Programme
In the past two years, many senior educators and teachers decided to leave their current working environment. Many schools need to handle the succession of retiring principals and middle leaders and help new teachers to adopt school culture. To explore current teacher mobility issues and propose up-to-date knowledge, theories, and strategies to lead school teams, The Joseph Lau Luen Hung Charitable Trust Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change (APCLC) and the Department of Education Policy and Leadership of The Education University of Hong Kong will organise the ‘Leading Teams in A Time of High Teacher Mobility’ online forum. Through the presentation from scholars and experts, we can explore ways to lead school innovation from the perspective of school leaders and teachers’ professional learning communities.
Climbing the greasy pole (together)
Working toward a principalship or any leadership role has been likened to ‘climbing a greasy pole.’ Helping future leaders to not only climb the pole but to keep learning once they’ve been appointed calls for a renewed focus on leadership succession. This short talk will present five things we know about successful leadership succession. These include the importance of ‘succession partnerships,’ nurturing talent, taking a long-term perspective, having a future orientation, and understanding succession is a two-way deal. The talk concludes by posing questions for schools and SSBs about their leader development structures and practices.
Leadership – Creating conditions for diversified team
Workplace differences: a curse or a blessing?
A key challenge that usually occur when working in teams concerns different preferences on how to better support the students and school development. The conflicts between school leadership team members in schools often take the form of ‘silent disagreement’ and can lead to poor decision and implementation, undermine relationships, and frustrate both personal and school development. While recognizing that openly discussing opposing views is difficult, the speaker will illustrate that cooperative and open discussion of different preferences can help to achieve a wide range of positive outcomes. These benefits include, but not limited to, challenging habitual thinking in planning and implementation; developing deeper understanding of a problem; eliciting quality rationales for a school decision; identifying potential threats and hidden resources/opportunities; gaining team members’ support for a decision; forging innovative solutions to a problem, and eventually promoting personal and team growth. This session attempts to equip participants with a more positive attitudes towards workplace differences, more confidence in the approach of open and cooperative discussion of diverse opinions, and some practical tips for doing so when working in teams.
Creating collaborative conditions for team: The connective pathways approach
Research internationally and in Hong Kong points to the potential impact that teacher teams can make on innovative practices and student learning. However, systemic, school and team changes challenge and inspire educators’ understanding of team collaboration. School leaders play a fundamental role in facilitating team efficacy and, with it, professional learning. In this session, we illustrate how the school leader contributes to facilitating teacher collaboration in this challenging period. We also explore how teachers can work together to promote school change by sharing some illustrative examples from local schools.
Secondary school principal sharing
Professional Learning Community – Connecting to teachers
How School Leaders Can Promote Innovation by Considering Teachers’ Values
Teacher collaboration is essential to school improvement in both Hong Kong and Singapore. However, teachers have different values so it is important school leaders cultivate teachers’ capabilities in collaboration by considering their values. We compare risk-taking, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance values of Hong Kong and Singapore teachers’ values to develop insights into how school leaders in Hong Kong can promote innovation by considering teachers’ values.
We employ Hargreaves and Fullan’s (2012) concept of professional capital to determine the values of high, medium, and low professional capital teachers. We discovered that Hong Kong and Singapore teachers with medium professional capital have matching values. However, Hong Kong high professional capital teachers have higher uncertainty avoidance compared to Singapore teachers, and low professional capital teachers have higher risk-taking than their peers in Singapore. Further, in Hong Kong, high uncertainty avoidance values positively influence teacher leadership and focus on student learning. We provide suggestions on how school leaders can use this information to develop teachers’ innovation capabilities by considering the teachers’ level of professional capital and their profile of values.
Surviving, recovering, and thriving: Teacher well-being and emotions in Hong Kong
It is well-documented that teaching is a high-risk profession worldwide. Teacher well-being is critical not only for their effectiveness, but also for the holistic development of students and sustainable development of a school and even a society. The statistics from The Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union (2019) reported that around 30% teachers in Hong Kong report depression symptoms. Although the new data is not available, the COVID-19 pandemic inevitably disrupted teacher lives globally and locally. In addition, increasing risks and uncertainties from the socio-political changes may also add the burden on teachers in Hong Kong. The front-line teachers, as the change agents, need to promptly react to this “undeniable chaos”, which is assumed will make teachers even more vulnerable. This section will tap into teacher well-being first and then particularly focus on how Hong Kong teachers’ emotions have affected moral and character education based on empirical evidences. it is expected to provide some implications for our front-line teachers so that our teachers can care for their own well-being while taking care of their students for promising individual, organizational, and societal sustainable outcomes.