’ academic results at a higher priority than teacher professional development. They think that sparing time for teacher development activities will make teachers unable to finish their teaching on time, and therefore will have negative effects on students’ learning. Schools in Hong Kong can learn from Shanghai to embed professional development activities into teachers’ schedule at regular intervals. This allows sufficient time for teachers to participate and ensures that teacher development is a continual process throughout the year but not just concentrate on the three professional development days. School leaders should recognize the fact that participation in the development activities can help teachers learn more teaching techniques, which eventually can benefit students’ learning so it is worthy to invest more time and resources for teacher professional

Teachers are observed by school principal and subject panels for at least one in each school year for evaluating their teaching performance. Sometimes, the Education Bureau also sends inspectors to monitor the teaching quality in schools (Zhang, 2010). Teachers need to do much more preparation for the public lesson than usual lessons. The extra workload and the pressure brought by evaluation explain why teachers in Hong Kong do not welcome lesson observation (Lam,