Centre News

APCLC Directors won General Research Fund (GRF) Grant

APCLC Associate director, Dr James Ko, and APCLC Directors, Prof Allan Walker and Dr Qian Haiyan, won General Research Fund (GRF) of HK$952,100, funded by Research Grants Council, the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The research grant is for a 24-month study entitled "Identifying Professional Growth and Trajectories of Development of Teachers and School Leaders in Contexts: A Mixed-Method Study”.

This study seeks to characterise how teachers and schools manage to tackle contextual challenges professionally by examining a novel theoretical model with nine propositions:

	(1)	Exceptional teachers and schools succeed in their approach to overcome contextual complexity.
	(2)	Quality leadership, teacher trust and commitment reduce goal conflicts in school governance and the uncertainty in professional learning.
	(3)	Teacher learning networks and distributed leadership promote collective capacities in enacting school policies and initiatives.
	(4)	When teachers and schools minimise risk aversions, they will exploit existing strengths and explore opportunities to innovate.
	(5)	Resilience fluctuates when teachers and the school have incompatible goal conflicts, but hybrid teacher leadership increases the chances of outstanding professional growth.
	(6)	Resilience is a collective professional quality of teachers in schools that succeeded in challenging contexts.
	(7)	Professional growth rises robustly if personal and organisational drivers are compatible.
	(8)	Gradual school changes rely on factors applicable to all schools, but profound and radical changes require charismatic figures and critical incidents to make things happen.
	(9)	Wiser individual and collective professional choices result in vigorous professional identities.

For more information about the study, please visit:
https://www.eduhk.hk/apclc/research_81.html.